On being realistic about reducing the prevalence and impacts of youth sexual violence and abuse in two Australian Indigenous communities

Social interventions, like medical ones, can produce negative as well as positive outcomes. It is important for policy and practice to learn what works, what doesn’t work, and what produces unintended effects, for whom and in what contexts. This is the task of realist evaluation. The formulation and evaluation of programs aiming to deal with problems in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities face a number of practical, conceptual and methodological problems. Here, realist methods for the design and evaluation of promising programs from which transferable lessons can be derived are discussed in the context of an initiative aiming to reduce the prevalence and impacts of youth sexual violence and abuse. Tentative conclusions are drawn for what this might mean for programs targeting similar problems elsewhere. 7 Learning Communities International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts | Special Issue: Evaluation | Number 14 – September 2014 introduction and background Griffith Youth Forensic Service Neighbourhoods Project (GYFS-NP) aims to reduce the prevalence and impacts of youth sexual violence and abuse (YSVA) in two Australian communities – a remote Aboriginal community, and a culturally diverse suburban precinct within a regional city. It aims to do so by engaging closely with the local communities, measuring various aspects of the problem in a variety of ways, and developing, implementing and evaluating a suite of locally-tailored interventions. Because of the context-specific nature of the targeted problems, these particular interventions may not be directly transferrable to other sites or to other related social problems. At the same time, the project aims to develop and test an over-arching prevention model that is transferable to a wide variety of places, problems, and contexts. YSVA has emerged as a hitherto only partially recognised problem in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous)1 communities. It is experienced in remote communities as well as within communities embedded in towns and cities. It takes the form of rape, prostitution, ‘rough sex’ in which girls appear to be resigned to being treated as objects of sexual satisfaction to boys, inculcation of children into highly sexualised peer groups, sexual teasing, self-abuse, and inappropriate touching. The project whose evaluation is the concern of this paper began with an exploration of a range of data on the extent of YSVA in the project’s target areas, and particularly amongst the Indigenous people residing in these areas. Data were assembled going back for as long as a decade. Rates of pregnancy amongst young girls, sexually transmitted infections, and recorded sex offences were many times higher within the project’s target areas and amongst Indigenous residents than amongst the general population. Systematic observations were also made at key public locations within the project areas where it was thought that antisocial behaviour might be taking place, when it was deemed safe enough, not in the expectation that YSVA would be seen directly but to gauge the number and basic attributes of those present, what they were doing, and the presence or otherwise of formal and informal guardians. The project is led by psychologists based at Griffith University whose work has specialised in the assessment and treatment of court-referred youth sexual offenders. Work with these youth strongly suggested that the incidents coming to the attention of the authorities, particularly in the two target communities, represent only a small fraction of the total number of incidents occurring. Indeed it suggested that some forms of YSVA might be endemic in the two locations of concern (Smallbone & Rayment-McHugh, 2013). Following an earlier study that aimed to empirically examine the scope, dimensions and dynamics of YSVA in these two communities (Smallbone, Rayment-McHugh, & Smith, 2013a), Australian Government funding was secured to support a three-year program that would devise, deliver and evaluate strategies to reduce the extent and 1. We are mindful of sensitivities about terms used to refer to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We have used the term ‘Indigenous’ in this paper because it accords with references to policies and other documents. On being realistic about reducing the prevalence and impacts of youth sexual violence | Tilley