{"id":70619,"date":"2026-03-19T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idronline.org\/?post_type=article&p=70619"},"modified":"2026-03-27T08:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T02:46:10","slug":"building-lasting-change-to-prevent-gender-based-violence","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/idronline.org\/kn-in\/article\/gender\/building-lasting-change-to-prevent-gender-based-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Building lasting change to prevent gender-based violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Violence against women and girls is common but largely invisible. Beginning in the 1960s, the women’s movement against violence in India emphasised a constitutional and rights-based approach to reforming the status and treatment of women. Feminist efforts focused on supporting survivors of violence through shelters, counselling, legal help, and law, leading to the landmark Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act,<\/a> 2005. Contemporary understanding has shifted towards not only addressing violence but also preventing it by challenging the norms and practices that increase its use and acceptance and limit its reporting and intervention to stop it.<\/p>

This article outlines the learnings from a community-driven violence prevention programme by SNEHA<\/a>, a Mumbai based nonprofit organisation and discusses crucial steps in delivering interventions for prevention of violence against women and girls in complex urban settings.<\/p>

More than 40 percent<\/a> of Mumbai’s homes are in informal settlements, many of which are overcrowded and poorly planned, with limited ventilation, inadequate lighting, and insufficient sanitation. In these conditions, the health and safety of women and children remain deeply compromised. Women and girls in informal settlements also experience gender-based disadvantages rooted in hierarchical, relational, and institutional structures. A double burden arises from the combined effects of traditional roles, unequal responsibilities, and rigid social expectations, with the harsh living conditions in settlements that disproportionately undermine the health and security of women and girls. <\/p>

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Furthermore, when women and children who suffer violence visit the hospital, they often receive only medical care, while their emotional, social, and legal needs are largely ignored. To address this gap, we set up the centre for women and children in distress to address the hidden nature of violence, women’s wish to protect family unity, and the need to work with families, communities, and service providers.<\/p>

Most cases concerned domestic violence, homicides and suicides and required more than counselling—needing coordination with stakeholders and communities. This highlighted the need for trauma-informed care and community mobilisation to prevent and respond to violence.<\/p>

At some level, the community was already addressing such violence. In Dharavi, for instance, women gather in small groups, urgently discussing how to support a neighbour experiencing violence. Some voices call out to say, “Let’s take action quickly and take her to the hospital.” Other voices say, “In the meantime we’ll talk to the family members and give them a piece of our mind.” These instances are seen in other informal settlements in areas including Govandi, Wadala, Kurla, Malwani, and Bhiwandi. Women in these settlements are quietly but persistently reshaping community responses to violence. <\/p>

The following are our learnings from implementing this work, tapping into community’s experiences and responses:<\/p>

1. Articulating a clear vision and mapping pathways to change<\/h3>

Programmes addressing violence against women and girls are driven by a deep commitment to ending it. Working backwards from the goal is important as it shows us all the things that need to happen before we reach it. It connects what we do with what we want to achieve and helps us question whether what we plan to do is possible, whether our actions are likely to lead to change, and if our progress and results can be measured.<\/p>

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In our experience, developing a theory of change<\/a> helps articulate the programme’s purpose, clarify pathways to impact, guide measurement, strengthen engagement with evidence, and identify gaps in existing intervention. The programme’s theory of change helped us understand the interconnections between response and prevention in programmes addressing violence against women and girls. Visible interventions that support survivors raise awareness of the issue and its possible solutions, while building confidence for collective actions can lead to change.<\/p>

2. Implementing a structured community mobilisation strategy<\/h3>

Community mobilisation through dialogue, collective learning, and local leadership, combining group-based education with individual voluntarism builds a support system within the community.<\/p>

Women’s groups help women understand violence, know their rights, and build leadership. Men’s groups encourage men to challenge harmful gender norms and act as allies to promote safety and prevent violence. Discussions with groups of adolescents focus on consent, relationships, health, and rights, while young people take action through campaigns and creative public activities.<\/p>

Trained women volunteers (Sanginis<\/em>) emerge from communities to support survivors by offering first-response help and linking them to health, legal, and counselling services. Community meetings and campaigns reinforce this work by making violence a shared concern.<\/p>

3. Embedding monitoring and evaluation systems to measure change <\/h3>

Although violence affects nearly one-third<\/a> of women globally, evaluation efforts remain limited due to stigma, invisibility, and the complexity of measuring change. To address this gap, a 10-year scientific effort<\/a> examined causal links between programme components, outcomes, and impact.<\/p>

After developing our theory of change, we tested it in the SNEHA TARA (Taking Action Reaching All) trial, a programme that tested the effects of community mobilisation through groups and volunteers to prevent violence against women and girls.<\/p>

Big questions that we had to work through were how possible it was for people in communities to follow the intervention model (its feasibility, fidelity and replicability in the real world), how often and for how long groups and activities would take place (its dosage), what kind of content and activities would resonate with groups and keep them active, and what scale the intervention could operate on (its reach). After five years of development and discussion, we settled on delivery in localities of about 500 homes, with meetings of women, men, and young people roughly every month over three years. We compared 24 informal settlement localities receiving both support services and our community mobilisation model with 24 localities receiving support services alone. The cluster randomised trial assessed changes in the prevalence of domestic and intimate partner violence over three years, alongside shifts in disclosure, community attitudes, bystander intervention, and gender norms.<\/p>

Between 2018 and 2023, in localities that were involved in community mobilisation, women were almost three times as likely to disclose violence. Over 4,100 survivors were identified, of whom almost 3,800 accessed counselling services. There were suggestive changes in the indicators in the theory of change. The prevalence of domestic violence was lower in the community mobilisation model areas and community tolerance of violence declined. However, at the population level, the change was not statistically significant.<\/p>

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Community mobilisation through dialogue, collective learning, and local leadership builds a support system. | Picture courtesy: Tejal Pandey<\/figcaption><\/figure>

Recommendations for evidence-based contextual programming<\/h3>

1. Adopt mixed-methods to measurement<\/h3>

Given the complexity, volatility, and recurring nature of violence against women and girls, we need to work out what questions we want to answer and choose ways of measuring that give us the answers we want. Surveys are just one approach. They might not be enough to capture nuanced experiences, changing forms of violence, and variations in frequency and severity. We need to understand what people think, what they do, how they respond, and what happens to them. For example, if we want to understand people’s attitudes to domestic violence, we could ask them questions in surveys, we could interview them in a more open-ended way, or we could observe what they say and do. All of these pathways are valid: the choice depends on the question.<\/p>

In the TARA trial, we conducted surveys before and after community mobilisation. Our surveys for assessing magnitude and frequency of violence were developed after thorough reviews of tools used across the world, such as the National Family Health Survey<\/a>, the Indian Family Violence and Control Scale<\/a>, and the WHO multi-country study<\/a> on women’s health and domestic violence against women.<\/p>