Stopping It before It Starts: Strategies to Address Violence in Young Children’s Lives

This document advocates for systematic and reliable measures of the effect of violence on young children. It was produced by the Bernard van Leer Foundation as a contribution to the International Expert Consultation on the Prevention and Response to Violence in Early Childhood held in Lima, Peru, August 27-28 2012. It presents evidence that violence in young children's lives can be prevented through programmes such as home visitation, family strengthening, women's economic empowerment, alcohol regulation, and efforts to change social norms. It examines policy windows to achieve impact at scale on violence against children, asserting that leaders need to engage more effectively in areas of social policy such as social protection, employment, women's rights, and public security. The document suggests that more sophisticated communications strategies can drive sustained public political engagement and gain new champions for violence prevention.

The document discusses available data and why data on young children is scarce. Table 1 on page 6 lists reasons for data gaps and gives a sample of effort to overcome measurement challenges. Table 2 on page 8 lists 7 interventions in situations of violence affecting young children and indicates which ones have supporting evidence from multiple randomised control trials with different populations that show their effectiveness, as well as ones that have support from emerging evidence. Some examples of interventions listed as "promising" include:

• "The Nurse Family Partnership (NfP) and the Triple P Positive Parenting Programme are two of the most well documented parenting and home visitation interventions."
• Programmes that address social norms around violence against women - In South Africa, for example, IMAGE, a micro-finance and gender training programme, demonstrated a 55% reduction in intimate partner violence in a randomised control trial study.

Table 3 on page 11 lists ongoing studies meant to strengthen the evidence base and what each study is examining.

Existing policies and services, as stated here, can be used as entry points for work to reduce violence in the lives of children and identify those who are at risk or already victims, including: home visits; intervention services in cases of abuse and violence; training for health workers on early learning and family violence; village savings and loan groups; agricultural extension in support of parenting; faith-focused programming to reduce violence against mothers; engagement of fathers in parenting; and a child welfare council to coordinate social policy and bring together early childhood programmes.

According to this document, communication strategies need to draw political will and public support to change the social norms driving the problem of violence in the lives of children. Two challenges are: 1) how to frame the issue, particularly when corporal punishment is accepted as a norm or when discussion is limited by taboos (such as discussion of sex abuse); and 2) the need to ground messages in concrete actions. Three case studies illustrate challenges - in Brazil, celebrity support aids a campaign on alternatives to spanking as discipline; in India, an Actionaid book on stories of men and women sets as models those who have fought for the rights of baby girls; a Plan India Hindi television soap opera raises the issue within the Indian cultural context; and the Bell Bajao (Ring the Bell) campaign, expanding from India to Pakistan, Vietnam, China, and Uganda, depicts people ringing the doorbell when they hear domestic violence being carried out in a home.

Some strategies recognised here are: choose the messenger - men to men, celebrities, or popular media; use intensive community mobilisation creating social pressure for change; challenge gender norms by depicting caring fathers as masculine role models; allow older children to be messengers and advocates for the youngest ones; engage young children and parents directly with stories that exemplify living by non-violent values; and train religious leaders and police to promote violence prevention and positive parenting. Advocacy points that can be useful are those that show the economic costs of inaction - e.g., increased crime, unemployment, costs to schools, and costs of protection - and the cost/benefit relationship of action - e.g., increased individual earnings and tax contributions, as well as reduced crime costs, special education, and welfare.