Transformed attitudes, beliefs, and norms

Objective of Strategy: Promote positive attitudes, beliefs, and norms that promote gender equality, challenge male power and privilege, discrimination and female subordination and condemn violence against women (VAW).

Evidence of impact:

• Promising evidence from LMICs that multi-year community mobilisation interventions can lead to community-level reductions in physical and sexual IPV and address risk factors.
• Good evidence from LMICs that intensive group-based workshops with men and women can improve individual attitudes and behaviours of the target group and reduce IPV prevalence.
• Evidence from LMICs shows that working with men and boys alone may not reduce VAWG, although it can result in important shifts in perceptions about masculinity and gender norms. 
• Insufficient evidence for the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns or edutainment- plus-group education alone to reduce levels of VAW. However, well-designed campaigns delivered over 2+ years combined with face-to-face approaches may improve knowledge, challenge the acceptability of VAW and change individual attitudes.
• Stand-alone VAW awareness-raising campaigns, which typically employ mass communications, are not effective at reducing VAW by themselves. Instead, these campaigns – especially when employing community networks, innovative media and positive messaging – play a role in starting dialogue and debate around various forms of VAWG in the public domain.