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

protection and treatment for women living with FGM/C or under threat of FGM/C.
Some 500.000 girls and women in the European Union are estimated to have
undergone female genital mutilation/ cutting.
- National: One of the first and most influential campaigns to end VAW, Zero
Tolerance, started out as a Scottish campaign in 1992 launched by the Edinburgh
City Council to educate large segments of the population on the prevalence and
nature of VAW.
- Community-based: The Uganda-based NGO Raising Voices has inspired the
emergence of community-level campaigns to end VAW. They assist community
organizations to plan and develop activities that mobilize women and men, girls and
boys to transform attitudes and behaviours within their communities.
DURATION: Campaigns to end VAW can take place over different periods of time.
Those addressing an urgent, narrowly circumscribed cause may be short, running for
just a few weeks or months. Those that seek to change social attitudes and practices
should be of at least a medium duration, lasting up to 5 years, or long-term, sometimes
stretching over an entire decade or more.
Example: An example of a long-term campaign is Freedom from Fear, launched in 1998
by the Western Australia Family and Domestic Violence Taskforce, a government body.
The 10-year community education campaign accompanied criminal justice and other
interventions that were integrated in a multi-pronged strategy to end VAW. Targeting
perpetrators of domestic violence, it successfully encouraged violent men (or those with
violent tendencies) to seek treatment for their behaviour by calling a dedicated “Men’s
Domestic Violence Helpline”. In the first 21 months of the campaign over 6000 calls
were received with a large proportion (64%) of those calling being men in the primary
target group (ie.perpetrators or men 'at risk').
Read the Freedom from Fear mid-campaign assessment (2000) describing the research
underpinning the campaign development and evaluation.
Example: An example of a short-term campaign is the ‘Know Your Power’ campaign,
which the University of New Hampshire in the United States ran for two months in 2010,
targeted at students on the college’s campus. The campaign used social marketing
8
Campaigns December 2011