Prevention Is Not Awareness Raising: Strategic Thinking About What Actually Prevents Violence

Reviewing Prevention and Response Plans, we see a pattern: strong(ish) response processes, detailed support services, comprehensive complaints procedures—and under "prevention," a list of awareness campaigns, bystander training, and consent workshops.

As if raising awareness about violence is the same as preventing it.

After a decade in primary prevention across UK and Australian universities, here's what I know: if your prevention strategy is "educate people about the problem," you don't have a prevention strategy. You have a communications plan.

What Primary Prevention Actually Means

The National Code's regulatory guidance is explicit about this: "Prevention work encompasses primary prevention, which addresses the factors that drive and contribute to gender-based violence through whole-of-population initiatives that shift attitudes, norms, practices, structures and power imbalances to stop violence from occurring in the first place" (National Code Regulatory Guidance, pg. 24). 

Read that again: shift attitudes, norms, practices, structures, and power imbalances. Not just tell people these things exist. Not just raise awareness that they're problematic. Actually, shift them.

Primary prevention operates at multiple levels: individual and relationship, organisational and community, system and institutional, and societal. The Educating for Equality framework, developed specifically for higher education, emphasises that "effective prevention requires an inclusive approach which involves engaging and collaborating with people from all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds, and of all races, ages, religions, and abilities". This isn't about delivering the same prevention program to everyone—it's about understanding different contexts, addressing specific barriers, and recognising diverse experiences of violence.

What the Plans Are Missing: Systemic Risk, Enablers, and Barriers

Standard 1.4 of the National Code requires institutions to conduct "a Whole-of-Organisation assessment identifying systemic risks, enablers and barriers centred on preventing and responding to gender-based violence" (Proposed National Code, 2025). This requirement appears in almost every Plan we review. What's often missing is evidence of deep, strategic thinking about what those risks, enablers, and barriers actually are.

·       Systemic risks aren't just individual risk factors like alcohol consumption or social isolation. They're patterns in organisational systems and processes that create conditions for violence. The UCL Centre for Behaviour Change research identified organisational factors, including performance culture, power imbalances, inadequate people-management skills, poor role modelling by leaders, and a lack of accountability mechanisms, as systemic risks for sexual misconduct in universities (UCL, 2018).

·       Enablers are factors that facilitate positive change, including existing resources, supportive policies, engaged leadership, strong relationships with student groups, established reporting mechanisms, and cultural competency within specific communities. Understanding enablers helps institutions leverage what's working rather than starting from scratch.

·       Barriers to effective prevention and response include resource constraints, siloed departments, competing institutional priorities, scepticism about prevention work, a lack of diversity in decision-making, institutional defensiveness, and inadequate data collection. Honesty about naming barriers is essential for developing realistic strategies to address them.

Yet many Plans read as if barriers don't exist, as if enablers are unlimited, and as if systemic risks can be addressed through awareness campaigns. This isn't strategic prevention planning—it's wishful thinking.

From an Intersectional Lens: Whose Safety Gets Prevented?

Prevention planning that doesn't account for intersectional differences in risk, barriers, and enablers will fail the students and staff most impacted by violence. The regulatory guidance is clear: "Intersectional practice is essential. Approaches to preventing and responding to gender-based violence must recognise that the impact of unsafe and disrespectful behaviour can be compounded by people's experience of different forms of discrimination and inequality" (Regulatory Guidance, 2025, p. 34).

For First Nations students and staff, prevention requires addressing colonial violence, systemic racism, and intergenerational trauma that compound experiences of gender-based violence. Generic bystander programs that don't acknowledge these contexts, or prevention campaigns that use imagery and language not co-designed with First Nations communities, are unlikely to prevent violence or build trust.

For international students, barriers to prevention include visa-related fears about reporting, language access limitations, cultural concepts of shame and family honour, unfamiliarity with Australian systems, and isolation from support networks. Prevention strategies need to address these specific barriers—through multilingual resources, culturally appropriate messaging, assurances of visa protection, and partnerships with international student support services.

For LGBTIQA+ students and staff, prevention must address specific forms of violence, including identity-based harassment, minority stress, discrimination in relationships and social spaces, and lack of inclusive representation in prevention messaging. Our Watch's Pride in Prevention framework emphasises that prevention for LGBTIQA+ communities requires "challenging rigid gender norms and heteronormativity" and "promoting equal recognition and celebration of LGBTIQ bodies, identities and relationships" (Pride in Prevention, 2017). This means prevention content that assumes heterosexual relationships or binary gender won't prevent violence for LGBTIQA+ communities.

For students and staff with disability, prevention requires accessibility not as an afterthought but as a core design principle, recognition of higher rates of violence against people with disability, addressing ableism as a driver of violence, and ensuring communication about safety doesn't rely solely on visual or auditory channels.

The Speaking from Experience Report documents that "women, people with disabilities, young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people with innate variations of sex characteristics, and people with minority sexual orientations and gender identities are significantly more likely than others to be harassed" (AHRC, 2024, p. 24). Prevention strategies that don't specifically address why these groups experience higher rates of violence—and design targeted interventions to address those underlying drivers—aren't actually preventing violence for the people most at risk.

Behavioural Science: Beyond Education

The COM-B model for behaviour change offers strategic prevention tools. For any behaviour—harmful or prosocial—people need Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation. All three must be present.

