Step 5: Implement, follow up and disseminate
In the fifth and final step, you implement the work, follow up on its progress and spread your knowledge and experience. The final step means creating long-term sustainability for violence prevention work.
You will now turn the shared vision you have formulated into a set of measurable goals that can be followed up and achieved in the foreseeable future. But real change takes time.
Violence prevention is likely to lead to more violence being detected. It is important that no resources are shifted away from victim support and to your new initiatives.
Implementing a violence prevention process usually takes several years, and it can be costly (but violence is always more costly), requiring a supportive organisation, effective leadership and skills development for those who will apply the work daily. Therefore, it is important to think long-term from the start, and to update existing and relevant policy documents for your goals and activities.
Violence prevention is likely to lead to more violence being detected. It is important that no resources are shifted away from victim support and to your new initiatives, but that you ensure that initiatives are made at several levels simultaneously.
Although most agree that violence prevention is a good investment, since the cost of violence is so high both in money and in personal suffering, this work is still being developed, both in Sweden and around the world. Therefore, more knowledge is needed. Whatever level you have chosen, you must compile and document your work. This data allows you to follow up and evaluate the interventions in your organisation, but also enables a wider dissemination of knowledge for other actors planning violence prevention work.
Follow-up can be done in several ways:
- A production follow-up examines the extent to which planned initiatives have been implemented, such as the number of classes on violence and gender.
- A process follow-up reviews how the work has been implemented. Has the purpose of the collaboration been achieved? What resources have been allocated and used?
- An impact follow-up examines whether the work has affected the problem that the intervention was intended to address. This type of follow-up normally involves taking measurements both before and after an intervention.
Build on the interventions you have performed so far by creating a clear process for supporting the implementation of new approaches and methods over time, and by sharing your experience and results with others to contribute to common knowledge development in the field.
Checklist for Step 5
1. Within which policy documents can you integrate your violence-prevention goals and activities?
2. Have you ensured that the organisations concerned have interventions at all three levels of prevention (indicated, selective and universal)?
3. Have you planned the introduction of new interventions according to the knowledge of successful implementation?
4. Have you developed forms for following up and evaluating your violence-prevention interventions?
5. Have you anchored goals and activities, as well as the results of follow-up and evaluation, within the framework of the existing governance and management system?
6. How will you disseminate and share your experiences and results internally and externally?
Publication date: 2 January 2023
Last updated: 3 January 2023