Delivering Best Practice: Using the NASASV standards to deliver primary violence prevention education programs
In 2009, the National Association for Services Against Sexual Assault released the National Standards for the Primary Prevention of Sexual Assault through Education. Six standards for best practice were developed which aim to assist workers in the prevention field to develop effective programs:
1. Using coherent conceptual approaches 2. Demonstrating the use of a theory of change
3. Understanding inclusive, relevant and culturally sensitive practice 4. Undertaking comprehensive program development and delivery 5. Using effective evaluation strategies
6. Supporting thorough training and professional development of educators
The Canberra Rape Crisis Centre and the YWCA of Canberra both deliver programs that work with young people to address and change violence-supportive attitudes and behaviours – Sexual Assault Prevention Program for Secondary Students (SAPPSS) and Respect,
Communicate, Choose (RCC).
The focus of this presentation will be to briefly introduce the national standards, and to illustrate their relevance in developing and delivering primary prevention programs for young people from different age groups, both male and female.
We are going to look across two programs with different target groups and different content but similar theoretical approaches, to see how the Standards are useful for guiding
development and delivery in ways which help to ensure we are working towards the same end game, even though our methods are specifically adapted to the needs and life stage of our clients.
Given the small amount of time we have today we have decided to focus specifically on one standard as a case study through which to highlight the challenges andrewards associated with putting best practice into practice. We will focus on Standard one - using coherent conceptual approaches to program design. In doing so we will specifically discuss the benefits and challenges of using a gendered analysis to develop and deliver primary prevention programs.
What we hope you take away from our talk today is that best practice approaches result in the best outcomes for young people. More specifically, our experience shows that a gender analysis is the key to providing successful violence prevention programs. As the Standards suggest this must connect from conception to development to delivery, and be realised through the mechanics of the program itself – the way it is delivered, the material covered and the activities used to convey the material.
What are the NASASV standards?
The Standards were developed in 2009 for NASASV by the Social Justice Social Change Research Centre at University of Western Sydney in partnership with VicHealth.
NASASV is the peak body for organisations who work with victims/survivors of sexual violence, and who work to prevent sexual violence. Canberra Rape Crisis Centre (CRCC) is a member of NASASV, and two of their staff, including the Executive Officer of CRCC, sit on the board.
The Standards were developed out of the National Sexual Assault Prevention Education Project (SAPE) funded by the Australian Government. The aim of the SAPE project was to “build upon existing prevention education activities to provide a framework that can be implemented across Australia by prevention educators, service providers, policy makers and funding bodies”.1
SAPPSS pre-dates the development of the standards, as does Relationship Things, the YWCA of Canberra’s violence prevention suite of resources upon which RCC is based. Both these programs were consulted as part of the SAPE project, which formed the basis of the Standards.
Why talk about the Standards
Developing and delivering primary prevention education programs is both rewarding and daunting. Given that the real success of these programs is measured by the prevention of
1
Carmody, M., Evans, S., Krough,C., Flood,M., heenan,M. & Ovenden. G. (2009) Framing best practice: National Standards for the primary prevention of sexual assault through education, National Sexual Assault Prevention Education Project for NASASV. University of Western Sydney, Australia, 9.
violence before it occurs, evaluating the effectiveness of interventions can also be a challenge.
The Standards were designed “to assist practitioners in developing, implementing and evaluating educational programs that focus on the primary prevention of sexual assault.”2 What makes them really important is that they are grounded in theoretical research and evidence from the evaluation of programs here and overseas, and thus provide an informed launch pad from which to initiate new work of high-quality in the primary prevention space. Importantly they also provide a benchmark that organisations and educators can use to analyse the effectiveness of their work and its impact.3
If applied broadly these Standards would generate a consistent and effective approach to primary prevention across the country. This is warranted given the seriousness and pervasiveness of the issue of sexual assault. By providing criteria upon which all programs can be judged, the Standards also raise the bar on accountability for organisations and program creators. Accountability is particularly important if we are to adopt an ethical stance towards our education of children and young people. Consistency of quality and accountability in program development and implementation is essential if we are to ever achieve the goal of ending violence against women in our communities.
The standards also demonstrate the complexities of prevention work, and can act as an important advocacy tool.4 It is clear from our experience that although there have been positive shifts in the way primary prevention education is viewed and valued in Australia, the way funding is provided for such programs, and the support schools are given to participate in such programs still do not adequately facilitate the achievement of best practice. Thus the Standards can help us in advocating for a shift towards sustainable and effective policy, and towards funding strategies which support best practice and embed primary prevention education across all levels of primary and high school education.
2
Ibid.
3
What are these programs?
Respect Communicate Choose
RCC aims to better equip girls and boys in primary school with the skills to develop and maintain equal, safe and respectful relationships, with the ultimate goal of preventing violence against women.
The program is targeted at young people in the last two years of primary school (ages 9-12). The rationale for this stems from research which highlights that young people are
particularly vulnerable as they transition from childhood into adolescence.5
Whilst children in this age bracket are recognised as more vulnerable,6 research on children in the middle years also indicates the potential for positive intervention to help these children achieve their full potential is heightened.7 Accordingly, interventions at this stage can make a significant difference to children and young people’s current and future lives.8
Despite this, young people in this age bracket are largely overlooked by programs and policies focusing on the development of children and young people.9 This is also true of primary violence prevention programs. Respect, Communicate, Choose seeks to bridge this gap.
The program comprises three complementary parts: workshops and participant-led projects delivered as a one term program, and a session run the following term to re-engage
participants with the ideas they learnt during the workshops.
Sexual Assault Prevention Program in Secondary Schools
Sexual Assault Prevention Program in Secondary Schools (SAPPSS), is a whole of school program aimed at “reducing the incidence and impacts of sexual assault by addressing its underlying causes and by promoting respectful behaviours.”10 The program was created by
5
Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (2011) ‘betwixt and between’: A Report on ARACY’s Middle Years Project Focusing on the developmental needs of children aged 9-14. ARACY.
6
Ibid.
7
NSW Inquiry into Children and Young People Aged 9-14 (2009), Report of the Inquiry into Children and Young People Aged 9-14 Years in NSW, Parliament of NSW.
8
Ibid.
9
Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth, above n.5.
10
CASA House (2008) Sexual Assault Prevention Program for Secondary Schools (SAPPSS) Report, CASA House and The Royal Women’s Hospital, Australia, 1.
and delivered by CASA house in Victoria and is delivered in the ACT by Canberra Rape Crisis Centre.
In best practice the program runs over six consecutive weeks, delivered to all the year 8 or 9 (Ideally) or year 10 students in a school simultaneously. This whole of school and whole of year cohort model is adopted for two important reasons. It allows the best opportunity for cultural shift to be created and reinforced within the entire school. It enacts an ethical stance towards the reality that students “..cannot be expected to change in isolation or in opposition to their environment.”11
The students are given accurate information about laws and standards pertaining to sexual conduct and are engaged in a process intended to foster empathy for victims of sexual assault, to illuminate the impacts of sexual assault on a victim, and to encourage constructive group responses to situations where someone is at risk from a range of behaviours. The six week delivery pattern provides consistent reinforcement of the
information being presented and enables students to stay engaged in a process of unpacking and exploring the ideas both in class and informally, long enough for those ideas to integrate positively into their communal discourse.
The program highlights the element of power imbalance present in all sexual assault to help students identify when they or their friends are being subject to coercive power use, and to encourage them also to notice their own use of power within their relationships. In
delivering the program the classes are divided along gender lines until the final session, allowing young women and young men to explore these issues safely.
Standard One - Using coherent conceptual approaches
As outlined above, we are going to discuss the first of the six NASASV Standards as a case study of the importance of adhering to best practice in violence prevention programming. This standard requires that programs “articulate the theoretical approach upon which the program is based, demonstrating a clear rationale and research evidence relevant to the target population.”12
11
CASA House (undated), SAPPSS Facilitator Handbook, CASA House, 6.
12
To achieve this, programs must:
clearly articulate the theoretical basis of the program, using approaches relevant to sexual assault prevention
adopt a gender analysis as foundational
use theoretical approaches which support achievement of positive relationship behaviours.13
Standard One requires that we understand why sexual assault occurs and thus what we can do to address it.14 Articulating the causes and remedies of violence against women then
allows us to create effective programs to address this issue. As such, achievement of Standard one is necessary to achieve other standards including undertaking comprehensive program development and delivery (Standard four), and supporting thorough training and professional development of educators (Standard six).
We agree with the creators of the Standards that adopting a gender analysis as a key principle which must shape development and delivery of a program. This is vital in the area of sexual assault prevention education.
Both RCC and SAPPSS are underpinned by a gendered analysis of violence.
SAPPSS is founded upon the idea that “within a feminist framework, sexual assault is understood to have social and structural gender inequality as its causes; it is both a
consequence of and a reinforcer of the power disparity between genders. It is a violent act of power which, in the main, is carried out by men against women and children.”15
RCC also works from the understanding that unequal gender norms and gender relations are determinants of men’s violence against women. The program adopts an ecological approach to understanding violence, which looks beyond the individual to examine social norms that support and reinforce violence against women. It recognises that the interplay of different individual, relationship, community and societal factors lead to violence.16
13 Ibid. 14 Carmody, M et al above n.1, 30. 15
CASA House, above n. 10, 7.
16
Violence Prevention Alliance (2013) The ecological framework, World Health Organisation, last viewed 12 May 2013 <http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/approach/ecology/en/index.html>
Challenges associated with adopting a gender analysis
Determining how to, or whether to, incorporate gender into prevention programs was highlighted by those developing the Standards as a key challenge in the development and delivery of prevention programs.17 Articulating an explicit gender or feminist approach to violence prevention may cause conflict and resistance from some audiences and
stakeholders. As a result gender-neutral approaches and language are often used to explain the violence that both girls/women and boys/men experience.
With younger age groups this is particularly evident. In primary schools, children are often exposed to anti-bullying programs and general values programs, which seek to promote respectful relationships and sometimes also develop skills in this area. Most of these programs do not touch on violence within intimate relationships or sexual assault, nor do they address the issue of gender. Discussing these relationships is often seen as something that should be left for high school- in fact, in one school we were told students were not allowed to refer to having boyfriends and girlfriends. Addressing gender may therefore be seen as irrelevant to this age group. This is despite the fact that research and our experience tells us that young people at this age are frequently exposed to gender roles and
stereotypes, and may already have strong ideas about gender and violence.
In high schools, concerns may be raised that adopting a gender analysis may exclude men, or mark them as perpetrators of sexual assault. Teachers may find discussions of gender and power challenging to their own gender socialisation and the way in which a classroom operates.
Despite these challenges, both SAPPSS and RCC recognise that using gender-neutral content and individualist frameworks fails to address the social and structural factors that endorse and perpetuate boys’ and men’s violence.18
But what does this mean in practice.
17
Carmody, M., Evans, S., Krough, C. (2009) ‘“Time to get cracking” The challenge of developing best practice in Australian sexual assault prevention education’ ACSSA Issues No. 11 2009, Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault.
18
Respect, Communicate, Choose
In developing a program, the theoretical approach should inform a whole range of decisions about the content and how the program will be run. Whilst SAPPSS speaks explicitly about sexual assault, the view in developing RCC is that we are capturing young people before they are negotiating intimate relationships. Whilst this is not true for all young people in this age group, our experience and the evidence base suggests that in this age group, we are capturing young people at the point where their awareness and interest in sexuality and gender is blossoming, but not yet fully developed.19
Despite this, we wanted RCC to create a space where gender and equality was a key focus. To this end, we decided that we wanted both men and women facilitators modelling respectful behaviour to students. Wanting to expose students to both male and female positive role models also drove our decision not to deliver the program in gender segregated groups. Whilst there is limited supporting evidence showing better outcomes when using sex-segregation, the research remains inconclusive. Our experience shows that having mix gendered groups has provided important opportunities to challenge young people’s pre-existing stereotypes about what one or the other gender may or may not be or do.
RCC seeks to build skills for safe, respectful and equal relationships and challenge young peoples' attitudes around gender and violence. In developing an age appropriate program however, we are not in a position to speak explicitly about sexual assault. Despite this, by using a gender analysis to guide our decisions about content and delivery, RCC remains a violence prevention program that contributes to the elimination of violence against women.
The program does this by providing students with an opportunity to interrogate gender roles and stereotypes and their implications for relationships. Utilising the ecological framework acts as an enabler because it takes a broader understanding of the cause of violence against women and allows us to consider friendships and issues such as bullying without being gender neutral, while also laying the groundwork for their future intimate relationships.
Students are given opportunities to analyse how gender is represented in the media, and to think about the impact of this representation on how they think about themselves and others. They are challenged to interrogate what they have been told about what real men
19
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (2011) Catching on Early – Sexuality Education for Victorian Primary Schools, Melbourne, 12-14.
and women are, and think about the implications and justice of these ideas for themselves and others. In performing role plays about what respect looks like in a relationship, students are asked to think about whether they would perform differently if gender of the characters was changed.
