Page 62 - Violence Prevention Through the Engagement of Violence Producers

EFFECTIVENESS OF THE VIOLENCE INTERRUPTION PROGRAMME

dead”, “reparation time”), further work needs to be done to dissect these hindering norms

in order to arrive at implementable measures to address them along with the relevant
evaluation mechanisms. Barrier analysis identifies the helping norms (motivators) so that,

like the protective factors in youth violence risk assessment, maximum use of them can
be made in a VIP. A VIP should benefit from a study akin to the one conducted by the

Violence Prevention Alliance for the CSJP III which focussed on the values and norms of
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young persons (13 to 29 years old) that support violence. It is therefore necessary that a

VIP includes training that will allow the programme to design and implement behaviour
change activities.

A very strong positive of the norm changing component of the VIP as implemented by the

PMI is the recognition that norm changing is best when driven internally. Accordingly, the
engagement of high-risk young persons from the relevant communities in the design and

delivery of norm changing activities has always been a practice in the VIP. Critical in norm
changing is duration and it has been suggested by the Violence Prevention Alliance
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that norm changing messages and actions should be sustained for a minimum of twelve
months but a comprehensive norm changing plan should go beyond five years. The

limitations of the VIP in this regard is clear as either from resource constraint or contract
administration issues, the PMI was not able to have sustained norm changing activities in

the communities. The importance of inter-agency collaboration is also critical and here
again, the VIP did not benefit from strong inter-agency working.

It is therefore concluded that this very critical aspect of the VIP did not perform as expected,

in spite of the fact that those expectations were ill-informed. The VIP norm-changing
activities barely scratched the surface and lacked sustainability. The absence of a well-

designed programme including baseline, targeting and evaluation mechanism was at
the root of this limitation. It is therefore recommended that a VIP should be supported to

have a robust design of the norm-changing component of the programme along with the
requisite training.

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49 Violence Prevention Alliance 2019
50 Ibid

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