Achieving social change on gender-based violence: A report on the impact evaluation of Soul City's fourth series

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.04.035

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 61, Issue 11, December 2005, Pages 2434-2445

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.04.035 Get rights and content

Abstract

The Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication—a South African multi-media health promotion project—together with the National Network on Violence Against Women, formulated an intervention to address domestic violence. Recognising that behavioural change interventions aimed solely at individuals have limited impact, the intervention was designed to impact at multiple mutually reinforcing levels; individual, community and socio-political environment. The intervention and its evaluation results are presented. Soul City successfully reached 86%, 25% and 65% of audiences through television, print booklets and radio, respectively. On an individual level there was a shift in knowledge around domestic violence including 41% of respondents hearing about the helpline. Attitude shifts were also associated with the intervention, with a 10% increase in respondents disagreeing that domestic violence was a private affair. There was also a 22% shift in perceptions of social norms on this issue. Qualitative data analysis suggests the intervention played a role in enhancing women's and communities’ sense of efficacy, enabling women to make more effective decisions around their health and facilitating community action. The evaluation concluded that implementation of the Domestic Violence Act can largely be attributed to the intervention. While demonstrating actual reductions in levels of domestic violence was not possible, the evaluation shows a strong association between exposure to intervention components and a range of intermediary factors indicative of, and necessary to bring about social change. This paper reports on the evaluation, discusses its limitations and challenges as well as lessons learned regarding multi-level interventions on domestic violence.

Section snippets

Background—domestic violence in South Africa

Domestic violence is described as endemic to South Africa. A 2003 antenatal survey in one city found 38% of women had experienced domestic violence at some point in their lives; 35% of women during their current pregnancy (Mbokota & Moodley, 2004). A prevalence study across three of nine provinces found that 9.5% of women had been physically abused in the previous year. In one province 28.4% of women reported ever being physically abused, and over 50% of women reported of emotional abuse in the

Introduction—the Soul City/NNVAW partnership for social change

The Soul City vehicle is developed by the Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communication (SC: IHDC)—a South African NGO utilising mass media for social change. The vehicle consists of prime time radio and television dramas and print material. It uses edutainment, where social issues are integrated into entertainment formats, which has been shown to be a powerful mechanism to achieve social change objectives. Through drama Soul City is able to reach prime time audiences, and

Demographic profile of the national survey samples

Table 2 shows that the sociodemographic characteristics of the samples were very similar for the baseline ( $n = 1979$ ) and follow-up survey ( $n = 1981$ ).

About 48% of the respondents lived in rural areas, 52% resided in urban and metropolitan communities. 90% were African with the remainder of the sample “Coloured” (10%). There was a 2–1 ratio of women to men. 66% of respondents were between 16 and 35, while 34% were 35 and older. Over 50% had completed at least a secondary education. As a general rule,

Knowledge

There is an association between exposure to SC4 media and increased knowledge of where to find support. Eight months after it had been established, 41% of respondents nationally had heard of the Helpline. This is entirely attributed to the SC4/NNVAW intervention as the line was established specifically for this purpose. 16% of people with no exposure to SC4 compared to 61% of respondents with exposure to 3 SC4 media knew about the Helpline ( $p ⩽ 0.05$ ). Men and women with high exposure to SC4 print

Attitude

Attitudinal change across a number of items is associated with exposure to SC4 media (see Table 5). Fifty-six percent of respondents pre-intervention disagreed that domestic violence is a private affair compared to 66% post-intervention. 60% of those exposed to three types of SC4 and 77% of those not exposed felt that domestic violence is a private affair ( $p ⩽ 0.05$ ).

A positive attitudinal shift was found on the item “As head of the household, a man has the right to beat a woman” but it was not

Behaviours

In the post-intervention survey, 8% of respondents reported experience of domestic violence in response to the item “have you or anyone close to you been abused physically or emotionally by their husband or boyfriend”. SC4 exposure is associated with support-seeking behaviour around domestic violence—with regards to contacting a support organisation, and using the Helpline: none of the respondents with no exposure to SC4 contacted a support organisation, 5% of respondents with exposure to three

Discussion

In a thorough literature review, no available evaluations of local or international interventions of this magnitude were found to serve as a yardstick for assessing the comparative success of the SC4 intervention.

The study shows a consistent association between SC4 and positive change.

The use of cross-sectional surveys of different samples (i.e. the absence of longitudinal data on the same respondents) limits the ability to argue causality since other factors may account for changes observed

Conclusion

The SC4 evaluation pointed to the value of a partnership model combining the social mobilising capabilities of organisations on the ground with the clout of large scale mass media interventions. This, together with the success of the advocacy campaign resulted in the formalisation of partner social mobilisation and advocacy strategies into the organisation's work. The strategy of edutainment was also shown to be an important mechanism for social change.

Despite its limitations, the evaluation

Acknowledgements

•
“An Evaluation of SC4” conducted by CASE: T. Samuels, J. Mollentz, R. Olusanya, M. Claassdens, S. Braehmenr and Z. Kimmie.
•
“Impact Evaluation of SC4 in partnership with the NNVAW” conducted by Women's Health Project: N.J. Christofides.
•
“SC4: Sentinel Site Study” conducted by Social Surveys: Katharine Hall and Karen Daniels.
•
Media monitoring and analysis and interviews with journalists for the Partnership Evaluation Study, conducted by Khosi Xaba, Mweru Mwingi and Irene Muriuki.
•
Dhaval Patel:

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