Campaigns to end VAW can take place over different periods of time. Those addressing an urgent, narrowly circumscribed cause may be short, running for just a few weeks or months. Those that seek to change social attitudes and practices should be of at least a medium duration, lasting up to 5 years, or long-term, sometimes stretching over an entire decade or more.
Example: An example of a long-term campaign is Freedom from Fear, launched in 1998 by the Western Australia Family and Domestic Violence Taskforce, a government body. The 10-year community education campaign accompanied criminal justice and other interventions that were integrated in a multi-pronged strategy to end VAW. Targeting perpetrators of domestic violence, it successfully encouraged violent men (or those with violent tendencies) to seek treatment for their behaviour by calling a dedicated “Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline”. In the first 21 months of the campaign over 6000 calls were received with a large proportion (64%) of those calling being men in the primary target group (ie.perpetrators or men 'at risk').
Read the Freedom from Fear mid-campaign assessment (2000) describing the research underpinning the campaign development and evaluation.
Example: An example of a short-term campaign is the ‘Know Your Power’ campaign, which the University of New Hampshire in the United States ran for two months in 2010, targeted at students on the college’s campus. The campaign used social marketing communication channels to focus on students’ roles as bystanders and how they could prevent or intervene in situations of sexual and intimate partner violence and stalking on campus. The channels used were considered the best means of catching the attention of students and generating campus-wide awareness in a short period of time. The Know Your Power campaign is the social marketing component of the university’s nationally known ‘Bringing in the Bystander’ violence prevention programme.
Visit the campaign website.
Read the campaign evaluation.