Asking the Community on How to Prevent Sexual Violence

Last week at CALCASA’s Leadership Conference, I co-led a workshop on program planning for primary prevention programs.  This workshop highlighted steps to plan comprehensive prevention from assessment to evaluation.  In this planning process the selection of a program activity is important to match the needs of the community.  But often a key resource in selecting a program is ignored – the intended audience itself.

When . I saw the abstract for an article titled “Adolescents’ own suggestions for bullying interventions at age 13 and 16” from the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, I realized how infrequently sexual violence prevention practitioners actually ask what is the best activity to address the problem.  Using focus groups or approaches like Community-based participatory research (CBPR) can elicit great potential activities.  In the quest for evidence-based practices we cannot ignore the preferences of the community we are working with.

Organizations such as the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault are using CBPR to have community members ask other community members what can work to prevent sexual violence.  I think that is a great question.