Conclusions
violent
RECRUITMENT
The overarching objective of the EMAP program is to promote gender equality and reduce IPV in communities through building a cadre of male allies. The program was originally intended to include only non-violent men and to build their skills for championing gender equality and non-violence. However, given difficulties in screening for IPV perpetration as part of program recruitment criteria, particularly in settings with highly endemic violence such as eastern DRC, the program included a non-negligeable proportion of men who had used violence against their intimate partner. It is therefore critical to examine whether the program has differential impacts on men who were more or less violent at the start.In this paper, we show that the EMAP program was effective at reducing and stopping physical IPV among men who were most physically violent in the year before the start of the program, although these men were not the target population of the program. LCA identifies four distinct groups of couples based on female partners’ reports of experience of violence at baseline. The largest class include couples exposed to little to no violence in the 12 months preceding the baseline survey (70% of participants). Couples exposed to high levels of sexual and/or physical IPV were in the minority. This program composition may explain some of the results highlighted in this paper.This study has a number of limitations. Firstly, several of the subgroups obtained through the LCA are small, leading to a loss in statistical power to detect differences between groups. In addition, and as already noted in Vaillant et al. [Research on the effects of social norms at the individual level focuses on the influence of both descriptive social norms (defined as the perceived prevalence of a behavior), and injunctive social norms (defined as the acceptability of the behavior) [While we do not have a direct measure of perceived norms, the baseline measures of behaviors and attitudes suggest that EMAP participants regarded only low levels of IPV as common and acceptable. The results presented in this paper suggest that men who were using higher than average levels of violence were encouraged by the program to reduce the severity of the violence that they perpetrate. In contrast, there was no impact of the program on the prevention, cessation, or reduction of physical or sexual violence among couples exposed to little or no IPV in the year before baseline. On the contrary, the analysis suggests that the program may have had unintended negative effects on couples who were not exposed to physical IPV before the start of the intervention, as the program led to increases in severity of physical violence among those couples. In sum, EMAP seems to have affected the behavior of men who had used higher than average levels of violence in the year before baseline but did not positively affect the behavior of men whose actions seemed to be in line with existing group norms.These results suggest that social learning took place within the EMAP groups. Men whose baseline use of violence was above average may have learned that their behavior was inconsistent with the preferences or actions of others in their EMAP group. Alternatively, the group discussions may have caused shifts in their expectations about the likelihood or gravity of sanctions for their non-normative behavior. These same processes could also explain the slight increase in the use of violence among men who were perpetrating little to no violence at baseline if those men learned that some levels of violence are unlikely to lead to social sanctions. These mechanisms of impact should be investigated in future studies. If these hypothesized mechanisms do, in fact, play a role in promoting change, then the composition of discussion groups will be a critical feature of program design. Groups that are comprised of both more and less violent men may be important for encouraging progress among “outlier” men using violence levels above the group norm. Furthermore, as noted by Gibbs et al. [The findings have two important implications for future research. First, studies focusing on measuring only cessation of IPV are likely to miss important changes in the severity of violence. Estimating reduction in severity of IPV should be systematically performed when there is reason to believe that a program cannot realistically achieve a normative shift to a new consensus of zero tolerance for violence within the study timeframe. Second, given the possibility for heterogeneous impacts of interventions such as the EMAP that rely on group interactions, it is important for researchers to plan for such analyses at the design phase. Limited sample size and related lack of statistical power has been a recurrent issue in the studies of violence prevention. This means that sample sizes should be sufficiently large to detect changes in subgroups, rather than only average changes in the treatment group.It is also important to note that the program was not as successful at addressing sexual IPV than physical IPV, despite both types of violence being addressed in the program content. There are several possible explanations for the mixed effects on levels of sexual violence. First, because sexual violence often occurs in private and is not observable, the behavior may be more weakly influenced by the potential for social sanctions [This analysis of the heterogeneous impacts of the EMAP program shows that in contexts of endemic violence, programs like EMAP can lead to a meaningful short-term reduction in harm to women, perhaps even without transforming prevailing norms about male superiority or the acceptability of IPV. While a fundamental shift in gender relations is an essential goal for the promotion of gender equality and women’s rights, it is important to measure shorter-term improvements as well. Careful analysis of incremental changes can also be useful for learning about how best to promote systemic transformative change in the future.