Our experience indicates that these are not opportunities or questions they are being given or asked in other parts of their lives. On this basis, that our program is underpinned by a gender analysis of violence is our biggest strength and our biggest achievement. This
approach has allowed us to provide space for students to think about how gender inequality plays out in the community and the playground, and to articulate the impact it has on their relationships.
Outcomes around gendered attitudes are where we are making the biggest shifts in our evaluation, and young people are often telling us that talking about gender stereotypes both in their school and in the broader community is their favourite part of the program. For girls, we find that having express discussions about gender inequality is empowering. For boys, we have even found that this space has allowed for critical analysis of dominant masculinity.
Although we are working with different age groups, the success of articulating and utilising gender analysis as a key principle of our program mirrors the experience of Canberra Rape Crisis Centre in delivering SAPPSS.
SAPPSS
A gender analysis is key to the delivery and effectiveness of the SAPPSS program.
One application of it in the SAPPSS program is the separation of male and female students until the final session of the program. This separation of genders recognises that the students have been socialised to interact in particular, unhelpful, ways. They have been given roles in relation to each other and those roles are a key contributor to the behaviours we are challenging. SAPPSS aims to minimise the activation of those roles while engaging this material, until the final session. The standards in this case lead to a very concrete practitioner outcome. A facilitator is able to engage young men with less of their "impress girls with my power/compete with other guys to attract girls attention" role interfering in how they engage content which is cognitively and affectively challenging.
Applying Standard One in SAPPSS depersonalises/externalises the problem - the masculine role is not one the boys created, it is one they have been given without knowing they had a choice. Thus, a facilitator is able to talk about the power aspects of male behaviour in sexual relationships in a non-threatening way, as a problem we all are trying to overcome, not as something wrong with males.
The gender analysis applied in SAPPSS leads to the creation of a change space for the young men. We might be the first adults who have explicitly given them permission to deconstruct the role society has given them, and to reject the elements of it which don't serve their actual needs. They are invited to explore their identity aspirations, particularly in reference to relationships with a sexual component, more aware of the distortions imposed on them by the socialised role of how to be masculine.
Standard One, as it is applied in SAPPSS, gives the young men more awareness of the choices they have about who to be and how to behave, and it ensures they are given a safe and change fostering space in which to consider and reconstruct their relational and sexual behaviours.
Adopting a gendered analysis of violence and spelling out to young men that the definitions of masculinity which prepare them to use power in damaging ways are generated by society, is thoroughly empowering for them. The SAPPSS program is uncompromising about each student's personal responsibility for their own actions and choices and it does this without blaming young men for the model of masculinity their society, and the adults around them, have offered to them. Exploring even the idea of a constructed masculinity empowers the male students to recognise that they have choices related to personal identity and personal conduct, which they were not previously aware existed.
It is our observation that young males’ internal world does not fit the external "masculine" relational persona they are already adopting. Practitioners need to recognise this and not be influenced by the face to face behaviour of the boys, so as to mistake that group behaviour (which is merely them practicing the role of dominant masculinity) for the truth about what's going on inside them. Internally, at the younger ages, young males aspire to be pretty much who we would hope they aspired to become.
This disjunction between external role and internal process is reflected in the SAPPSS context in the disjunction we often see between the ambiguous or even reactive
engagement of the young male students in the group session and the generally positive and significant learning they reveal in their post program feedback surveys.
Conclusion
The NASASV standards are a valuable tool for program developers and practitioners alike. The standards can expedite the program development process, and guide delivery and assessment of the program into the future. The standards, if applied consistently by all program developers nationally, will invite consistency of program quality and a national framework for program accountability. If adopted as the standard/framework for program development the standards will assist in the creation of a range of programs that, while targeted at different age groups and different contexts, share a coherence and can be mutually reinforcing/synergistic.
We have particularly focussed on Standard One. Our experience illustrates that adopting a gendered/social construction analysis of the problem of male violence can produce programs that in conception and implementation offer young male and female students empowering opportunities to take ownership of their own identity development. Our experience also illustrates that when given this opportunity in the kind of program that flows from the implementation of Standard One, young male students consistently seek to
construct respectful modes of being male for themselves.
Applying Standard One also ensures that program content and process takes individual change and community change dynamics seriously, and implements that change dynamic more ethically and safely. Using Standard One illustratively we have shown, with reference to two programs, a wide range of significant benefits which accrue to any program
developers and practitioners who decide to adopt the NASASV Standards. We believe the Standards warrant national promotion and adoption as the benchmark for all programs developed to address and change the root causes of male violence against women in our country.
