What to Evaluate

Evaluation can be daunting, but keep in mind that asking any questions about the effectiveness of the strategy you have employed is exponentially better than not asking questions at all, and even a few simple questions can provide valuable insights into increasing the effectiveness of your strategy.

Some key questions that can be evaluated

  • Have participants deepened their awareness and understanding of the topic? Has knowledge been gained?
  • Have participants expanded their vocabulary to discuss the issues across disciplines and through the campus community?
  • Have participants developed additional resources/skills they can use to address the issues? e.g., How to intervene? How to ask for consent?
  • Do participants perceive the intervention to have been effective?
  • Have participant’s attitudes changed? Has participating in the strategy resulted in their challenging social norms around gender-based sexual violence?
  • Can participants recommend ways in which the intervention can be improved to increase potential effectiveness?
  • Do participants view the interventions as having potential to change behaviors?

Potential goals that can be evaluated

Some strategies clearly target attitudes, some target behaviors and some target both while other strategies have been shown to be ineffective at impacting either attitudes or behavior. It’s important to keep in mind that changing people’s attitudes doesn’t necessarily result in a change in their behavior.

Much of the work around evaluation of strategy is based on the premise that identifying effective strategies for preventing sexual violence perpetration is the ultimate goal of sexual violence prevention efforts. However, through the course of our work on campuses it became evident that there can often be other important interrelated goals that support prevention efforts.

1. Changing
attitudes
and creating
culture shifts

  • Strategies that comprehensively address social norms, attitudes and behaviors,
  • Provide education about gender-roles,
  • Provide education about toxic masculinity, toxic feminity, and addressing rape myths and rape culture
  • Increase understandings about what constitutes sexual violence,
  • Educate about how gender-based sexual violence is manifested from acquaintance rape to the role of gender-based sexual cyberviolence,
  • Provide education about intimate partner violence and teen dating violence, increasing understanding(s) regarding consent or building relationship skills

2. Creating a safer
campus environment

  • Identifying and addressing risk factors such as unsafe campus spaces,
  • Increasing security and making the campus security accessible to students
  • Educating campus security on trauma-informed survivor-centered, intersectional approaches,
  • Increasing understanding(s) of possible risk factors, such as the role of alcohol consumption in sexual violence (both for perpetrators and potential targets),
  • Encouraging bystander interventions through peer-to-peer training and skills building

3. Embedding strategy and evaluation
in pedagogy and curriculums throughout the campus

  • Integrating understandings of the macro forces that generate systems reinforcing exclusion and violence such as social forces, economics, globalization, patriarchy, colonization, the immigration system, the legal system, into course requirements across disciplines.
  • Acknowledging the types of discrimination such as heterosexism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, ethnocentrism, ableism,classism, amongst other forms of discrimination, that can be key in influencing the ways in which individuals experience gender-based sexual violence on campus and influence the specific responses required.
  • Consulting a range of individuals, student groups and campus organizations about the ways in which their individual needs can be best served through strategy and policy.