Content analysis of responses to The Line, an Australian primary prevention of violence against women campaign on Facebook

Issue addressed Primary prevention of violence against women (PVAW) strategies and campaigns aim to address and challenge violence-supportive behaviour and normative social structures to intervene before violence happens. Towards this aim, from 2014 to 2019, The Line was a public Australian Commonwealth-supported PVAW campaign on social media that targeted young people. This study explores how young people discussed PVAW-related themes on the campaign's Facebook page. Methods Social media scraping tools were used to collect 346 941 comments on The Line's Facebook page from 2014 to 2017. In this study, 3663 comments included three high frequency, PVAW-related key terms, 'violence' (1430 comments), 'gender' (1602 comments) and 'consent' (631 comments). These were identified and were thematically coded. Results Young people's comments indicated high support for violence prevention but varied in how they understood gendered violence and factors that contribute to it, and instead, some argued that the campaign should not ignore men. Some young people who engaged with The Line on a long-term basis and spoke to its aims, proposed interpretations from their experiences, and challenged the campaign to progress. Conclusions This study demonstrates that young people influence each other by adopting and disrupting PVAW knowledge in a publicly funded social media campaign. So what? Public PVAW social media campaigns can encourage young people to discuss gendered violence online. However, successful campaigns need ongoing support to develop conversations with target populations that allow diverse audiences to build their knowledge.