Preventing Household Violence: Promising strategies for humanitarian settings

Violence against women (VAW) and violence against children (VAC) are both global epidemics with prolonged impact on the health, well-being, and safety of both individuals and communities. The epidemics are also intimately interconnected, as VAW and VAC tend to co-occur within the same homes and exposure to VAC predicts VAW in adulthood. Yet despite a growing body of evidence indicating alarming levels of both VAW and VAC in emergencies, most interventions to address these issues have been fragmented across the gender-based violence (GBV) and child protection (CP) sectors. The goal of this review was to use a holistic lens to examine the landscape of interventions that have been used in humanitarian contexts and that may have applicability to primary prevention of any form of interpersonal household violence, including VAW, VAC or both. A combination of electronic database searches, published or publicly available reviews of violence prevention interventions, and communication with practitioners in the field was employed to identify interventions that met this criteria.