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The ANROWS Evidence Portal is a living resource of evaluations of interventions from high-income countries that aim to address and end violence against women. It uses robust systematic review methodology to bring together this vast knowledge base in one place using interactive visualisations and accessible written summaries.
Ultimately, the Evidence Portal aims to ensure that the action we take in policy, practice and research to address and end violence against women is backed by a vast and quality evidence base.
Impact evaluations of interventions can teach us a lot about “what works” so we can disentangle the best options to fund, implement, research and evaluate. The Evidence Portal saves you time and resources by bringing together this knowledge base in one place using interactive visualisations and accessible written summaries.
Our comprehensive and thorough processes mean that you can be confident that all available evaluation evidence that meets our eligibility criteria has been captured. The systematic search and screening will be updated regularly with new data. Currently, the Evidence Portal contains data from January 1994 up to and including December 2022.
The Evidence Portal adds a tool to your toolkit for places to find intervention evidence to address and end violence against women. It does some of the legwork for you by collating, categorising and interpreting evaluation evidence across a wide range of interventions, and intervention settings, modalities and implementers.
This is an example of some of the search terms used in the ANROWS Evidence Portal systematic search. The ANROWS Evidence Portal is an online resource which allows users to search quickly and easily for information about what might work to address or end violence against women in high-income countries.
Our two key elements of the Evidence Portal are the Evidence and Gap Maps (EGMs) and the Intervention Reviews. EGMs are designed to capture the “big picture” in terms of quantity and types of existing research. Complementing the EGMs, our Intervention Reviews give you an overview of key information about an intervention and comment on the effectiveness of the intervention. Both incorporate evidence from primary quantitative, qualitative and systematic review evaluation research.
Policymakers and decision-makers can use the EGMs for an accessible visual overview of the consolidated evidence on interventions designed to address and end violence against women.
The four EGMs are aligned with the domains outlined in the National Plan and function as a “shorthand” language that communicates consolidated evidence.
They can use the EGMs to identify gaps in the knowledge base and direct future research into crucial areas, and they can use the larger portal to inform funding and grant applications and literature reviews, and as a teaching resource to provide students with access to quality literature.
Evaluations of interventions are one tool to determine what may work for your community or population. While there is much merit in bringing the evaluations together into one place, other forms of evidence should also be used to complement what the Evidence Portal can tell us about “what works”.
For example, knowledge from practitioners and people with lived experience may be captured in the Evidence Portal, but only when situated within an evaluation, so our picture of this knowledge may be incomplete.
Some interventions, such as wide-scale policy changes or media campaigns, are more difficult to evaluate using traditional research models. This means there may be fewer evaluation papers on these types of interventions within the Evidence Portal. We’re also unable to comment on interventions that are yet to be evaluated or evaluations that are yet to be published (whether that be in traditional journal articles or other document types such as technical reports and dissertations).
In addition to providing overviews and effectiveness measures, the intervention reviews will enable practitioners and implementers to consider questions regarding intervention applicability to different populations; participant experiences of interventions; and the factors requiring consideration if the intervention were to be implemented in Australia. That is, the Evidence Portal will serve as a resource for identifying potentially effective interventions, underpinned by robust research that may “work” within specific communities, for practitioners and implementers to add to their existing “toolkit” of interventions.
We need to be clear about what you can and cannot do with the Evidence Portal. While the portal provides a transparent way of collating and synthesising the effectiveness of existing interventions based on studies conducted in high-income countries, it is unable to comment on interventions that are yet to be evaluated, and does not synthesise the non-intervention evidence base within the broader field of research into violence against women. While the portal is not the answer to “what works” to reduce and respond to violence against women, it does provide an unbiased and comprehensive survey of the intervention literature. ANROWS does not necessarily endorse interventions included in the portal, and we urge all audiences to critically examine intervention suitability and applicability.
ANROWS acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land across Australia on which we live and work. We pay our respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present. We value Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and knowledge. We are committed to standing and working with First Nations peoples, honouring the truths set out in the Warawarni-gu Guma Statement.
This material was produced with funding from the Australian Government Department of Social Services. ANROWS gratefully acknowledges the financial and other support it has received from the government, without which this work would not have been possible. The findings and views included in the Evidence Portal are those of the authors and cannot be attributed to the Australian Government Department of Social Services.