Awareness campaigns address only one small part: knowledge (capability). Strategic prevention addresses all three systematically.

The UCL research found capability gaps, including "lack of skills in navigating complex social situations, limited understanding of power dynamics, insufficient knowledge about what constitutes misconduct" (UCL, 2018). These can't be fixed with posters.

When considering how to address opportunity at the systems level, physical opportunity includes environmental design factors such as social spaces, alcohol policies, lighting, and accessibility. Whereas, Social opportunity includes peer norms, leadership modelling, visible accountability, and cultural narratives. When examining staff-to-student sexual misconduct, "Organisational factors, such as performance culture, power imbalances, inadequate people management skills, created opportunities for misconduct" (UCL, 2018).

Motivation includes both reflective (beliefs and intentions) and automatic (emotions and habits) factors. Changing automatic motivation requires repetition, social reinforcement, and environmental cues—not one-off education.

This means understanding what changes behaviour, not just what increases knowledge.

What Strategic Prevention Planning Looks Like

Strategic prevention planning starts with honest assessment: What are the actual drivers of violence in our context? What organisational conditions enable harm? What barriers prevent help-seeking or intervention? What resources and partnerships could we leverage? Who experiences disproportionate risk and why?

Addressing Capability Through Sustained Education

Instead of one-off bystander training sessions for new students, strategic prevention builds capability across the student lifecycle through:

• Integrated prevention content in orientation, academic programs, leadership development, and residential life programming

• Skills-based training that includes practice, feedback, and progressive complexity

• Different approaches for different contexts—prevention in STEM fields looks different from prevention in residential colleges, which looks different from prevention in postgraduate research environments

• Specific content for student leaders, residential advisors, club executives, and other students in positions of influence

• Trauma-informed approaches that recognise many students have experienced violence and design education that doesn't require disclosure or re-traumatisation

Addressing Opportunity Through Environmental and Cultural Change

Instead of safety campaigns telling students to "stay aware," strategic prevention changes environmental and social conditions:

• Designing social spaces and events with safety considered from the outset, not as an afterthought

• Regulating (not just restricting) alcohol in ways that reduce harm while respecting student autonomy

• Creating multiple, accessible, visible pathways for help-seeking and disclosure

• Implementing transparent accountability mechanisms when harm occurs

• Building peer cultures that normalise intervention, support, and calling out harmful behaviour

• Addressing power imbalances in supervisory relationships, teaching contexts, and institutional hierarchies

• Ensuring accessibility is embedded throughout all spaces and programs

From an intersectional perspective, this requires different environmental considerations for other communities. For First Nations students, creating a connection to culture, Country, and community is a protective factor. For international students, building culturally diverse student communities and addressing isolation are priorities, creating explicitly inclusive and affirming spaces where diverse identities are celebrated. For students with disabilities, ensuring full accessibility enables participation in community life and fosters connection and safety.

Addressing Motivation Through Leadership, Accountability, and Culture Change

Instead of campaigns telling individuals to "respect each other," strategic prevention addresses motivation through:

• Visible leadership commitment demonstrated through resource allocation, not just statements

• Consistent, transparent accountability when harm occurs—showing that institutional values are backed by action

• Positive cultural narratives about gender equality, respectful relationships, and consent as normal expectations

• Recognition and reinforcement when people demonstrate intervention, support, or allyship

• Addressing institutional defensiveness and reputation management that undermines prevention

• Building emotional capacity for discomfort—being willing to have difficult conversations, acknowledge institutional failures, and prioritise safety over comfort

From our experience, trust is built through transparency, not defensiveness. It cannot be assumed; it must be earned. Motivation to engage in prevention increases when institutions demonstrate trustworthiness through transparent, accountable, and student-centred responses.

What Needs to Change

·       Move beyond listing activities to analysing needs. What drives violence in your context? What creates opportunity for harm? What capability gaps exist?

·       Conduct genuine whole-of-organisation assessments. Surface uncomfortable truths about culture, power dynamics, and systemic inequities.

·       Design prevention using evidence. Base decisions on what changes behaviour, not assumptions.

·       Centre intersectional analysis. Design with communities, not for them. Resource partnerships and culturally responsive practice.

·       Connect prevention to broader institutional change. Prevention that addresses gender norms and power imbalances contributes beyond violence prevention alone.

·       Build in evaluation from the start. Standard 3.6 requires evidence-based, evaluated prevention. Assess actual behaviour change, not just awareness.

·       Resource appropriately. Transforming culture requires sustained investment in expertise, staffing, partnerships, evaluation, and infrastructure.

The Path Forward

Building prevention capacity takes time. Be honest: acknowledge what's realistic in the first cycle, what requires longer investment, and how you'll build capacity over time. A modest but strategic plan addressing actual drivers beats an ambitious plan disconnected from evidence.

Prevention is a strategic, evidence-informed, intersectional transformation that addresses systemic conditions. It's challenging work requiring expertise, resources, and commitment. But it's achievable. The first guiding principle of the National Code states that preventing gender-based violence is achievable with proactive, coordinated action (Regulatory Guidance, 2025).

Let's plan for that prevention strategically, not settle for awareness-raising. If you would like support for universities or workplace prevention work, please get in touch.