On May 27 2021, the Child Protection and Gender sections at NYHQ and UNICEF Innocenti organised an internal webinar on UNICEF’s Strategy Paper on the Gender Dimensions of Violence against Children and Adolescents in which over 200 UNICEF colleagues from regional and country levels participated. The webinar aimed to help participants learn more about the strategy paper and provided an opportunity to share ideas and recommendations for the implementation of priority actions in this area.

1. Gender dimensions of violence
against children and adolescents
Highlights from a strategy paper

2. Why the paper was developed
A new Child Protection Strategy A new Gender Policy and Action Plan

3. How the paper was developed
• Core team: Innocenti, HQ CP, HQ Gender
• Total of 11 versions
• External reviewers:
• UNICEF reviewers: Catherine Poulton, Esther Ruiz, James Grey,
Kazuaki Tsujii, Kendra Gregson, Maha Muna, Rachel Harvey, Shelly
Abdool, Sheema Sen Gupta
Name Affiliation
Anna Giudice UNODC
Avni Amin WHO
Chrissy Hart Together for Girls
Clara Alemann Promundo
Dipak Naker Raising Voices
Elizabeth Dartnall Sexual Violence Research Initiative
Emily Esplen UK FDCO (DFID)
Melissa Alvarado UN Women
Shanaaz Matthews University of Cape Town
Wendy Ann O’Brien UNODC
Yolanda Iriarte UN Women

4. What the paper covers
1. Rationale for greater attention to gender
dimensions of violence
2. Existing frameworks for action: INSPIRE +
RESPECT
3. Review of evidence on effective gender-
transformative strategies
4. Ways UNICEF can strengthen violence
prevention and response
5. Recommendations for UNICEF’s strategic
planning

5. Important points to keep in mind
1. UNICEF is already undertaking some of the actions recommended
2. Paper suggests strengthening existing work and ensuring it is
evidence-based
3. While capacities may be overstretched, important to note that:
• Suggested changes are likely to improve effectiveness of programs
• In many cases, it’s not about “doing more”, but about “doing
differently”, “doing better” and “doing together”
4. This is a new area of knowledge: we are all learning together
5. UNICEF has a unique opportunity to help build the evidence base
and lead the way

6. 1
Rationale for greater attention to
gender dimensions of violence

7. Levels, patterns, and risk factors for violence are
different for girls and boys, women and men
• Women and children are more likely to experience violence
perpetrated by those close to them
• Men represent 80% homicide victims but women 6x more likely
than men to be killed by an intimate partner
• Most research finds girls experience higher levels of sexual
violence than boys
• Boys are more likely to be victims of homicide

8. Why use a gender transformative approach?
1. Gender inequality and violence are mutually reinforcing.
2. Unequal gender norms contribute to violence at different levels:
• Individual level - boys and men who espouse unequal gender norms more likely
to perpetrate VAC and VAW
• National level - strongest predictors of VAW include:
• norms condoning male control of female behavior
• extent to which laws disadvantage women compared to men
3. Structural gender inequalities increase vulnerability to violence
4. Multiple forms of marginalization compound vulnerability to violence

10. IPV and violent discipline in the home
• IPV and violent discipline often co-occur in the same household
• Children whose mothers experience IPV suffer negative consequences,
regardless of whether they experience direct violence
• Both IPV and violent discipline have gendered, intergenerational effects
• exposure increases risk of later perpetration (boys) and victimization (girls)
• IPV and violent discipline have common roots and risk factors
• gender inequality, acceptability of violence
• Acceptance of wife-beating correlates with acceptance and use of violent
discipline

11. Intergenerational effects of violence
• Pathways by which IPV affects children are complex
and gendered
• Women living with IPV face difficult decisions on
how to protect children
• Gendered assumptions about parents affect how
systems approach IPV
• Study from Asia and Pacific:
• men exposed to childhood trauma more likely to
perpetrate IPV in adulthood
• women exposed to childhood trauma more likely to
experience IPV in adulthood

12. Violence against adolescents
Adolescents often experience forms of violence common among younger children (e.g.
violent discipline) as well as adulthood (e.g. IPV)
• Adolescent girls report higher levels of sexual abuse than boys
• Rates and patterns of adolescent homicide vary widely by sex
• Homicide rates for boys are 4 times higher than girls
• Girls more likely to be killed by an intimate partner and to be raped before killed
• Adolescent girls face greater risks of IPV than adolescent boys
• Girls face reproductive health consequences from sexual violence that boys do not
• Adolescent boys and girls face gendered barriers to help-seeking
• LGBTQI+ youth face a heighted risk of violence

13. 2
Frameworks for action

14. INSPIRE:
Seven Strategies
for Ending VAC
• Implementation/enforcement of laws
• Norms and values
• Safe environments
• Parental and caregiver support
• Income and economic strengthening
• Response and support services
• Education and life skills

15. RESPECT:
Preventing violence
against women
• Relationship skills strengthened
• Empowerment of women
• Services ensured
• Poverty reduced
• Environments made safe
• Child and adolescent abuse prevented
• Transformed attitudes, beliefs and
norms

16. INSPIRE: End violence against children RESPECT: Prevent violence against women
Implementation and enforcement of laws
Put in place and facilitate enforcement of laws and
policies*
Norms and values Transformed attitudes, beliefs, and norms
Safe environments Environments made safe
Parent and caregiver support Child and adolescent abuse prevented
Income and economic strengthening
Poverty reduced
Empowerment of women
Response and support services Services ensured
Education and life skills Relationships skills strengthened
Multi-sectoral collaboration
Monitoring and evaluation
Coordination and partnership across sectors
Strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems
How do INSPIRE and RESPECT frameworks compare?

