FINAL - SATF Prevention Toolkit V2.0 - Online

8 Oregon AGSATF
Prevention Toolkit
THE SOCIOECOLOGICAL MODEL
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Successful primary prevention strategies are ongoing, collaborative, and comprehensive, and include strategies that
simultaneously address individuals, relationships, communities, and institutions, as well as society in general.
Challenging attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that allow for violence at the individual level cannot create sustainable
change alone. These efforts must be reinforced and reflected by the community in which individuals live, and by the
society and institutions that create the policies and laws that shape and control their environment. For example,
teaching students about healthy relationships is more likely to result in the changed behaviors we intend if the school
adopts and systemically enforces policies that require safety and respect in all school-based relationships. The model is
based on the recognition that no one group or institution can end sexual violence alone and that change needs to take
place on the individual, relationship, community, institutional, and societal levels to truly impact the problem. This
approach is summarized by saying, “Sexual violence is preventable, and everyone has a role in preventing it.”
The socioecological model (SEM) recognizes that the individual is strongly influenced by domains, systems, and norms,
and that positively influencing each of these will reduce violence. Following the lead of The World Health Organization
(WHO), we use a modified version of the socioecological model as a means to understand and organize violence
prevention work. While sexual violence is committed by individuals, preventing that behavior requires taking into
account multiple domains including: families, peers, communities, institutions, media, and the broader society – and
looking at their relative impact on individuals and their behavior. Building a comprehensive primary prevention
program across all levels of the socioecological model allows individuals and groups to identify where they can
participate in prevention efforts given their strengths, resources, and experiences. People often see the SEM as a
model of separate spheres, when in reality each layer in the model interacts with and influences each other.