Campaigns to End Violence against Women and Girls - Virtual ...

issues of sustainability. The document is available in Making a Difference: Strategic
Communications to End Violence Against Women (UNIFEM, 2003).
The Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication Soul City
(South Africa) uses multi-media ‘edutainment’ to inform the public, raise awareness,
and foster change in attitudes and behaviours related to key health and development
issues. Soul City Series 4, which addressed violence, has included:
- A 13-episode prime time television drama
- A 45-episode radio drama in nine languages
- Distribution of three full-color information booklets (with a nationwide distribution of
one million copies each)
- Community events (including school-based programmes)
Formative research to develop and pre-test communication tools with experts and target
audiences (men and women 16-65 years old from metropolitan and rural areas)
accompanied the planning, implementation and evaluation of the communication
strategy.
Results: Soul City 4 reached 82% of the population in South Africa. Qualitative and
quantitative research noted small increases in knowledge and awareness on domestic
violence and related laws and services. However, in the short-term (less than a year), no
changes were reported on key attitudes, including: “As a head of household, a man has
the right to beat his wife”, despite an overall 11% increase in the proportion of men that
indicated that women never deserve to be beaten. These contraditictions demonstrate
the complexity of measuring attitudes regarding violence and that change is a long-term
process.
Read the Soul City case study.
That’s Not Cool (USA) is a public education campaign run by the US Family Violence
Prevention Fund (now called Futures without Violence), the Ad Council and the US
Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) to prevent teen dating abuse. It summarizes
its strategy as follows:
Objective: To prevent teen dating abuse by helping teens acknowledge that digital
infractions can be a form of abuse.
Guiding Spirit: Draw your digital line.
Key Message: Digital violations can be forms of abuse.
Desired Response:
- Visit ThatsNotCool.com to learn more and talk to others
- Connect the dots between digital infractions and other forms of abuse.
The campaign uses digital examples of controlling behaviour online and by cell phone to
encourage teenagers to draw their own line about what is, or is not, acceptable
relationship behaviour.
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Campaigns December 2011