Abstract for:Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention

Gender based violence is a significant barrier to global development and major global health problem disproportionally affecting girls and women across the lifespan. Existing community efforts at prevention and response, while improved over the years, have been disappointing in their overall impact. A major methodical challenge is how to rigorously design and evaluate community prevention systems that can respond to dynamic environments. Universities offer a unique community testbed for the research and development of dynamic prevention systems to address gender based violence. The objective of this paper is to present a formal simulation model of relationships and sexual violence for a university student population that is being used to develop a dynamic prevention and response system. The Relationship and Sexual Violence (RSV) model a synthetic population in an overall dynamic equilibrium at various stages of risk and exposure to relationship and sexual violence using a birth-cohort approach where risk is specific to gender and age. The paper makes several contributions including solving the problem of how to establish an overall dynamic equilibrium for a population model using the birth-cohort structure and illustrating the sensitivity of change to small shifts in the age distribution of the population that pose a serious