Primary Prevention vs. Outreach-Awareness- Education

Written by Luana Yoshikawa-Scanlan, CDC RPE Project Manager, PRIME Consultant; 
Assessing Rape Prevention in our community begins with understanding what it is, and what it is not.
The typical public health approach is to define a ‘problem’, identify ‘risk and protective factors’, develop ‘prevention strategies’, and reach out to the public using these strategies to raise awareness and educate people on how to avoid the problem.
Primary prevention focuses on changing the underlying causes of the problem rather than the problem itself.
In other words, while critical, information like sexual violence prevalence, skills to reduce risk of being victimized, availability of victim services do not prevent the acts of sexual violence.
Primary prevention aims to ‘eliminate and reduce factors’ that enable sexual violence and keep it from happening in the first place.  An example of this is active bystander strategies. An active bystander is aware of a situation that may lead to sexual violence and takes action to ensure the violence doesn’t happen. 
Outreach, awareness, and education aim to reduce individual risk and increase community support for victims/survivors. These approaches address the possibility (risk factors) of, or aftereffects of violence (personal experiences, beliefs).
Primary prevention, on the other hand, addresses health and social inequities that fuel the social norms that contribute to violence. 
The line between primary prevention and the outreach-awareness-education work we do in the community is often blurred and ambiguous. However, this line is what differentiates RPE Primary Prevention: a world without sexual violence. Working from this perspective changes our approach to the outreach-awareness-education. From ‘addressing’ the problem to eradicating the roots of the problem. For example, educating people on how to be healthy, non-violent individuals; learning skills to improve individual wellbeing.
As the Alliance prepares to engage the community in discussions about rape prevention and sexual violence, we are developing discussion questions that aim at the roots of those problems. After all, you cannot solve a problem that you don’t understand, or worse – don’t acknowledge.  We encourage people to join upcoming community talanoa and online surveys to share knowledge, experiences, and ideas.  
Photo from CDC Violence Prevention site: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/about/publichealthapproach.html