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

• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Donald P. Green,Jasper Cooper,Anna M. Wilke
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912275
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020912275

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(14) 2283 –2320

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020912275

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Article

Countering Violence

Against Women by

Encouraging Disclosure:

A Mass Media

Experiment in Rural

Uganda

Donald P. Green1, Anna M. Wilke1,

and Jasper Cooper2

Abstract

Violence against women (VAW) is widespread in East Africa, with almost half

of married women experiencing physical abuse. Those seeking to address

this issue confront two challenges: some forms of domestic violence are

widely condoned and it is the norm for witnesses to not report incidents.

Building on a growing literature showing that education-entertainment can

change norms and behaviors, we present experimental evidence from a

media campaign attended by more than 10,000 Ugandans in 112 rural villages.

In randomly assigned villages, video dramatizations discouraged VAW and

encouraged reporting. Results from interviews conducted several months

after the intervention show no change in attitudes condoning VAW yet a

substantial increase in willingness to report to authorities, especially among

women, and a decline in the share of women who experienced violence. The

theoretical implication is that interventions that affect disclosure norms may

reduce socially harmful behavior even if they do not reduce its acceptability.

1Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

2University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Donald P. Green, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, 712 International Affairs

Building, New York, NY 10027, USA.

Email: dpg2110@columbia.edu

912275CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020912275Comparative Political StudiesGreen et al.

research-article2020

2284 Comparative Political Studies 53(14)

Keywords

African politics, experimental research

Introduction

Thirty-five percent of women worldwide have experienced physical or sex-

ual violence by an intimate partner or nonpartner sexual violence (World

Health Organization [WHO] 2013). Permissive attitudes toward such vio-

lence are widespread in many contexts, among both women and men. As with

other socially harmful behaviors, prominent attempts to counter violence

against women (VAW) aim at changing people’s views on whether it is

acceptable to engage in such behavior.1

Social psychologists, however, have long suggested that value judgments

are deeply rooted (Staats, 1967) and slow to change (Doob, 1947). Indeed,

recent evidence suggests that shifting attitudes around social issues can be dif-

ficult. Scacco and Warren (2018), for example, find that an intervention

designed to foster positive social contact between Christians and Muslims in

Nigeria did not reduce prejudicial attitudes. Similarly, Paluck (2009) and

Paluck and Green (2009) find that an ethnic reconciliation soap opera in

Rwanda had little effects on intergroup attitudes. And although there is some

evidence that NGO-led campaigns that involve extensive on-the-ground

mobilization efforts may succeed in reducing the acceptance of VAW (e.g.,

Abramsky et al., 2014, 2016), such multifaceted campaigns are prohibitively

expensive to bring to scale in developing regions. In a pilot study (Green et al.,

2016), we found no evidence that a lighter touch intervention in the form of

education-entertainment videos that portrayed VAW as unacceptable altered

viewers’ attitudes toward such violence.

Socially harmful behaviors arise as a result of a combination of factors that

may include permissive attitudes but also strategic considerations. As a conse-

quence, changing attitudes may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condi-

tion for changing behavior. Some of the interventions mentioned above, for

example, were successful at curbing socially harmful behaviors, despite their

failure to change attitudes. We distinguish between attitudes, which are rooted

in moral value judgments, on one hand, and perceptions of norms, in the form

of expectations about the behavior of others, on the other hand. The conviction

that it is morally unacceptable to beat one’s wife, for example, is distinct from

the expectation that the victim will not report the violence to the authorities.

In this article, we focus on expectations around disclosure as an alternative

lever to prevent socially harmful behavior. Many harmful practices are observ-

able only for the individuals directly involved and, possibly, a small number of

bystanders. This problem is especially severe for VAW, which typically

Green et al. 2285

happens in the home. Even in a context where communities and authorities see

violence as unacceptable and would sanction perpetrators or otherwise inter-

vene, they will be incapable of doing so if victims and bystanders do not come

forward. Ethnographic and survey evidence suggests that women in East Africa

and beyond are reluctant to report experiences of violence (McCleary-Sills

et al., 2016). We show that such reluctance may be linked to the expectation of

ostracism by a community that, though opposed to certain forms of violence,

tends to be skeptical of witnesses’ motivation for coming forward. One alterna-

tive pathway to violence reduction, therefore, is to reduce expectations about

whether victims and bystanders will face social sanctions for coming forward,

so as to encourage disclosure of violent incidents.

To understand whether expectations around disclosure are amenable to

change through interventions that can be scaled easily, we designed an exper-

iment in rural Uganda. In light of recent randomized trials on the topics of

corruption (Blair et al., 2019), HIV (Banerjee et al., 2019b), and ethnic con-

flict (Paluck & Green, 2009), mass media dramatizations of social problems,

or “education-entertainment,” are believed to be a promising and scalable

way to bring about normative and behavioral change. We present new experi-

mental evidence illustrating mass media’s potential as well as its limitations.

Ugandan villagers were exposed to a placebo-controlled education-entertain-

ment campaign designed to convince audiences that VAW is deplorable and

to encourage viewers to speak out if they see it. The campaign comprised 670

film screenings in 112 villages, attended by more than 10,000 adults. We

measure outcomes through seemingly unrelated surveys conducted 2 and 8

months after the conclusion of the media campaign.

Our video intervention had no statistically significant effect on general

attitudes about VAW, such as whether husbands ever have legitimate grounds

for hitting their wives. At the same time, we do find substantial changes in

expectations around disclosure and respondents’ willingness to report VAW

to formal or informal authorities. In the control group, almost two thirds of

women believed they would face social sanctions for reporting incidents of

VAW; our campaign reduced this belief by 18%. Women became substan-

tially more willing to report incidents of VAW to local authorities and agents

of the state, as well as to family members. Moreover, men and women became

more likely to believe that their fellow community members would intervene

to stop VAW. In the communities where we screened our anti-VAW cam-

paign, this apparent erosion of a norm against speaking out coincided with a

decrease in violence: We estimate the probability that women in a household

experienced violence over a 6-month period following our films decreased

by five percentage points, effectively preventing violence in hundreds of

households. The theoretical implication is that it is possible to bring about a