Importance of primary prevention

on sexual harassment and advocacy in Quezon City led to the enactment of a local law on sexual harassment in public spaces. Other initiatives in Quezon City included developing apps to address sexual harassment.

In order to comprehensively address GBV, prevention efforts need to go beyond secondary and tertiary prevention and address primary prevention. Primary prevention activities seek to prevent GBV before it occurs, while secondary prevention is the immediate response after violence occurs to manage the short-term consequences of violence. Tertiary prevention addresses the long-term responses to address the lasting consequences of violence. A core piece of secondary and tertiary prevention is service provision, which is why service provision must be coordinated with prevention activities.

Efforts to address GBV have primarily focused on strengthening access to justice and services, with less focus on prevention. However, programmes to prevent GBV have increased greatly in some of the focus countries, but much more investment is needed to comprehensively address GBV, particularly in complex contexts. For example, the number of GBV prevention programmes in PNG has significantly increased in the past decade, along with more widespread acceptance that GBV is preventable. Diverse actors are involved in the prevention of GBV, with significant investments in communitybased approaches, working with faithbased organizations, men, youth and the education sector. However, prevention is still the least developed and leastfunded sector, and very few evaluations exist on the effectiveness of primary prevention programmes that focus on social norms change. The dearth of evaluations of primary prevention efforts could be explained by the fact that the majority of prevention efforts are focused on awareness-raising. While important, prevention efforts must go beyond awareness to address social norms change. The Pacific Women Shaping Pacific Development programme has worked to develop evidence-based GBV prevention programmes in PNG.393 Many of these programmes are implemented by international NGOs, in partnership with local CSOs.

Several innovative social norms transformation programmes that seek to address GBV risks at different levels of society exist in PNG and have the potential to be taken to scale. For example, programmes such as the Community Trauma Healing Programme and the Gender Justice Programme (both led by Oxfam)394 and Komuniti Lukatim Ol Meri (led by FHI360),395 show promise in behaviour and social norms change at the community level. School-based interventions, such as Equal Playing Field’s sports-based respectful relationships programme, and UNFPA-supported Comprehensive Sexuality Education for in-school youth as well as Life Skills Education, seek to prevent childhood experiences of GBV. Informants shared how at a larger scale, a UN Women-supported youthled programme called Sanap Wantaim improves safety for women and girls in public transport through the Meri Seif Buses, and in markets through the Safe Cities programme. An adaptation of the SASA! programme, in addition to the UNICEF-led faith-based Parenting for