Moving Beyond a Reliance on Criminal Legal Strategies to Address the Root Causes of Domestic and Sexual Violence

Abstract

This article is intended to support discussions about how to effectively address domestic and sexual violence. It proposes the following key strategies: expanding beyond police, courts, and prisons; adopting upstream approaches to address the social, structural, institutional, and historical drivers of violence; and using evidence-based strategies to prevent violence from happening in the first place. Comparing the United States, South Africa, India, and Brazil, the article makes the case that advocates working to address domestic and sexual violence have relied too heavily on criminal legal sanctions. Not only does this result in unmet needs of both survivors and their communities but it also expands the repressive powers of police and prosecutors and contributes to steadily growing levels of incarceration. The article concludes by calling for services that better meet the needs of survivors and for the rapid scale-up of prevention strategies, both evidence-based interventions and legal and policy approaches that address the root causes of men's violence.

Keywords

violence against women activism prevention criminal sanctions restorative justice

Introduction

On July 2, 2021, the United Nations Generation Equality Forum concluded in Paris. The closing statement celebrates “nearly USD 40 billion of confirmed investments as well as ambitious policy and programme commitments from governments, philanthropy, civil society, youth organizations and the private sector” (UN Women, 2021, para. 1). This commitment toward achieving gender equality—including addressing gender-based violence (GBV)—is a hard won accomplishment produced by years of determined advocacy and activism by women's rights organizations. GBV was one of the six priority themes in the Global Acceleration Plan produced for the Generation Equality Forum (Generation Equality Forum, 2021). The GBV section of the plan calls for action in four areas: ratification and implementation of evidence-driven laws, policies, and treaties; scaling up evidence-based prevention; expanding survivor-centered services for women and girls in all their diversity; and increased funding for autonomous women's rights organizations working to end violence against women and girls. This echoes the outcomes from the 65th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (Commission on the Status of Women Sixty-Fifth Session, 2021), which emphasized the need to invest in sustainable solutions to violence against women, including the economic empowerment of women, as well as women's full and effective participation and decision-making in public life.

However, away from UN meetings and conferences, many countries have been doing the opposite to these proposed strategies. They have been doubling down on punitive criminal legal sanctions and failing to implement evidence-based prevention at any meaningful scale. This is bad policy and will not meet the needs of survivors nor protect communities from violence; it may in fact increase the likelihood of GBV.

Analyzing developments across four countries to which the author has been connected through global alliances and advocacy work—the United States, South Africa, India, and Brazil—this article makes the case that advocates working to address domestic and sexual violence have relied too heavily on criminal legal sanctions, and in the process have neither met the needs of survivors nor the communities they come from. The article argues that this overreliance on the criminal legal system has expanded the repressive powers of police and prosecutors and contributed to steadily growing levels of incarceration. It critiques the neoliberal logic of attempting to deter violence through harsh criminal sanctions aimed at the individual, rather than efforts to change the social and structural drivers of violence. It concludes by calling for services that meet the needs of survivors and for the rapid expansion of prevention strategies, both evidence-based interventions and legal and policy approaches that address the root causes of men's violence.

Understanding Men's Violence Against Women and the Response to It

Men's violence against women has devastating consequences for women and for society as a whole. Men's violence occurs on and against individual women's bodies but is exacerbated by broader social conditions, including economic inequality, poverty, rigid and inequitable notions of manhood, warfare, nationalism, and insecurity (Gamlin & Hawkes, 2018; Gibbs et al., 2020).

Over the last four decades, women's rights movements have organized in many countries around the world to demand an end to gendered violence and to insist that the state take action to hold perpetrators accountable. In most countries, women's rights advocates have focused their efforts on compelling the state to treat domestic and sexual violence as criminal, rather than private acts, thus requiring a strong criminal legal response: arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. In most countries, however, women's needs have not been met by the criminal legal system; instead, they have experienced additional victimization from the process. This is especially the case for marginalized and low-income women from communities of color (Goel & Goodmark, 2015).

