Background: Violence against women (VAW) is a prevalent and serious issue. In Australia approximately one in three women over 15 have experienced physical violence and one in five have experienced sexual assault. Over half of all women have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.

Led by Women's Health East (WHE), and involving organisations across the whole of the Eastern Metropolitan Region (EMR) of Melbourne, Together For Equality and Respect (TFER) is a primary prevention strategy that reflects an integrated approach to addressing the determinants of VAW by promoting equal and respectful relationships between men and women and reducing rigid gender stereotypes.

Methods: The Action and evaluation plan accompanying TFER was developed using Intervention Mapping. This approach included the following steps: documenting and analysis of current and planned initiatives across the the EMR, identifying shared themes, development of objectives relating to these themes, confirmation of objectives with organisations, development of an evaluation framework and development/sourcing of evaluation tools that support a shared approach to measuring achievements.

Results/Discussions: Developed using Intervention Mapping, the TFER action plan  includes six shared regional objectives related to the four key strategic directions. Based on these shared objectives a regional evaluation framework has been developed. This framework includes indicators, tools and data collection procedures.

Organisations across the EMR have demonstrated their commitment to TFER through incorporating the objectives, indicators and evaluation tools in organisational plans and agreeing to contribute data to enable a regional evaluation report.

Conclusions/implications: It is not possible to end violence against women with disparate initiatives and one off projects, a sustained effort and a range of mutually reinforcing actions is required. The TFER action and evaluation plans have been developed to reflect this principle, with a view to the combined effort effecting more change that the sum of the parts.