Gender-Based Violence and HIV: Technical Brief

Produced by the AIDSTAR-One project for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), this brief is designed to assist in designing, planning, and implementing activities that integrate gender-based violence (GBV) and HIV prevention, treatment and care, and support programmes. It features a GBV/HIV Program Implementer's Wheel (pictured on page 2), which is a model that summarises the strategies and activities discussed most often in the literature as necessary for an effective response to mitigate GBV with particular attention to the context of HIV programmes. This model includes the following:

• Multi-sectorial approaches that integrate across justice, health, education, economic, social service, and other sectors (the two outer rings of the Wheel);
• Strategies for multi-level impact at the individual, family, service provider/organisation, community, and national levels, framed by an enabling environment that includes political will, financial commitment, capacity building, advocacy, changing gender norms, and challenging stigma (inner circles of the Wheel);
• Multiple interventions (spokes of the Wheel), including a human rights framework that includes: developing laws, policies, and programming; promoting women's economic security; empowering girls and women; challenging gender norms, roles, and behaviours; providing life skills education; providing services for survivors of GBV; training health care workers, counsellors, police, and others; using mass media; increasing community awareness, outreach, and mobilisation; and providing face-to-face education.

The Wheel, which is designed to help programme implementers identify strengths as well as gaps within a particular social context for addressing GBV and HIV, uses an ecological model that considers multi-level causes of GBV (including individual, contextual, institutional, and macro-systemic causes), theories about the central role gender constructs and power relationships play in perpetuating GBV, social cognitive theory that demonstrates the role of individual and collective efficacy (the ability to reach goals and create change) in achieving transformation of gender norms, and an understanding that multiple interventions are needed.

Drawing on this Wheel, the remainder of the resource: identifies programme considerations, describes mechanisms for multi-level impact, explores key intervention strategies, outlines challenges, and offers links to various resources. Text boxes provide examples from specific communication-centred GBV and HIV campaigns/initiatives around the world.