Safe to Learn’s calls to action and tools have helped governments around the world identify the steps they must take to prevent and address violence in and around schools. Now, it’s their turn to ensure schools are environments where children are safe to learn, develop, and thrive.
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.
Kanga Rasi, Social Justice Advisor and Africa Campaign Director at the Brave Movement, speaks about the power of data to advocate for policies to prevent gender-based 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.
While school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is prevalent, it is also preventable, and there are evidence-based solutions that show that teachers and school personnel can be significant changemakers when they take active roles in preventing, addressing, and responding to violence.
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.
To mark World Education Day this year, we spoke to Yona Nestel of Plan International and Olanike Timipa-Uge of Teenage Network to learn more about the impact of COVID-19 on girls’ access to education.
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.