A/HRC/26/17 E/CN.6/2014/8 methodology. The team leads a series of workshops in which participants question harmful constructs of masculinity and femininity and build positive alternatives. 15. The Coalition has detailed, in its second annual report to the Trust Fund, how the programme has decreased stigma, increased the use of condoms and reduced the number of men with concurrent sexual partners, all of which lessen the risk of contracting and spreading HIV/AIDS. Women report an increased ability to negotiate sexual practices, while couples report more fluid communication and a decrease in the use of physical and emotional violence as a means to settle conflict. In addition, village chiefs have banned harmful practices such as “sexual cleansing”. 6 These results demonstrate that, when owned by communities, sustained activities decrease the social acceptability of violence against women and of discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. 16. The Uganda-based civil society organizations Raising Voices and the Centre for Domestic Violence Prevention used community-led activism and mobilization to help bring about changes in behaviour and attitudes towards violence against women and girls. Support from the Trust Fund allowed the successful SASA! methodology, designed by Raising Voices, to be scaled up. This community-focused violence and HIV prevention programme challenges power imbalances between men and women through a series of sustained activities that support community members through different stages of behaviour change, from awareness of the issue, to support for women and men in creating change, to action against violence. For three years, the programme, which was recently the subject of an external evaluation in terms of its processes, provided technical assistance and mentored 13 grass-roots organizations in Botswana, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania. In feedback provided as part of the evaluation, participating organizations reported that the partnership gave them vital tools to continue rolling out the methodology in their communities. Grass-roots activists, women and men, also acknowledged that their own attitudes and behaviours towards gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS were positively transformed. 17. A separate evaluation of the impact of the SASA! programme was conducted by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and included a randomized controlled trial in four intervention sites and four control sites in Uganda, which showed the impact of the initiatives over a period of 2.8 years. In communities where the programme had been implemented (intervention sites), 76 per cent of women and men believe that physical violence against a partner is not acceptable; the corresponding figure in the control communities is 26 per cent. In addition, 28 per cent more women and men in participating communities than in control communities consider that it is acceptable for a woman to refuse sex. Levels of physical partner violence against women are 52 per cent lower in intervention sites than in control communities. Finally, 27 per cent of men in participating communities reported having multiple concurrent sexual partners; the corresponding figure in the control communities is 45 per cent. These figures suggest that supporting systematic and sustained interventions can help to significantly reduce the social acceptability of intimate partner violence, the levels of physical violence and the prevalence of concurrent sexual partners among men. __________________ 6 13-61736 Known as kulowa kufa, this practice involves having unprotected sexual relations with a man appointed by the community when a woman’s husband dies (according to the Coalition’s “Baseline report on intimate partner violence amongst people living with HIV/AIDS” p. 22). 5/16