Women’s health Goulburn North East community crime prevention plan – regional preventing violence against women and children strategy: summative evaluation report from the external evaluator, February 2016

This report presents the external evaluation of the Hume Regional Preventing Violence Against Women Strategy. This is one of 12 projects funded by the Department of Justice and Regulation in Victoria under its initiative to support primary prevention and early intervention-focused partnership projects that seek to prevent violence before it occurs or address the key contributing factors of violence against women and their children. The focus is on changing behaviours and attitudes that allow violence against women and children to continue. The lead agency in the project was Women’s Health Goulburn North East (WHGNE).

The Hume regional strategy
The focus of the project was to develop and implement a coordinated regional strategy that addresses the determinants of violence against women and builds the capacity of communities to take action to prevent such violence. At the outset it was envisaged that a key component of the strategy would be to undertake preventive activities that respond to identified gaps in the region.

The first version of the strategy was completed in September 2013 and formally launched in November 2013. In October 2013, Courageous Conversations was identified as the brand to be used for activities in the strategy, including a charter and other resources. As the project evolved, the strategy was revised to reflect differing levels of engagement and progress with the different parts of the work and to identity explicitly the activities associated with the brand. A revised version of the regional strategy was produced in September 2014, with four aims:
•tpromoting equal and respectful relationships between men and women;
•tworking across local government, workplaces and sporting settings to coordinate a region-wide approach to preventing violence against women;
•tbringing about structural and systemic organisational change to promote gender equitable and non-violent cultures;
•tbuild the capacity of leaders in preventing violence against women.

Different components of the activities carried out under the strategy included: partnership and capacity building; building gender equity in organisations; gender equity and masculinities training; bystander training; knowledge dissemination and the Courageous Conversations website.