Leveraging Faith Communities to Prevent Violence against Women: Lessons from the Implementation and Delivery of the Motivating Action through Empowerment (MATE) Program

Karen Pearce (), Erika Borkoles and Sharyn Rundle-Thiele
Additional contact information
Karen Pearce: School of Medicine and Dentistry, Griffith University, Southport, QLD 4222, Australia
Erika Borkoles: School of Medicine and Dentistry, Griffith University, Southport, QLD 4222, Australia
Sharyn Rundle-Thiele: Social Marketing @ Griffith, Griffith University, Nathan, QLD 4111, Australia

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: Gender-based violence is a human rights and public health issue, disproportionately affecting women. The Motivating Action Through Empowerment (MATE) bystander program aims to address violence against women by shifting focus from perpetrators and victims of violence to community responsibility for not accepting attitudes and behaviors that support or allow the violence to occur. Traditionally bystander programs have been delivered through institutions, most notably college campuses in the United States. The translation of bystander programs to community settings is not widely reported. This research aimed to understand whether a violence prevention program could be effectively delivered in a faith community setting; specifically, it focuses on the implementation of MATE in a Christian church network in the Gold Coast region of Queensland, Australia. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten church-based trainers in the MATE pilot program. Theoretically informed analysis using the COM-B behavior model identified that environmental factors had a large bearing on opportunities to deliver MATE workshops. This research identified six key lessons for MATE and other programs wishing to leverage faith communities: (1) Provide religious context; (2) Accommodate diversity; (3) Build faith leader capacity; (4) Employ social marketing; (5) Undertake co-design; (6) Actively administer, measure and monitor.

Keywords: violence against women; domestic violence; violence prevention; bystander approach; train-the-trainer; faith community; community intervention; COM-B model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/23/15833/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/23/15833/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:23:p:15833-:d:986496

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().