Harsh criminal legal sanctions have also failed to deter or prevent violence (Heise, 2011). Instead, the focus on the criminal legal system has often deflected attention away from other strategies that might have effectively addressed the social and structural drivers of violence—such as inequitable and restrictive norms about manhood, poverty and inequalities, child abuse and trauma—which would have prevented, rather than just responded to, violence after the damage had already been done. Paradoxically, the very lack of success brought by this focus on criminal legal sanctions and accountability for individual perpetrators has fueled ever more insistent demands for harsh criminal sanctions from communities and civil society organizations outraged by persistent, brutal, and pervasive male violence against women.

In some countries, these demands are being met with extrajudicial killings by police or by electioneering and posturing by politicians, in ways that are reminiscent of the tough-on-crime rhetoric in the 90s and 2000s in the United States that led to mass incarceration and the gutting of social safety nets. In some places, this manifests as populist calls for retributive justice--for example, the reinstatement or greater use of the death penalty in India, Nigeria, and Bangladesh (Karin, 2021); the calls for public hanging and castration in Pakistan (UN News, 2020); the elimination of bail, imposition of longer mandatory minimum sentences and life sentences without the possibility of parole in Malawi (Masina, 2020); and the call for chemical castration and ever harsher prison sentences and conditions in South Africa (Maphosa, 2020).

Moving Beyond Criminal Legal Sanctions to Address and Prevent Men's Violence Against Women

Criminal law can play a role in securing safety for survivors of domestic and sexual violence in the immediate aftermath of assault, by detaining perpetrators and thereby temporarily removing them from the community at large. However, as will be discussed below, there are several grave limitations inherent in the primary focus on harsh criminal legal sanctions in response to domestic and sexual violence.

First, criminal legal sanctions and incarceration often are not what survivors themselves want. Seldom do these sanctions provide survivors with redress or a sense of justice, and they do little to address the conditions that trap women in violent relationships (Alliance for Safety and Justice, 2016; Clayton et al., 2018). Instead, the criminal legal system often retraumatizes survivors. There is also growing evidence that survivors themselves sometimes face arrest, prosecution, and incarceration as a result of mandatory arrest and prosecution policies and for failing to protect their children from exposure to abuse, especially in the United States (Goodmark, 2018).

Second, criminal legal sanctions rely on coercive police and criminal legal systems that have long histories of discriminating against and disproportionately sanctioning poor and working class communities of color (Richie, 2012). This has often caused great harm to communities of color, including many women who have themselves been targets of the laws and policies that were put in place to sanction and deter violence against women (Beichner et al., 2021; Davis, 2019; Garrison, 2020). The overt bias of the criminal legal system has contributed to over-incarceration and mass incarceration—with devastating effects on poor and working class communities, especially communities of color (Bazelon, 2019). Indeed, restricting bail and imposing long and harsh sentences cause harm to survivors themselves, to the men who serve time in prisons in which violence is endemic, and to the families and communities they leave behind, especially communities of color (Goodmark, 2018).

Third, criminal legal sanctions fail to address the social and structural drivers of men's violence against women, and instead attempt to deal with a social phenomenon by criminalizing individual behavior (Heise, 2011). Sharma and Bazilli (2014) put it clearly: “Focusing on reforming individualistic laws to punish individual perpetrators obscures the preventive initiatives that would require fundamental alterations in economic and social structure” (p. 8).

Fourth, some of the calls being made by women's rights advocates for harsh and retributive sanctions undermine international human rights standards, grant coercive state institutions great power, and set troubling precedents for the rule of law (Miller & Roseman, 2019).

Fifth, and critically, there is little evidence that harsh criminal legal strategies deter violence; in fact, there is reason to believe that they may increase violence against women (Goodmark, 2018; Heise, 2011; Sharma & Bazilli, 2014). There is now a broad consensus among criminologists that the threat of harsh punishment and long sentences does not in fact deter or decrease violence; rather, it is the certainty of arrest and punishment (National Institute of Justice, 2016; OHCHR, 2020; Thomforde Hauser & Abbasi, 2016). As Heise (2011) puts it in a paper presented at the 2012 UN Expert Meeting on Prevention of Violence against Women and Girls:

The United States … has generated little convincing evidence that pro-arrest policies, pro-prosecution policies, domestic violence courts and court-referred perpetrator treatment programmes (whether considered individually or taken together) have worked to substantially reduce rates of recidivism or make women feel safer. Many of these interventions are now being implemented in various developing countries (p. 8).

We turn now to the United States, South Africa, India, and Brazil as case studies to explore the following themes: tensions between reliance on criminal legal sanctions and more upstream prevention approaches; consequences for survivors; and emerging strategies that address some of the structural drivers of violence.

We start with the United States for four reasons. First, a quarter century after the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the United States offers important cautionary lessons about the unintended consequences of a steadily closer relationship between women's rights and GBV prevention advocates and the criminal legal system. Second, the models developed to address GBV in the United States have been widely exported around the world (World Future Council, 2014). Third, there is rich scholarship and debate among advocates working on GBV about the unintended consequences of reliance on the criminal legal system. Fourth, the growing movements calling attention to discriminatory police practices and to mass incarceration in the United States are asking hard questions of GBV advocates.

The United States

The VAWA is a seminal piece of legislation, celebrated as a victory for the domestic and sexual violence prevention movements. It was authorized as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, legislation which furthered a retributive justice system in the country, including mandated trainings for police, judges, and lawyers on how to investigate and prosecute domestic violence; increased funding for police and for extra prisons; tougher prison sentences, and 60 new death penalty offenses.

The passage of VAWA reflected and reinforced the tough-on-crime logic of the 1980s and 1990s, a period in which a highly racialized law and order political rhetoric set in place the ideological foundations for a period of mass incarceration (Alexander, 2020). Between 1980 and 2020, the US prison population increased by 500% and now holds 2.3 million people in federal and state prisons and in jails, with people of color disproportionately incarcerated (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020).

A growing body of scholarship by, among others, Goodmark (2018), Gruber (2021), Richie (2012), and Thuma (2019), details the ways in which the criminal legal system gradually shifted the priorities and strategies of women's movements working to address domestic and sexual violence away from their more radical origins in the civil rights movement and toward greater cooperation with the criminal legal system. Kim (2015) argues that “Feminist and other social movement proponents with emancipatory claims now find themselves trapped by the symbolic logic, political aims, and spatial occupation and domination of the carceral state” (p. 24).

Goodmark (2018) details the many ways in which an overreliance on criminal legal sanctions has harmed survivors of violence, including mandatory arrest policies that have increased the number of survivors arrested by the police for GBV; failure to protect laws that require the police to file reports when children are present during domestic violence which have increased the involvement of the child abuse and neglect systems and expanded the likelihood that women lose their children; the fear of immigrant women regarding the deportation of their partners; and less money being made available for other services, including for housing support, mental health services, or legal assistance.

In the United States, there is a long history of women, especially women of color, calling for alternatives to criminal legal strategies to address GBV. In 2000, activists from INCITE! (a movement of women of color demanding action on GBV) and from Critical Resistance (a women of color-led movement demanding an end to mass incarceration) convened the Color of Violence national conference in Santa Cruz, California. The following year INCITE! and Critical Resistance issued a call to action that 20 years later still demands careful consideration. It reads (CR10 Publications Collective, 2008):

The criminalization approach has … brought many women into conflict with the law. … When public funding is channeled into policing and prisons, budget cuts for social programs, including women's shelters, welfare, and public housing are the inevitable side-effect. These cutbacks leave women less able to escape violent relationships.

The Alliance for Safety and Justice's Crime Survivors Speak Report (2016) found that victims of violent crime in the United States generally do not want punitive criminal law responses and instead want restorative justice approaches. There is also scholarship that indicates that restorative justice approaches can provide an alternative to punitive criminal legal approaches (Condon, 2010; Sered, 2019). Despite the fact that survivors in the United States want alternatives to the options offered by the criminal legal system, and despite the evidence that alternatives exist and can be effective, the US government and many US-based NGOs continue to use and export a criminal legal system model to the rest of the world. Goel and Goodmark (2015) point to three problems with this: first, the criminal legal system has “not been effective in decreasing intimate partner abuse”; second, the exportation of US law and policy ignores cultural context and may not be feasible or may be counter-productive in the countries in which it is imposed; and third, it ignores “the larger structural problems that contribute to intimate partner abuse” (p. 5).

South Africa

In South Africa, rates of GBV remain extremely high (WHO, 2021). In the face of recurrent domestic and sexual violence homicides, thousands of women and some men have repeatedly taken to the streets over the last few years demanding action from the government, including calling for the reinstatement of capital punishment, denial of bail, swifter prosecution, and longer sentences (Agent of Change, 2019). In 2020, the Domestic Violence Amendment Bill proposed a range of new and harsher criminal legal sanctions, including a provision that would require anyone with “knowledge or a reasonable belief or suspicion” of domestic violence to report it to the police or a social worker. The response of GBV activists to this was mixed, with some for it and some against it (Davis, 2021; Maphosa, 2020).

Relying on the criminal legal system to address and deter GBV does not appear to have reduced rates of violence against women (Šimonović, 2016). In South Africa, the post-1994 period has brought with it a nearly 40% increase in the number of police, a six-fold budget increase for prosecution, very real restrictions in bail conditions that trebled the number of awaiting trial detainees, and a prison population that has grown from nearly 120,000 to nearly 165,000. Yet, there has been a sustained increase in the number of GBV cases reported each year.

In their 2016 review of the South African government's response to GBV, the international auditing firm KPMG reports that almost two-thirds of the 26.9 billion South African Rands, or about 2.5 billion US dollars at 2016 rates, allocated to direct GBV programming across 10 government departments go to policing. Moreover “the remaining expenditure on prevention, early intervention and care and support programmes amounts to R9 billion, a mere 2.5% of the 10 national departments’ entire expenditure budgets combined” (KPMG, 2016, p. 103). Similarly, a UNICEF (2020) report determined that the budget for prevention and early intervention services made up less than 1% of the combined national and provincial Department of Social Development budgets. Clearly, spending on criminal legal services has not been matched with urgently needed funding for health and psychosocial services for survivors and those affected by violence (Vetten, 2018). The scarcity and unpredictability of government funds for survivor services have created significant tension within the GBV sector, producing both competition for resources and tensions about the relative merit of prevention (Vetten, 2016). An analysis of the strategies employed by civil society organizations dealing with GBV concluded that they “scarcely focus on factors related with deep societal structures, such as early education of girls and boys, family structures, ‘traditions,’ economic patterns, heritage patterns,” and give little consideration to “economic and social dynamics, as territorial isolation and spatial segregation, as land rights, as unemployment and as migration, which impact many women” (Costantini et al., 2017 , p. 30).

Strikingly, the calls for harsher and longer sentences in South Africa occur at the same time that the evidence for what causes GBV and what works to prevent it in South Africa is more robust than ever. However, the government has not made sufficient use of it. Many rigorous studies show that GBV in South Africa, like elsewhere, is driven by a range of predictable factors, including widespread acceptance of the use of violence; patriarchal and restrictive gender norms; poverty and economic stress; easy access to alcohol and binge drinking; trauma and other mental health problems; and especially, exposure to violence, child abuse, and intergenerational transmission of violence (Carlson et al., 2018; Gibbs et al., 2020). Over the last 15 years, research in South Africa has shown that programs focused on parenting (Cluver et al., 2018), economic empowerment (Kim et al., 2007), community education (Jewkes et al., 2008), and engaging men (Dworkin et al., 2013) can bring about very significant reductions in men's use of violence against women.

