Why Youth-Led Sexual Violence Prevention Programs Matter: Results from a Participatory Evaluation Project

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

It is exciting to see a paper using transformative participatory evaluation alongside young people to understand the intragroup and public impacts of a program on sexual violence prevention. I appreciate the author's efforts to build an inclusive team of evaluators and researchers and to tell a story that weaves together information about the program and reporting on the methodology of the program evaluation. I find it tough to keep these multiple registers clear for readers in such a short format and I think the authors did this very well.

I have a few general questions, and then some smaller ones. First (and this may be due partly to efforts to setup a blind peer review), I am unclear on the roles played by adults and young people throughout the project and evaluation. For example, who was involved in writing the paper - and who will be included as authors of the paper). This is especially true throughout the paper where the roles of young people are more specified, but the roles of adults are not reported or more thinly reported. Clarifying all the roles would help the reader learn from the work done here and to make more specific discernment about how the authors are deploying concepts like "youth-led" (which is used in a variety of ways in the literature).

I appreciated the literature review, which was concise and strong, and does a nice job of locating the authors' project in the broader literature. I also appreciated the detail on the specific contexts the program operates within. I wonder whether the authors differentiate at all between "peer programming" and "youth-led" activities/initiatives. The authors refer to Hart's ladder in later sections of the paper, but it would be nice to better understand specifically how they are using the terms of "youth-led" and how they compare it to other related terms in the field, such as peer programming/education and youth-adult partnerships and peer-to-peer programming (around line 107). Why this specific title for the work? I found myself wondering more about this later in the paper, around line 332 and 356 for example, where the authors give an example of how adults listened to youth concerns, and then as adults, developed and delivered a curriculum to teach the young people about the concerns. This enters into debates about what constitutes a "youth-led program" and what, in a program that seems to have significant adult facilitation and direction, it means to be "youth-led". If the authors want to use "youth-led" as the language to describe the program throughout the article, I think it would be useful to provide some additional details about the ways young people's decision-making was prioritized, specific roles they played in leading, and possibly how conflicts between adult and youth ideas were negotiated. When we reach the finding around line 553, I believe the authors have specified the roles of adults in leading, but not as extensively the roles and activities of young people involved.

On Line 117, it might be helpful to note that little exists on youth-led prevention programming, but there is literature about youth-led programming more broadly.

Around Line 204 I began to wonder who was the collaborative team, who was involved in which aspects of the research and so on. This is answered in Table 2, so I wonder if there's a reference that could be made here that would allude to that?

Line 245 - Really appreciate Table 2 here, which lends a lot of clarity to the different phases. I wonder if Phase 1 is meant to be in bold as if it were the title of that table?

Line 354 - What does it mean for self-care to be radical?

The authors offer a number of useful strategies in the findings/conclusion section that could be used by peer education and other youth programming in sexual violence prevention and more broadly. It would be helpful to understand how this reinforces, expands or modifies existing literature.

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

It was a pleasure reading your manuscript. Well done on the study; it is an important topic.

I really only have very minor edits to be done to it.

Line 27: “Dane County” – please make it clear this is in the US so that international readers don’t have to google this to find out the context of your study. It’s important to contextualize your research and proposed intervention.

Line 60: “Nationally representative surveys..” – please make it clear you are speaking about USA

Line 121: “Sexual violence in Wisconsin” : ‘Sexual violence in Wisconsin state, USA’ (no need to assume international readers are automatically familiar with USA’s geography)

Line 139: ‘WI’ : make sure you make it known earlier this stands for Wisconsin

Line 216: No need to use the full name of ‘GameChangers Evaluation Project’ and then abbreviate it again in the parentheses. Simply use the abbreviation as you spelling it our beforehand.

Are there any quotes that could further support your views on the GameChangers’s community and system’s impact? You refer to guidance and reports that were produced, but it would be good to have quotes from the interviews, as additional evidence, especially if something was implemented and, even more ideal (but a tall order), if the guidance produced was successful and had a direct impact on social change. But, I see from your interview schedule this was not a topic explored; nonetheless, if it was mentioned in the interviews, would be nice to include it.

Since the program is so beneficial to the children involved and potentially to the community/system, and given your experience of successfully implementing it, what would be your advice for other cities/communities, looking to set up such a program? A brief, more practical paragraph on it would be nice, perhaps in section 7. Strategies.

I would advise changing your title, as it currently leads the leader to believe that you evaluated the direct impact of the program on the amount/type/reporting/etc. of sexual violence. I don't believe you can yet make the claim that it truly prevents sexual violence, nor is your article focused on prevention per se, but rather more on how participants benefited from the program, how it educated young people, who in return educated others, and there is some discussion of the program's impact - impact which could be short-term or long-term, but without a proper evaluation, we can't know for sure. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx