Equality and Gender-Based Violence in the University: A Practical Case of Social Marketing to Implement in the Framework of Non-Profit Marketing Studies

Abstract

This paper proposes a practical case to be incorporated in marketing courses and, more specifically, in courses of non-profit marketing and/or social marketing. From the social marketing model proposed by Mier-Terán (Igualdad y violencia de género, https://druidadelmarketing.com/violencia-de-genero/Apuntes-de-clase, 2017a; Un análisis de los resultados de las estrategias contra la violencia de género en España desde una óptica de marketing social, 2017b), the main goal is to present to university students with the necessary tools to develop a social marketing campaign: analysis and test of the problem, campaign focus, definition of goals and strategies and, finally, evaluation. The starting point for this is an applied case study, carried out within the University of Cádiz (Spain), which considers the problem of gender-based violence in the university context, with a specific focus on women university students.

FormalPara Learning Objectives

The case studied that is proposed as a model to sets out and develops the steps for the creation of a support strategy alternative to actions already taken on equality and especially on gender-based violence in the environment of the university; it adopts a focus different from that currently applied and utilizes the principles and techniques of social marketing.

The main learning objectives for the students who undertake it can be summarized as follows:

• Know, in the context of social marketing, how to make a diagnosis of the problem under study:

  • Know the context in which the problems of equality and gender violence are encountered.

  • Identify the target public involved in the process and that of most relevance for the strategy.

  • Understand the current behaviours of the segments involved in the process and the associated benefits and barriers.

• Learn to define a proposition and select a campaign focus.

• Learn to set Social Marketing objectives and goals:

  • Define objectives for behaviour, knowledge and belief for the campaign.

• Learn to design social marketing strategies:

  • Product strategy

  • Strategy for costs of adoption (Price strategy)

  • Strategy for facilitation of the proposed behaviour (Placed strategy)

  • Communication strategy (Promotion strategy)

  • Sustainability strategy

Introduction

This project is based on the model of social marketing developed by Mier-Terán (2017a) and is focused on one of the principal problems that affect societies globally: gender inequality and gender-based violence, specifically on the university environment.

Violence inflicted on women is one of the most widespread and habitual forms of violation of human dignity and human rights; it affects a large number of people in the world. In the most conservative estimates, at least 35% of all women have been physically or sexually harmed by their partner or by another man (Nardi 2017). In some countries, especially in Africa and Latin America, this proportion is much higher and can reach extremely high levels. This includes verbal attack, psychological aggression, discrimination and many other sexist practices. In the European Union, this problem is no less serious: in 2014, a study by the European Agency for Human Rights found that 25 million women were victims of male violence, 13 million were physically assaulted, 9 million suffered sexual harassment and 3.7 million were subjected to sexual violence. The estimates of mental rather than physical aggression are even higher: 43% of Europeans suffer psychological aggression in one form or another because they are a woman. In Spain, specifically, it is recognized as a state problem; this is reflected in the approval by the Spanish Parliament, in September 2017, of the “State Pact against Gender-based Violence” BOE 2017); the document approved contains more than 200 measures aimed at reducing the incidence of a scourge that has claimed 918 victims since 2003 (the year in which the Government Office for Gender-based Violence established an official register of individuals assassinated). This State Pact is endorsed by the governments of all the autonomous regions and all municipal councils.

The approaches currently adopted to address problems of violence against women in Spain are as follows:

• Political/legal: The State Pact of 2017 and associated document (a study paper for the development of strategies against gender violence, constituted within the Equality Commission); law (legislation at level of state and autonomous regions); ethical codes; special courts to try cases of gender violence (Consejo General del Poder Judicial 2014); and education and training at schools and universities

• Economic measures: Special help under Article 27 of Integral Law LO 1/2004; assistance for victims with change of residence; bonus and replacement contracts; and active insertion income (RAI)

• Technological measures: Dedicated emergency telephone line 016 for victims; ATENPRO (Telephone Service of Attention and Protection to the victims of gender violence); Viogen (System of Integral Monitoring in the cases of Gender Violence); WRAP (Web of Resources for Support and Prevention for cases of gender violence); and electronic bracelets to monitor location of convicted offenders (Consejo General del Poder Judicial 2016)

• Educational/informative measures: Awareness campaigns and educational resources (Ministerio de Sanidad, Servicios Sociales e Igualdad 2015)

Considering in particular the university and as stated in the report “Gender-based violence in the Universities of Spain (2006–2008)”, there is hardly any published research on gender-based violence. Therefore there is a clear need to advance in this subject. Various universities around the world are implementing preventive measures and interventions, starting from the assumption that any woman studying or working in the university context is at risk of suffering acts of violence. The working hypotheses considered in national studies on gender-based violence in the university are the following:

• Gender-based violence is a reality that is present in Spanish universities and takes various different forms, as in other social contexts.

• There exist measures that are being implemented in the university context that are intended to contribute to preventing and reducing gender-based violence.

By way of example, in the University of Cádiz (UCA), Spain, a “Protocol for the Attention to Students who are Victims of Gender-based Violence” was approved in June 2016 (Consejo de Gobierno de la Universidad de Cádiz. Bouca nº 210 2016). The actions carried out in recent years by the university’s Unit for Equality between Women and Men can be summarized in the following:

• Organization and attendance at congresses

• Meetings

• Working days, seminar and summer courses on the topic

• Making periodic diagnoses of the situation

• Marking International Women’s Day with events

• Public manifestos

• Carrying out activities

• Travelling exhibitions

• Projects

• Establishing rules and guidance

• Collaborations with other entities

• Producing reports

• Attention to users

• International collaborations

To date, the UCA has not implemented any big social campaign with the specific objectives of reducing the incidence of this problem.

All the above actions have been carried out with the object of meeting the following goals defined in the equality plan:

• Promoting a commitment to equity and equality between men and women

• Strengthening the inclusion of a gender perspective in teaching and research

• Propitiating the balanced representation of women and men in the university’s bodies of representation and governance

• Promoting the conciliation of the personal, family and professional life of all those who work or study in the UCA

• Ensuring the occupational health of all employees, from the perspective of gender; eradicating harassment of a sexual nature or for reasons of gender

• Guaranteeing the normative rights established for the protection of the victims of violence against women

Gender-Based Violence in Social Marketing

Having first contextualized the problem on which the project is centred, the next task is to define the principal steps that will have to be implemented to put the case into practice; as stated before, this is based on the social marketing model defined by Mier-Terán (2017a, b) that is presented as Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Social marketing model applied. Source: Mier-Terán (2017a, b)

Case Development

Although the project that is presented here is valid for international application, in order to help readers to follow it and to facilitate the learning process, and so that they may get the most benefit from this case study, the development of this project and the data employed are based on an actual process developed in the University of Cádiz (UCA).

Thus, for each learning objective, the basic working tools for the students are shown, and from the example of the project applied and from the research carried out in the context of the UCA, the results obtained in each of the learning objectives are established. This is the reason why this section of the paper is subdivided into four subsections, each of which is identified with one of the learning objectives previously defined.

Objective 1: Know How to Make a Diagnosis of the Problem Studied

General Context of Gender-Based Violence in the University

• Working tools for the student:

  Analyse in greater depth, by means of secondary sources of information, the data on gender-based violence in the university context.

For the first of the objectives, the student will have to undertake a review of the bibliography and an intensive information search in secondary sources that will enable them to place the problem studied into context. This will require the student to employ general sources such as Internet search engines (Google, Bing, etc.), Google Scholar and databases of relevant academic journals—in other words, online resources of all types. At the same time, the student will be expected to access more specific sources, such as:

• Web pages of the organizational units responsible for equality between women and men and similar topics of the particular university in which the study project is being carried out

• Reports issued by the university Equality Unit

• Observatory for gender-based violence

• Research papers on violence against women (VAW)

• Spanish university and VAW reports

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz

According to the experts, the context in which the problem is framed is the existence of gender inequality, discrimination and relationships in which the man holds power over the woman.

