The Issue

Violence against children remains one of the world’s most intractable public health challenges. It affects more than 1 billion children every year-- about half the children in the world--with wide-reaching consequences.

In the last two decades, data collection on the magnitude, nature and consequences of violence has accelerated worldwide thanks to committed coalitions of scientists, donors and policymakers. Alongside this, interventions to prevent violence have been developed and tested. We know now that violence is preventable.

Why Does it Matter?

The Sustainable Development Goals have set a target to end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence and torture against children. In addition, the protection of children from all types of violence is at the core of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is important that governments have access to, and sight of, the appropriate data and evidence in order to understand the most effective methods to make the changes that will protect children from all types of violence.

Our Project

The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children was launched in July 2016 by the UN Secretary-General. Today, the End Violence Partnership is the only global entity focused solely on Sustainable Development Goal 16.2: ending all forms of violence against children. The Partnership works in collaboration with the End Violence Lab, at the University of Edinburgh, to bring data, evidence and learning to its broad constituency.

The aim of this project, with national partners and their universities in Brazil, China, Colombia, Côte d Ivoire, Jordan and Uganda, is to map the data landscape on violence against children (VAC) by conducting regional (Africa, Americas and Asia) systemic reviews of INSPIRE interventions to identify `SDG accelerators’ that will enable the most effective and rapid violence reduction.

Key research questions will include:

1. Are there strategies that predict reductions across multiple forms of child violence?

2. Can we combine effective provisions to make lean packages of “best buys” for governments?

   
   
   
   

The results will support governments in their national planning processes to enable them to invest limited resources in the best set of interventions in time to meet the SDGs 2030. The outcomes will be fed into national action plans in all six countries working to end violence against children. The goal is to ensure that national teams can deliver results and create impressive policy impact and momentum. 

The project will also aim to enhance the systematic review process by establishing a Young People’s Advisors (YPA) approach, designed to generate youth outputs that can be highlighted and disseminated on various global, academic and national knowledge platforms. Engaging young people in research enables them to fully exercise their right to be heard. In addition, any policy outputs resulting from the primary project will be strengthened by the inclusion of youth perspectives as primary end-users.

Data translation is a challenge for the field of violence prevention where research interventions tend to have complex outcomes. The innovation within this project is the development of an approach that directly engages young and emerging scholars from around the world, pairing young people with scientific researchers to allow for findings and analysis to be interpreted through the lens of young people.

For more information on the End Violence Lab, click here.

Our Outputs