Causal Factors of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG): Perspectives from the Brazilian Higher Education Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

An insightful work that presents timely findings and advocates for eradicating VAWG on campus clearly. The use of FSE provides fascinating insight into the five structural categories and the arguments and results are clearly presented. There are some areas that require improvement listed below.

Literature review: ensure clarity of argument and detail that is relevant and not redundant in nature. The most egregious examples that required consideration listed below but an overall review to ensure this section is more robust and detailed is suggested.

“Most women globally have been experienced one forms of violence—sexual harassment, physical or psychological abuse [15].” Some further detail here, you’ve already outlined these experiences and could provide a global statistic of how prevalent these issues are estimated to be. Some studies suggest at least 3/4s of women have experienced sexual violence for example.

“Despite increasing global awareness, the prevalence of violence against women continues 81 to rise, particularly in comparison to men [17]” – this seems obvious given that it is violence against women and girls – move the argument forward more clearly perhaps to highlight male aggression or hegemonic masculinity as an issue more specifically?

 “Violence against women, 101 VAWG, and violence against women and children (VAWC) are all forms of GBV, which 102 disproportionately affects women, girls, and children [26]” Somewhat redundant: this is suggested in the names/acronyms and could be developed more clearly to outline types of abuse and harassment or more specific details.

Use of the term “dating violence” (line 131) could be clearer, is it referencing violence that occurs in romantic relationships or in hookups? The other examples are clear, so simply a slight word change here is advised.

Practice of “wife inheritance” (146) requires a brief explanation (a footnote of parenthesis).

Results section: largely fine, but some minor areas for consideration listed below.

4.1 Background Information of Respondents

Issues with grammar here, particularly use of tenses where the work seems to move from present to past tense. Requires quick review.

4.2 Cross-tabulation of genders and form of VAWG in the Brazilian higher education

The brief reference to "movement monitoring" and "restricting access to education" requires further discussion in this section; the brief attention given compared to other forms of abuse could come across as belittling otherwise.

The brief references to a need for “urgently addressing” VAWG come across more as empty platitudes here, especially without clear indications to how they should be addressed. As the work does address potential resolutions in later sections and in more robust and clear ways, it may be worth removing this language here.

“This is a serious concern and suggests that sexual assault happens on campuses, even though many cases might go unreported.” This sentence needs reworking to avoid redundancy – we do know from prior work that such assaults happen, perhaps here it is worth mentioning the normalcy of such action on campus is suggested.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

A deep edit is required to ensure grammar and writing syntax is correct throughout. There were several examples of typos with missing words or the wrong tenses being used. I am listing several examples below that I caught while reading but want to stress that these are not exhaustive:

 

Line 78: “one forms of violence”

Line 80: “problem on in the lives”

Line 89: “many victims chooseing not to”

Line 96-98: ““In response, a strategic framework emphasizing poverty reduction, women’s empowerment, awareness campaigns and efforts to dismantle patriarchal ideologies while advancing gender equity [15, 25]” There is an issue with sentence structure here which is complicating the argument.

Line 100: remove “young” as it suggests that older women are not experiencing such abuses and harassment and reaffirms certain rape myths.

Line 101: You’ve already introduced VAW as the acronym for “violence against women” in the intro and should ensure consistent use of these terms throughout the work

Line 162: “with a weakened legal system”

Line 227: “resulting in 311 responses were received”

Line 292: “A majority of”

Line 293: “male respondents account for”

Line 388: “weak community sanctions”

Line 398: “indicate the role of institutional”

Line 399-400: place the following in parathesis for the sentence to work: (such as weak enforcement of policies, inadequate victim support systems, or poor reporting mechanisms)

Line 493-496; would be worth restructuring this sentence to ensure the argument is clear.

Line 579: “and has shown”

Line 594: “but are also enforced”

Line 599: “professionalism and expterise”

Line 609: “a deeper look into CUC was needed, suggesting”

Author Response

A file is attached showing point-by-point response to reviewer's comments.
Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The main goal of this study was to identify and rank the various factors associated with perpetration of violence against women and girls (VAWG), particularly within academic institutions. The results of a Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation (FSE) approach on the collected data ranked the factors in the following order: 1) Societal, 2) Institutional, 3) Interpersonal, 4) Community, and 5) Individual. Therefore, indicating that academic institutions should largely focus on macro level interventions within their institutions to decrease the risk of violence for their students.

Specific Comments:

1. Table 1 summarizes the various causal factors identified by the authors from an extensive literature review. It is implied that these are the causal factors that were included in the survey given to the participants in this study. However, there is no other information provided about the survey and the specific items included. For instance, how were these factors measured? Additionally, how were the specific items phrased? This information is important because it impacts what the results speak to. If the items were kept as written in Table 1, these items do not speak specifically to the conditions within the academic institutions that impact violence rates on campus. Therefore, the data is not appropriate to provide recommendations to be applied by these academic institutions. The author(s) need to make information about these items available and rewrite their results accordingly.

Overall, I believe that the use of an FSE approach is highly valuable when dealing with complex life experiences such as VAWG. However, it is not clear whether these results can fill the specific gap the author(s) noted in their introduction. I would recommend the authors to consider creating a detailed FSE tutorial for the social sciences using the data from this study, assuming no such resource already exists in the field.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments and feedback.

A file is attached showing point-by-point response to reviewer's comments.
Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors, I read your manuscript with great interest and I think the topic is very important, so I appreciate your work. Although, I think that there need to be some revisions:

1) I think the sections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3, although interesting, not being the main focus of the article (this is not a review article) should all be extensively trimmed and then merged with the introduction, starting just before you introduce the concept of violence in school campus;

2) In the materials and methods section you say (line 222) that "The target population included individuals within Brazilian higher education who have directly experienced or are knowledgeable about VAWG incidents". How did you manage to do so? This is not clear, please give some more explanation;

3)  the sentence starting at line 557 and finishing at line 559 has not a proper end or meaning.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's time and effort.

A file is attached showing point-by-point response to reviewer's comments.
Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The concerns noted in my original review were not thoroughly addressed by the author(s), but it is possible that I have misunderstood the purpose of this investigation. It is my understanding that the purpose of this investigation is to examine how the various causal factors listed in Table 1 manifest specifically within the culture of the higher education institution under investigation. That is, when participants are prompted to reflect on these causal factors, are they instructed to consider them in relation to the broader society, or specifically within the institutional context? This distinction is particularly crucial for factors categorized as community, social, or institutional. For example, if participants are asked about the “culture of impunity,” are their responses meant to reflect their perceptions of the university’s culture of impunity, or of societal norms more generally? These interpretations could lead to different conclusions. To clarify this, it would be helpful if the authors provided the actual items participants completed through an open science repository or as supplemental materials.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer for the comments.

A point-by-point response to the reviewer's comments is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors, you adequately addressed most of my comments and, as for section 2, I do understand that you have to satisfy the requests of other reviewers too.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the comment and effort of the reviewer.

A file showing point-to-point response to reviewer's comments is attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf