Preventing Violence Against Women Through Raising Awareness on Gender Among University Students

Abstract

This study is an intervention study following the principles of the pre-test and post-test models. It was conducted with the students studying at the Department of Classroom Teaching in a university located in the Eastern Black Sea Region. The data were collected with the ‘Personal Information Form’ created by the researcher and the ‘Attitudes toward Violence Scale’. Mean and percentage were used to evaluate the data. The mean age of the students was 22.06±1.38, and 53.3% were male. The pre-and post-intervention ratios of students supporting the idea that ‘Men and women have the same rights’ were 80.0% and 100%, respectively. Before the intervention, while 64.3% of the students thought that ‘Violence must remain within the family’, 20% of them thought the same after the intervention. Before the intervention, %53.3 of them had an idea that ‘Trying to cover up women against their will is violence against women’, but the percentage increased up to 93.3% after the intervention. This intervention study, aiming at preventing violence against women through raising awareness of gender, demonstrated that the pre-intervention traditional views of students about gender changed in the direction of egalitarian roles in the post-intervention period.