Balancing Community Input and Established Research: Findings from the Development of a Sexual Violence Prevention Campaign

Abstract

This article describes a focus group study exploring university students' perspectives of sexual violence prevention campaigns with the goal of developing a social marketing campaign that would resonate with university students. Seventy-one students at one university in Aotearoa/New Zealand provided feedback in 15 focus groups. Findings of an inductive thematic analysis indicate that students think sexual violence prevention campaigns should depict diversity in perpetrator and victim identity and focus on more subtle contexts of sexual violence. These findings have implications for the development of sexual violence prevention campaigns. In particular we discuss how universities must balance tensions between designing palatable and relatable prevention campaigns while also reflecting and addressing the underlying gendered nature of sexual violence.