The effectiveness of dating violence prevention programs in changing behaviors, attitudes and knowledge related to perpetration and victimization has been well documented in the literature. However, little attention has been paid to the question of how such positive outcomes have been obtained, and the debate continues as to their underlying theoretical rationale. The present study aimed to fill this gap by designing a dating violence prevention program from a feminist approach and to investigate the processes of change with a constructivist grounded theory methodology. Towards this goal, 56 Turkish college students completed the program and later participated in semi-structured individual interviews. The analysis showed that the program initiated a gradual move towards safety, equality and mutuality in dating and intimate relations through four processes: changing perspectives and norms, learning from peers, reflecting on self, and acting differently. Some of the processes were experienced differently depending on the nature of prior or current dating experiences and the strength of sexist beliefs. The present study argues that a feminist approach proves to be a useful framework for dating violence prevention efforts and concludes with recommendations for future preventive work.

Intersectional approaches have challenged the field of domestic violence to pay more attention to diversity in women’s experiences and highlighted the significance of their social contexts and positions, such as class, race, religion, in shaping their understanding of and responses to violence. In the dating violence (DV) literature, a similar call has been made to develop contextualized accounts of DV and to address the heterogeneity of young people through DV prevention programs. Nevertheless, to date, intersectional thinking has not been fully utilized in DV research. The present study aims to address this gap in the literature and investigate how young people make sense of and experience DV from an intersectional perspective in an urban Turkish context. The data for the current study came from individual interviews conducted with 39 college students, aged 18–25. The interviews inquired into how young people understood, explained, and experienced DV. The interviews were analyzed thematically, culminating into four main themes: (a) DV as control, (b) DV as resulting from traditional gender norms, (c) DV as women’s fault, and (d) DV-related socialization processes. Some of these main themes were interpreted and experienced differently by the participants depending on their gender and the impact of traditional, Islamic, and egalitarian discourses on their accounts. The result demonstrated nuanced differences in young people’s meaning-making perspectives, needs, and vulnerabilities to DV. In the Turkish context, these results are intended to inform the burgeoning field of DV research and to guide the development of diversity-informed, culturally tailored, and context-sensitive prevention practices.

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