17. 3
Review of evidence on effective
gender-transformative strategies

18. A gender transformative approach
addresses the causes of gender-
based inequalities and works to
transform harmful gender roles,
norms, and power imbalances.

19. The gender continuum
Source: UNICEF (2019) Technical note on gender-transformative approaches in the global programme to end child
marriage phase II: a summary for practitioners.

20. What we know about gender
transformative violence programming
• Evidence about effective strategies to prevent and respond to VACW growing rapidly.
• Evidence confirms that violence against children and adolescents is preventable.
But, existing evidence has important limitations :
• lack of high-quality evaluations from LMIC
• heterogeneity of interventions
• weaknesses in evaluation designs and unclear how to measure impact of interventions
• lack of focus on gender or diversity
• most target individual, rather than system-level changes

21. 4
Ways UNICEF can strengthen
gender transformative violence
programming

23. 9 ways UNICEF can strengthen gender
transformative violence programming
1. Strengthen coordinated and multisectoral action
2. Generate evidence for action
3. Strengthen gender transformational work in legal and policy reform
4. Strengthen capacities of systems and institutions
5. Strengthen services for girls, boys and women who experience violence
6. Promote community mobilization and social norms change
7. Improve economic empowerment of women and girls
8. Support gender responsive caregiver support
9. Strengthen gender transformative adolescent programming

24. Examples from UNICEF
• Justice: In Nepal, UNICEF trained 350 law enforcement and justice officials to use
gender and child-friendly approaches to case management. Nearly 50% increase in
reported cases of rape, child marriage, domestic violence (2018 -2019) suggests
reduced barriers to reporting.
• Education: UNICEF led Global Working Group to End School-Related Gender-Based
Violence, makes schools safer, more gender-sensitive and inclusive. In 2019, 49% of
UNICEF-supported countries had mechanisms to prevent and respond to school-related
gender-based violence.
• Gender-based violence in emergencies: UNICEF works to strengthen child protection
systems in emergencies and integrate gender-based violence risk mitigation across
sectors. @Catherine, would you like to add more?

25. Ending Violence against Women and
Children in Asia and the Pacific:
Opportunities and Challenges for
Collaborative and Integrative Approaches
WHAT
Joint (UNICEF + UNFPA + UN Women)
multi-country exploratory study in Cambodia, Papua New Guinea,
the Philippines and Viet Nam.
HOW
• Desk review
• 4 Case studies via country visits
• Series of informal dialogues
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• What is the status of existing VAW and VAC policies, action plans, prevention and response efforts in region?
• Which policies, action plans, programs or services have achieved some degree of VAW and VAC coordination or
integration?
• How do VAW-focused and VAC-focused stakeholders collaborate or interact? How do donors influence the agenda?
• What are the areas of tension between VAC and VAW work? How do various stakeholders address these?
• What opportunities exist within current policies, action plans, programs or services to introduce or enhance integration?
• What overarching opportunities and challenges exist for addressing intersections between VAC and VAW by sister UN
entities with mandates covering these issues?
IF possible, include cover of the
EAPRO report

26. Generate evidence for action
• Gender dimensions of intersections between IPV and violent discipline
o What strategies are effective at preventing and mitigating both IPV and
violence against children in the home?
• Gender dimensions of violence against adolescents
o What strategies are effective for promoting non-violent, gender equitable,
empowered relationships in adolescence in LMIC?
• Strengthening systems and coordination
o How well do child protection systems meet the needs of adolescents
(including LGBTQI+) who experience violence?
o How can coordination across systems (CP, health, etc.) be strengthened to
respond to the needs of children and women?
• How can we improve gender-transformative violence programming?
o Monitor and evaluate rigorously to promote effective programming, ensure no
unintended harm and build the evidence base

27. 5
Recommendations for UNICEF’s
strategic planning

28. Global evidence generation
• Improve methodological tools for researching sexual
violence against girls and boys
• Increase geographic coverage, quality and
data on violence against children and adolescents
• Explore intersections and co-occurrence of IPV and
discipline
• Invest in systematic reviews of gender transformative
violence programming in LMICs (accessible in multiple
languages)
• Strengthen capacities for ethical, safe participatory
sound research at global and national levels
• Strengthen evidence base on effective / promising
to prevent and respond to violence against children,
adolescents and women in coordinated way and help
countries integrate emerging knowledge into policies
programs
Support for country offices and governments
• Prioritise approaches to child protection, gender
transformation, violence prevention that integrate attention
to these issues across systems and institutions, including
health and education sectors
• Advocate for greater attention to civil rights, legal equality,
and social and economic empowerment of women and girls, as
essential to long-term prevention of violence
• Help bridge gaps between VAC/A and VAW in programming and
coordination
• Help child protection systems understand dynamics of IPV
and collaborate w/ systems for women
• Ensure legal and child protection systems protect rights and
wellbeing of both children and women
• Increase investment in multi-sectoral, long-term, and
sustainable programming that aims for changes in gender
norms, gender power imbalances
• Develop better methods for measuring long-term change
across whole systems and institutions and build donor support
for long-term systems change
Approach gender equality and violence as rights issues that are
inextricably linked, as are intersections between violence against
children and violence against women.

29. Thank you