In other words, at the very moment when more is known about what causes violence and what works to prevent it, it is entirely plausible that the South African government will choose to double down on harsh sentences and increase the already overcrowded prison population serving time in facilities in which rape and other forms of violence are endemic and from which inmates emerge deeply traumatized and schooled in violence and toxic ideas about manhood.

India

The Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women's report on her visit to India describes widespread violence against women occurring in many different settings “from the womb to the tomb,” including honor killings, acid attacks, and dowry killings condoned by the state and in militarized regions (Manjoo, 2014). In 2021, the National Commission for Women reported a rise of 46% in complaints of crimes against women in the first eight months of the year (Hindustan Times, 2021). In India, as in South Africa, public outrage at pervasive and brutal violence against women has generated calls for harsh sanctions and vengeance from citizens and politicians alike. In response to public outrage in the wake of a number of high-profile cases of GBV, the use of the death penalty has recently been expanded to include those convicted of child rape. As in the United States and South Africa, the passage of this legislation has coincided with a tough-on-crime rhetoric and a concomitant rapid increase in the prison population; over the last 20 years, India's prison population has risen from 272,079 to 433,033. Sixty-seven percent of the people in Indian jails are undertrials—those detained in prisons during trial, investigation, or inquiry but not convicted of any crime in a court of law. More than 25% of undertrial prisoners in 16 out of 36 states and union territories had been detained for more than one year in 2014 (Rath, 2017).

In 2019, Jaya Bachchan, a Member of Parliament in India, called for lynching of the men accused of a high profile and widely publicized rape while speaking in the parliament: “I know it sounds harsh, but these kind of people should be brought out in public and lynched. I think it is time. … The people want the government to give a proper and definite answer” (BBC, 2019). Four days later the alleged rapists were shot by the police in what appears to be an extrajudicial killing.

CREA, the All India Progressive Women's Association, and other Indian organizations are challenging the use of the death penalty and calls for draconian punishments. The All India Progressive Women's Association has said such approaches will only make the problem worse. According to their spokesperson, as quoted in the UK Guardian (Ellis-Petersen, 2019):

The cry for the death penalty is nothing but a red herring. … It's the easy option because it avoids any institutional accountability and doesn't cost a thing, it's just lawmakers reassuring themselves that all it will take to solve this problem is to eliminate one or two of these devils. We are still not having the conversation which needs to happen, so nothing changes. … All the talk of the death penalty for rape just means we may be seeing more women murdered so they can't remain alive as a witness (paras. 20–21).

In their piece, “A reflection on gang rape in India: What's the law got to do with it?” Sharma and Bazilli (2014) review the historical context of women's activism toward strengthening criminal legal responses to violence against women in India —from successful legal reform in the late 1970s and 1980s, through to the appointment of the Verma Commission and enactment of new laws in the wake of the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh on a bus in New Delhi in December 2012. They argue that women's successes in law reform over this period have largely failed to achieve justice for survivors or to deter violence against women. Instead, they argue that legal reform in India has often relied on exported models from the global North, largely failed to address the broader social-ecology driving violence, and has been hijacked both by Hindu nationalists and neoliberalism. Sharma and Bazilli (2014) further emphasize that “Although numerous laws related to rape were passed in India, due to feminist groups pressuring the government, these laws have been ineffective through lack of implementation, and in some cases have actively worked against the interest of women … it is safe to postulate that most feminists have little or no faith in legal solutions to violence” (p. 15).

Brazil

In 2015, GBV led to the murder of 4,621 women in Brazil (Cerqueira et al., 2019). Between 2001 and 2005, the murder of black women increased by 22%, while the rate for nonblack women decreased by 7.4%. Shockingly, fewer than 3% of femicides are investigated (Pinto et al., 2017). Similarly, Human Rights Watch (2018) reports pervasive violence against women and dire state inaction:

At the end of 2017, more than 1.2 million cases of domestic violence were pending before the courts. Implementation of Brazil's anti-domestic violence legislation, the 2006 “Maria da Penha” law, is lagging. Official data show that 23 shelters that housed women and children in desperate need closed in 2017 due to budget cuts. Only 74 shelters remain, in a country of more than 200 million people (para. 31).

Brazil has emphasized, for the most part, the criminal aspects of VAW over prevention and rehabilitation, investing in a system of protection for women survivors of violence. This includes a national hotline, increased penalization for men who perpetrate VAW, and the world's first specific police stations for women to report violence (Alves de Araújo Lima et al., 2016). At the same time, research has also affirmed that many low-income women of color in urban areas in the country are often reluctant to report VAW because they are highly aware of the repressive and unjust treatment that men of color, particularly low-income men, receive from Brazilian police and the court system (Taylor et al., 2016). Moreover, a 2006 law tripling the sentences for intimate partner abuse may have led to a decrease in filings of intimate partner abuse complaints, as those subjected to abuse question the severity of the criminal penalties and fear losing the economic and coparenting support of their partners (Moraes, 2011).

In the mostly low-income communities of color in Brazil, violence perpetrated by state actors is pervasive, especially by the police and the military. This both diminishes trust in the police and the broader criminal legal system and compromises GBV prevention efforts. Promundo's 2016 report, “This isn't the life for you: Masculinities and nonviolence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil” (Taylor et al., 2016), details findings from IMAGES implemented in Brazil and focuses on the linkages between public and domestic violence. The study revealed that hypermasculine norms which encourage violence at home and in public are both causes and consequences of militaristic police brutality. Extremely high numbers of men experience police violence by the age of 18 and 55%–60% report that they are almost as afraid of the police as they are of militias, criminals, and drug dealers. The concentration of public violence, especially in dense urban zones in Rio de Janeiro, leads to “transfers of violence or stress from the public to private space” (Taylor et al., 2016, p. 53). In this transfer, violence is normalized as a means of resolving conflict in nearly every interaction and across age groups, including against women. The report importantly calls for action to “address police violence committed primarily against low-income, young black men including via comprehensive police reform with transparency and reporting mechanisms” (p. 20).

Alternatives to the Current Overreliance on Criminal Legal Strategies

The next section reviews alternatives to criminal legal strategies. It begins with a review of policies that can increase women's ability to avoid and leave abusive relationships, then shifts to evidence-based interventions that have been shown to prevent violence at the individual and community level. The section concludes by identifying strategies needed to address the social and structural drivers of violence, thereby reducing violence at a broader societal level.

Increasing Women's Autonomy to Avoid and Leave Abusive Relationships

What policy approaches can address the social and structural forces that we now know increase the likelihood of violence and trap women in violent relationships? Goodmark (2018) offers a comprehensive set of policy proposals, arguing that these will better meet the needs of survivors and will decrease the prevalence of violence. She calls for the repeal of mandatory arrest and prosecution policies and offers a comprehensive set of alternatives to the criminal legal system. Her legal and policy recommendations include economic strategies, such as conditional cash transfers to survivors and women at risk of violence; job skills and training to ensure economic independence so that survivors can leave abusive relationships; employment assistance programs; provisions to address economic abuse and credit record destruction; and at the broader social level, addressing job insecurity by partnering with trade unions and building an anti-poverty movement. Goodmark (2018) also proposes effective gun control policies, ending mass and over-incarceration and reducing the trauma of incarceration, and the widespread provision of school and community-based mental health and psychosocial support to address adverse childhood experiences, including exposure to domestic violence. Alongside these approaches, she provides compelling evidence of the successes of primary prevention to stop violence before it occurs.

