A billion children spend a significant proportion of their time in school every day, making school settings a key factor in interventions to save more children from violence.
Schools have a responsibility to empower students to prevent school-related gender-based violence.
It is not enough for children to attend school. We must also ensure they are safe doing so. Violence prevention and response should be integrated into education policy and programming to ensure safe schools for all students.
School-related gender-based violence is a particularly egregious form of gender-based violence because it happens to children who sometimes do not even recognise it as violence.
Through collective advocacy messaging and political recommendations on the intersections of gender and violence, we can influence the political stakeholders who can enable efforts to end gender-based violence in, around and through schools.
Together for Girls and partners hosted a Solutions Summit side event. Global leaders, experts, and youth activists shared the latest data on violence in school settings and highlighted school-based interventions for catalyzing broader social change to end violence.
“Social Responsibility within Changing Contexts” was the 2021 conference theme for the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). CIES is dedicated to increasing understanding of educational issues, trends, and policies through comparative, intercultural, and international perspectives.
Social norms drive gender inequalities and violence, and even though access to education is a human right, learners across the globe are impacted by school-related gender-based violence.
Every child deserves to be safe at home, in their communities, and at school. However, findings from the VACS show that many children experience school-related gender-based violence. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Every child around the world deserves the opportunity to learn. Education is a basic human right and a necessary pathway to ending extreme poverty. We know that equitable, quality education has an immense power to transform the lives of individuals, communities, and nations.