According to the data of the “Observatory for Gender-based Violence” of the Spanish Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality (2018), the situation in the province of Cádiz is positive with respect to the overall incidence of gender-based violence in Spain; when a corrective factor for size of population is applied, the incidence is lower than the national average. It is observed that, although in absolute terms the number of telephone calls to the 016 line made in the province place Cádiz in tenth position in the ranking of all Spanish provinces, when the corrective factor for population size is applied, Cádiz falls to the 24th position (out of 52). In the ranking by number of formal complaints/accusations, Cádiz change from the 10th to the 17th position after the correction and, in the ranking by number of deaths attributed to this phenomenon, from the 21st to the 45th position. This indicates that, in relative terms, the province has a lower proportion of cases.

With the object of making an estimate of the degree of incidence in the university and given that there are no specific published data on gender-based violence, we will extrapolate, first, the provincial data to the university population and, second, the data from the national university studies. In particular, we will study the data of official complaints since the orientation of the campaign is aimed in the direction of getting victims to register complaints, and we will consider the population of 18–24 years of age, which is appropriate for the students in the university (Table 1).

Table 1 Extrapolation of the provincial data of complaints/accusations of gender-based violence (GBV) to the women students of the UCA

Historically, the number of complaints/accusations that are presented annually in the Unit for Equality is low—between 2 and 3, on average.

Target Public

• Working tools for the student:

  Analyse the different publics or groups that may be involved in the problem and decide which of those publics the campaign must actively influence.

Once the problem has been put into context and the relevant statistics have been established, the student should be capable of defining the key public affected by the problem of gender-based violence and of describing the principal characteristics of that public. Then the students will need to make the important decision with respect to the public or publics on which the future campaign to be mounted should be centred.

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz:

  The social phenomenon of gender-based violence involves many different publics or groups, each of which plays a different role in the problem (Potter et al. 2011; Santesmases 1999). The most significant groups identified in the University of Cádiz are the following:

  • Abusers

  • Victims

  • Family members and friends

  • Police and other law enforcement authorities

  • Health system personnel

  • Judicial authorities

  • Associations and organizations

Clearly, in the light of the multiplicity of publics that may be possible targets, any such campaign should follow a clear process of segmentation, with the focus of the campaign aimed at actively influencing each of the selected target publics with differentiated messages. However, for this case we will focus on the possible victims as the target public of highest priority. More specifically, these will be women who are students at the University of Cádiz and who know of cases and/or situations of inequality, physical or psychological abuse, maltreatment or, in general, gender-based violence. In numbers, as can be seen in Table 2, there are 6925 women in this target public.

Table 2 Extrapolation of the national data for universities on gender-based violence to the women students of the UCA

Analysis of Current Behaviours

• Working tools for the student:

  Study the behaviour of the target public that is most important for the campaign and identify the key factors that intervene in that behaviour. Conduct surveys of students of the university and hold personal interviews with the personnel and public who may be involved, in the university in which the project is being undertaken, paying special attention to the priority target public.

In this phase, the students must be capable of identifying and defining the principal behaviours associated with gender-based violence. For this, a key methodology will be to conduct surveys and personal interviews of the principal publics involved, with the objective of identifying the most important factors.

• Comparative results obtained for the University of Cádiz:

In the case of the University of Cádiz, what has been taken as the reference is the national survey on gender-based violence in Spanish universities (Valls 2008), applying the same questions and scales of measurement for the sample obtained in the UCA. After conducting the surveys (see Annex 1, with the technical data on the survey given in Annex 2) and the interviews held with students of the university, the next step is to identify the following key aspects:

• University students level of recognition of gender-based violence (Table 3)

  Table 3 Recognition of situations that may constitute gender-based violence

• Benefits and barriers of current behaviour for the target public identified (results obtained in the personal interviews):

  • Benefits of the behaviour

    • Those women victims who have presented a complaint to the Unit of Equality have resolved their problem favourably; the offender has been removed from the classroom, and the victim is now protected.

    • The women victims who have not presented a complaint are left with feelings of failure and frustration because of what has happened to them.

  • Barriers to the behaviour

    • Fear of not being believed or of reprisals by the person accused.