Evidence-Based Prevention Interventions

The 2021 Generation Equality Forum's Global Acceleration Plan (Generation Equality Forum, 2021) includes a clear call for prevention with the following action item:

Scale-up implementation and financing of evidence-driven prevention strategies by public and private sector institutions and women's rights organizations to drive down prevalence of gender-based violence against women, adolescent girls and young women in all their diversity including in humanitarian settings. In so doing, increase by 50% the number of countries that include one or more evidence-driven prevention strategies on gender-based violence against women and girls in national policies by 2026 (p. 19).

Fortunately, there is now robust evidence of what works to prevent violence and, as such, it should be easy for states to implement many more than the minimum standard of one prevention strategy.

Similarly, one of the agreed outcomes from CSW65 focuses on the prevention of VAW, calling on states to “address the structural and underlying causes of violence against women and girls through enhanced prevention measures, research and strengthened coordination, monitoring and evaluation by, inter alia, encouraging awareness-raising activities, including through publicizing the societal and economic costs of violence, and working with local communities” (Commission on the Status of Women Sixty-Fifth Session, 2021, p. 14).

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) offers a useful set of recommendations aimed at preventing intimate partner violence. Some echo Goodmark’s (2018) focus on survivor autonomy, while others go upstream and focus on strengthening family support and resilience, increasing men's involvement as allies in ending violence, and creating protective environments in schools, workplaces, and local communities (Niolon et al., 2017). The CDC's emphasis on the built environment in local communities is noteworthy as it is unique in the literature on GBV. They write:

Evidence suggests that changing or modifying environmental characteristics of neighborhoods may be an effective approach for preventing IPV. For example, one study found that residents of an urban public housing development randomly assigned to buildings in proximity to green conditions (i.e., trees and grass) reported significantly lower rates of partner violence in the past year than residents living in proximity to barren conditions. … Additionally, research has also shown that green space in urban communities has been linked to higher levels of neighborhood collective efficacy and reductions in violent crime, which is a risk factor for IPV (Niolon et al., 2017, p. 31).

The recent UK Government-funded “What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women” initiative used rigorous randomized control trial (RCT) evaluation methodologies to assess the impact of 16 VAWG prevention interventions in 14 sub-Saharan African, Asian, and Middle Eastern contexts, over six years from 2014 to 2019. Based on these 17 RCTs and a meta-review of 104 additional published studies, which fully evaluated 95 separate GBV prevention interventions, Kerr-Wilson et al. (2020) identified nine broad strategies as effective when well designed and executed, namely:

Economic transfer programs;

Combined economic and social empowerment programs targeting women;

Parenting programs to prevent IPV and child maltreatment;

Community activism to shift harmful gender attitudes, roles, and social norms;

School-based interventions to prevent dating or sexual violence;

School-based interventions for peer violence;

Interventions that work with individuals and/or couples to reduce their alcohol and/or substance abuse (with or without other prevention elements);

Couples’ interventions (focused on transforming gender relations within the couple, or addressing alcohol and violence in relationships); and

Interventions with female sex workers to reduce violence by clients, police, or strangers (i.e., nonintimate partners) through empowerment/collectivization or alcohol and substance use reduction.

There are many other research-based best practices frameworks and compendia. However, taking effective, evidence-based, primary prevention programs to scale is challenging. Practitioners and policymakers grapple with how to replicate effective evidence-based interventions—how to build the necessary human resources capacities, how to build local capacity, and how to sustain the financial commitments to prevention over the long term. Both the WHO RESPECT Women framework (World Health Organization, 2019) on ending violence against women and the INSPIRE framework (World Health Organization, 2018) on ending violence against children offer useful recommendations for scale-up, including developing a national plan, policy, or strategy on VAW, and ensuring the inclusion of prevention strategies within these; programming for synergy, combining multiple strategies and interventions at the individual, interpersonal, community, and societal levels for sustained impact; building on ongoing initiatives, integrating prevention activities into existing health, development and other existing sectoral programs; and supporting a community of practice among program developers and implementers to facilitate learning and knowledge sharing.

