Countering Violence Against Women by Encouraging Disclosure: A Mass Media Experiment in Rural Uganda

Exposure to an anti-VAW media campaign had no effect on attitudes condoning VAW, but led to an increase in willingness to disclose VAW incidents, particularly among women, and a decline in the share of women experiencing VAW.

• Exposure to anti-VAW video vignettes failed to shift value judgments about VAW. (It had no impact on general attitudes about VAW or on support for gender equality.)
  • Both women and men who attended screenings with anti-VAW showed no differences in their general attitudes about VAW — including the legitimacy of husbands' grounds for hitting their wives, the degree of VAW victims' suffering, or the potential for initial acts of VAW to escalate — or in their support for gender equality.
• Exposure to anti-VAW video vignettes led to an increase in willingness to report VAW to community members and local authorities, particularly among women.
  • Women who attended screenings with anti-VAW messaging were 9-13 percentage points more likely to say they would report a hypothetical VAW incident to local authorities when compared to their control group peers. These effects were found in both the 2-month and the 8-month survey results.
  • Men who attended screenings with anti-VAW messaging were 2-4 percentage points more likely to say they would report a hypothetical VAW incident when compared to their control group peers.
• Exposure to anti-VAW video vignettes reduced concerns about negative social repercussions for reporting VAW incidents, and increased expectations that community members would intervene in an incident of violence.
  • Women who attended screenings with anti-VAW messaging were 11 percentage points less likely to expect to be scolded for gossiping, rather than validated for doing the right thing, if they were to report a hypothetical VAW incident. They were also 18% less likely to believe that they would face social sanctions for reporting incidents of VAW.
    • The reduction in expected social repercussions appears to center on reactions from the community at large; exposure to the anti-VAW video did not reduce respondents' fear that friends or family of an accused perpetrator would seek revenge.
  • Men who attended screenings with anti-VAW messaging were 4-5 percentage points more likely to report that they would intervene personally or mobilize others when they learned that a man was beating his partner.
  • Men and women who attended the anti-VAW screenings also became more likely to believe that their fellow community members would intervene to stop VAW.
• Exposure to anti-VAW video vignettes led to a decline in domestic violence.
  • Anti-VAW video screenings reduced the probability that women in a household experienced violence over a 6-month period by up to 5 percentage points, effectively preventing violence in 302 households.  
  • Anti-VAW video screenings reduced the community-level share of women respondents who reported any violence in their household by 7 percentage points.
  • Anti-VAW video screenings reduced the estimated frequency of VAW incidents, producing a 5 percentage point decrease in the predicted probability of a household experiencing violence less than once a month, about once a month, about once a week, or almost every day, as opposed to never.

It is possible to change outcomes by changing social norms (whether to report VAW incidents) without changing core attitudes (whether VAW is acceptable). These findings show that one pathway to violence reduction and increased reporting is to change the expectations about whether victims and witnesses will suffer negative social repercussions for disclosing incidents—without having to change their core values.

In this study, an anti-VAW media campaign consisting of three short video vignettes was screened during the intermission at film festivals held in rural Ugandan villages. The film festival was composed of six films shown one each week over consecutive weekends, from July 30 to September 4, 2016. To counter the perception that film halls are more appropriate for men, the film festival was explicitly marketed as an event open to both women and men. Ultimately, the media campaign was viewed by more than 10,000 Ugandan women and men across video halls in 112 villages.

Each anti-VAW vignette presented a self-contained fictional story that countered the idea that VAW allegations are based in gossip, and portrayed people reporting incidents and believing incident reports. They were designed to create realistic portrayals of situations familiar to the audience to facilitate vicarious learning: the vignettes were told in the local language (Luganda), composed by local screenwriters, and filmed on site.
The study evaluated the effects of these anti-VAW video dramatizations, as well as the effects of two other sets of video vignettes concerning either abortion stigma or teacher absenteeism. Participating villages were organized in 16 blocks of seven to minimize within-block variance, and then randomly assigned to screen either one set of video vignettes (e.g., anti-VAW), a combination of two sets of video vignettes (e.g., anti-VAW and teacher absenteeism), or a placebo (a Hollywood film).

To measure the anti-VAW videos' impact, the authors interviewed attendees at two different points in time: two months and eight months after the end of the campaign. The first survey in late October 2016 engaged 5,534 women and men from 110 of the 112 participating villages, with a response rate of 96 percent. The authors focused on respondents who attended at least one of the screenings. The second survey in late May 2017 re-engaged the same respondents who attended at least one screening, with a follow-up rate of 90 percent. The authors then compared responses from villages that were exposed to the anti-VAW messaging, whether alone or in conjunction with another kind of video, to the responses from villages not exposed to anti-VAW messaging.