Young people don’t just want to be sources for data sets or people who need protection. We also deserve agency over our own data and experience and want to be an active part of global efforts to end SRGBV.
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.
All children have a right to learn. The threat of violence stops many from going to school and many more from achieving learning outcomes. If they are serious about education, governments must invest in understanding the nature and drivers of violence against children and use data and evidence to ensure their safety.
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.
Investing in ending childhood sexual violence is the right thing to do, and we must protect kids and support those who have experienced this horrible trauma. Globally, policy and decision makers can save billions investing in preventing child sexual abuse. The returns on investment would cut across physical and mental health, labor, judicial, and other sectors.
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.
The “Safe to learn” initiative published a collection of essays that examine and tackle the causes of different forms of violence in and around schools. This essay is authored by Dr. Daniela Ligiero, Executive Director & CEO of Together for Girls.
We have conducted secondary analyses of the Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS) to understand the prevalence, consequences, and gender-specific experiences of violence in and around schools.
For decades, advocates and researchers have stressed the need to collect more data on both violence against children and violence against women and have pushed to make sure data is disaggregated by sex, age and geography.
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.