Alternatives to Harsh Criminal Legal Sanctions: Addressing Historical, Social, and Structural Drivers of Violence

After decades of rapidly increasing police and prison budgets, the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 brought hundreds of thousands of protestors onto the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In hundreds of cities in the United States, protestors demanded fundamental changes to the functioning of the criminal legal system. Advocacy efforts focused on defunding the police and redirecting money away from often discriminatory and counter-productive police responses to those better trained and equipped to respond to community safety needs.

Following weeks of sustained Black Lives Matter protests across the entire United States, 46 domestic and sexual violence state coalitions issued a statement on their historical relationship to the criminal legal system—a system these very same coalitions have called on for the last three decades to implement ever more robust measures to improve safety for survivors and to hold perpetrators accountable. Titled “A Moment of Truth” (Violence Free Colorado, 2020 ), it represents significant soul-searching among those working to address violence against women about their role in legitimating the expansion of police and prosecutorial powers and the exponential growth of prisons and mass incarceration, and the impact this has had on communities of color. It commits to shifting from a retributive police-prosecutors-courts-prison model to a restorative, community-driven one (Violence Free Colorado, 2020):

This moment has long been coming. We must be responsible for the ways in which our movement work directly contradicts our values. We espouse nonviolence, self-determination, freedom for all people and the right to bodily autonomy as we simultaneously contribute to a pro-arrest and oppressive system that is designed to isolate, control, and punish. We promote the ideas of equity and freedom as we ignore and minimize the real risks faced by BIPOC survivors who interact with a policing system that threatens the safety of their families and their very existence. We seek to uproot the core drivers of gender-based violence yet treat colonialism, white supremacy, racism, and transphobia as disconnected or separate from our core work (para. 4).

In South Africa, a recent statement by Code Red, a new feminist collective calling for a focus on the structural drivers of violence, similarly acknowledged the relationship between structural inequalities, violence against women, and calls for redress. They call for a basic income grant for all, expanded social grants for children, cash transfers, labor protection, attention to the still entrenched structural violence of apartheid-era spatial segregation, and an end to neoliberal economic policies of austerity. Code Red's statement reads (#CodeRed Feminist Collective, 2021):

We stand in solidarity with people, movements and organizations who have been systematically excluded by poverty, inequality, unemployment and gender-based violence, who have long been making the demands outlined below. … Structural violence always increases vulnerability to patriarchal gender-based violence, including assault, rape and murder. #CodeRed demands that President Cyril Ramaphosa implement his budget commitments to prevent and address gender-based violence as a systemic, structural problem. … Today, we say to all in leadership positions: Move beyond the usual empty rhetoric. Use your power to help create the world of our dreams—-of justice, peace and equality (paras. 2, 8, 22).

Conclusion

With the momentum generated by the Paris Generation Equality Forum, all the new funding commitments therein, as well as the cumulative achievements of decades of women's rights activism, this is a critical time to consider carefully what strategies will be employed to end all forms of violence against women. In the nearly three decades since the passage of the VAWA in the United States, we have learned a lot about what causes violence against women, and what works to address and prevent that violence. It is critical that we act on what we have learned from research and practice, and shift our focus from an overreliance on an ineffectual, harsh, and often harmful criminal legal approach and instead take measures to prevent violence before it occurs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges substantive edits provided by Zia Wasserman, as well as very helpful comments on earlier drafts by Tatiana Moura, Chris Hook and Joy Watson.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Dean Peacock Over the last three decades, Dean Peacock has worked in South Africa, across Africa, the US, and globally to advance health and human rights. His work has had a strong focus on health and human rights, including addressing gender based violence and increasing men’s support for women’s rights. He has worked at many GBV focused organisations including Men Overcoming Violence, Futures Without Violence, Prevention Institute and Sonke Gender Justice. He currently directs the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom’s global initiative to mobilise men for feminist peace. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town, a Visiting Scholar at the University of San Diego, a Senior Fellow at Promundo, and an Ashoka Fellow.

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