The Violence Against Children and Youth Surveys (VACS) are led by national governments with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other partners, as part of the Together for Girls partnership.

Most countries that conduct a VACS sign a data-sharing agreement with survey partners that sets the terms and conditions associated with the storage, access, protection, and use of data collected as part of the VACS.

The data sharing agreement specifies when and how the data from the VACS will become publicly available for use by third parties who want to conduct additional analyses with VACS data.

Before diving into the VACS datasets, we encourage you to review the country-specific questionnaires and codebooks. These resources will help you complete the information in the form to request access to VACS datasets. For every VACS country, there are three distinct questionnaires (head of household, male and female). The male and female questionnaires are identical, with the exception of the pregnancy-related questions. Each country folder also includes a codebook and, in some cases, a data user guide.