Can co-designing interventions with affected communities help prevent violence against women? Findings from a process evaluation of the E le Saua le Alofa (Love Shouldn't Hurt) pilot in Samoa.

There has been increasing interest in co-designing interventions with end users to prevent violence against women (VAW). Co-design is theorized as an ethical approach to research able to engage some of the most marginalized groups in VAW prevention. However, there is little evidence of whether co-designing interventions can reduce violence against women, or a theoretical consideration of how it might do so. This paper contributes to current discussions about co-design by examining the results of the E le Saua le Alofa (Love Shouldn't Hurt)-a pilot intervention that engaged Samoan communities in co-designing violence prevention activities. A mixed-methods evaluation of the pilot has shown promising results, and in this paper, we consider how the co-design process may have contributed to these results. The evaluation of the co-design process assessed four theorized mechanisms: (1) increased ownership of the problem of violence; (2) improved health behaviours and social norms; (3) relevance of actions taken to address VAW; (4) addressing power structures arising from coloniality. Our results show that a change in violence outcomes occurred through the pilot's ability to revisit previous conversations about violence in Samoa, prompting new activities by local leaders, and tightening village rules on violence. Yet, the activities implemented by local leaders were largely unpredictable and sometimes conflicted with global evidence. We argue that such actions should not be construed by policymakers as the "unpredictable outcomes" of an intervention, but rather understood within a broader framework of diversified knowledge systems. The need for balance in co-designing VAW interventions with communities affected by violence highlights a key challenge of decolonizing VAW practice within a co-production framework.