    • Shame over what has happened to her.

    • Feelings that she is to blame for what happened.

    • The victim thinks that she will have difficulty proving her version of what happened due to lack of evidence.

    • Lack of support from family and/or friends.

Objective 2: Purpose and Focus of the Campaign

• Working tools for the student:

  In order to define the purpose, it is necessary to establish, in the light of the data obtained from the research, what is the final objective of the campaign in quantitative terms.

In this phase of the project, the students collectively should be capable of interpreting the results of the research carried out in the preceding phase and, from those results, establish the purposes and the key focal point of the social marketing campaign that will finally be put into operation.

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz

Purpose

To ensure that at least 20% of the total cases of GBV that take place in the UCA are reported by the victim to the Unit of Equality, in a suitable virtual space provided for this

Focal Point

To increase the preliminary complaints/accusations made to the Unit of Equality, in line with the severity of the problem

Objective 3: Objectives and Goals of the Campaign

• Working tools for the student:

  Among other differences, social marketing campaigns are differentiated from generic social campaigns in that three types of objectives are established:

  • Objectives of behaviour: What is it we want our target audience to do?

  • Objectives of knowledge: What is it we want our target audience to know?

  • Objectives of beliefs: What is it we want our target audience to believe?

Once the students have determined the purpose and the principal focus of the proposed campaign, they must then define the specific objectives of the campaign, guided by the social marketing model explained previously.

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz

Objectives of Behaviour

For any student of the University of Cádiz who considers herself a victim of any kind of gender-based violence perpetrated by any personnel of the University, what we want that student to do is to inform the Unit of Equality so that the student affected can be advised whether or not to present a formal complaint/accusation and, if so, advised to which authority this should be done.

Objectives of Knowledge

We want all students to know that 42% of women university students suffer sexist comments about the intellectual capacity of women or their role in society or comments with sexual connotations that degrade or humiliate women; that 13% state that they know of some situation of gender-based violence in the university context; and that there are 24% of the victims of gender-based violence in the university who do not say anything at all to anyone in respect of a known case. We want them to know that 9.2% of the women students of the UCA do not consider that criticizing or denigrating what they do constitutes gender-based violence (although this is generally recognized as such).

Objectives for Beliefs

We want students to believe that the Unit of Equality has at its disposal mechanisms for the defence of victims already proven on previous occasions and that have resolved problems of this nature. We want them to believe that by reporting behaviours of gender-based violence, it is possible to resolve the specific offence committed against the student and that this is not going to have adverse repercussions on the student’s studies or marks awarded.

Objective 4: Proposed Strategies

• Tools for the student:

  The product strategy should facilitate the strengthening of the proposed behaviours. A principal product (the benefits of the behaviour) is defined (Kotler and Roberto 1989), together with an enhanced product (this refers to all those material elements necessary for supporting the principal product) and a personal product (the particular benefit that the person who adopts the behaviour will receive). The price and distribution strategies should facilitate the reduction of the costs incurred in adopting the proposed behaviour. The communication strategy should facilitate the transmission of the information, the persuasion and the proposed behaviour to the target public; it will be implemented in conjunction with the Office of Communication and Marketing of the University. The sustainability strategy should facilitate that the behaviours adopted are maintained over time, after the campaign has ended.

As defined in the social marketing model followed in this research, the last phase to be implemented by the students is the proposal of the main strategies to be followed in order to achieve the objectives. On this point, starting from these objectives, the students should be capable of establishing the five strategies that make up a social marketing plan; these cover product, price, distribution, communication and sustainability. In this phase of the project, a very important role is played by the interpretation that the participants have made of all the information collected and the potential of that information for useful analysis. Equally, a key element in the definition of the strategies should be the creative thinking that the students are capable of doing and putting into effect when formulating the proposals.

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz

Product Strategy

• Principal product: Registering the complaint/accusation enables information about the problem to be obtained, while at the same time, it activates a protocol that safeguards the victim, protects her rights and freedoms and allows her to describe what happened in her case, freely and anonymously.

• Enhanced product: An anonymous space is provided in the website of the Unit of Equality where the victim can report the offence and request help.

• Personal product: The situation of harassment is eliminated.

Strategy for Costs of Adopting the Behaviour

• The woman student who considers that she is a victim of gender-based violence should report the offender, but that person will sometimes be a friend or a teacher. This will create the fear or worry that her academic performance and her marks may consequently be prejudiced. To reduce this obstacle, it is proposed that the victim’s anonymity be guaranteed clearly and evidently when she makes the complaint/accusation. The offender is not accused or made aware of the complaint until the case has been studied, and the Unit for Equality considers that the complaint is viable.

Strategy for Facilitation of the Proposed Behaviour

• To facilitate the desired behaviour, it is proposed that a complaint, message or request for help written by a victim should receive a response in less than 24 h and that a link is included on the principal web page of the Unit of Equality that gives direct access to the complaint/accusation with a closed format and an open space for comments.

• Minimum data to be included: name of the offender, campus school where the offence took place, description of what happened and persons who support the version of the victim.

Communication Strategy

• Media strategy:

  • To circulate the campaign among the students, it is proposed that the main social networks should be used, in particular Facebook and Instagram, both used very frequently by students. Through the Office of Communication of the UCA, the campaign is publicized in all the available media. The Unit of Equality includes the campaign on its principal web page, and the website of the UCA creates a link from its principal page.

• Creative strategy:

  • What needs to be said? (Core of the message)

    • When any instance of this behaviour is suffered, the case must be reported and described on the web page of the UCA’s Unit for Equality between Men and Women.

    • The complaints/accusations are anonymous but are not actively followed up unless the unit considers that it would be effective to do so.

    • A protocol that protects the victim is activated.

  • How to say it?

    • Language

      • Relevant for the victims; bearing witness to the offence

    • Images

      • Cartoon drawings, illustrative but not amusing

Sustainability Strategy

• Tools for the student:

  The campaigns should continue to be effective over time, since it is a natural tendency for persons to revert back to their habitual forms of behaviour. Therefore, in addition to mounting the campaigns, it is necessary to establish reminders that will be effective over the required period of time.

• Results obtained for the University of Cádiz:

  • Reminder 1: Displaying posters in the Campus buildings

  • Reminder 2: Maintaining a link on the main web page of the UCA

Conclusions

The university is not insulated from the social phenomena of gender inequality and gender-based violence: these issues are present in the daily life of university students. In this practical case, we have presented a different way of approaching the problem, involving one of the principal publics of the university: its own students. What we have sought with this project is to set up a teaching model derived from work that has been done from the perspective of social marketing and within the framework of subjects related to non-profit-making marketing. This working methodology has proved to be capable of generating a proposed strategy for confronting the problem inside the university itself, from its own initiatives. The project is developed and carried out by the students themselves, utilizing the models that are analysed in the classroom and working in a coordinated way with other units of their university.

Discussion Questions

• 1. Could it be interesting to do a research study utilizing other quantitative techniques in order to know better the benefits and barriers of current behaviours of men and women? If so, what research techniques would you recommend?

• 2. What questions should be included to the persons interviewed?

• 3. What are the differences between social campaigns and those of social marketing?

• 4. Are there campaigns about gender-based violence in your country? If so, is the object of those campaigns to produce a change of behaviour or are they limited to making people more aware and sensitive?

• 5. What strategies are employed in your university to reduce the incidence of gender-based violence?

• 6. Do you think that social marketing campaigns are more effective than generic campaigns? If so, why?

Appendices

Annex 1 Used Survey

Annex 2 Data Sheet

Universo	Mujeres estudiantes en la Universidad de Cádiz = 10.564 (female students Uca)
Muestra	154 encuestas válidas (valid surveys)
Nivel de confianza	95.5%
Error de muestreo	8.05% (utilizando el supuesto de máxima indeterminación o varianza para el caso de las proporciones p = q = 50%)
Tipo de muestreo	Por cuotas de titulaciones (By degrees quotes)
Trabajo de campo	Mediante encuestas realizadas en la plataforma de SurveyMonkey. Abril de 2018