What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls Evidence Reviews Paper 3: Response mechanisms to prevent violence against women and girls

This Paper is the third in a series of four evidence reviews that were produced by the programme ‘What Works to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls’ (What Works). What Works is a DFID-funded global programme investing £25 million over five years to improve the evidence base on the prevention of VAWG. It supports both innovative primary prevention programmes and rigorous research into and evaluation of prevention programmes – across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, that seek to understand and address the underlying causes of violence in order to stop it before it starts. 

This paper examines the evidence base on the effectiveness of response mechanisms for VAWG in preventing the occurrence or reoccurrence of violence. In this paper, we review interventions that are designed primarily to respond to VAWG, but which have a secondary or parallel aim of preventing VAWG or targeting key risk factors that contribute to the perpetration (by men) or the experience (by women) of VAWG. It is important to make it clear that assessment of the interventions in this paper focuses only on their effectiveness in preventing VAWG or addressing related risk factors. 

The complete series includes:

• Paper 1: State of the field of research on violence against women and girls.
• Paper 2: Interventions to prevent violence against women and girls.
• Paper 3: Response mechanisms to prevent violence against women and girls.
• Paper 4: Approaches to scale-up and assessing cost-effectiveness of programmes to preventviolence against women and girls.