Child Protection Challenges and Opportunities:  The Need for Evidence-Informed Strategies in South Africa ________________________________________Human Sciences Research CouncilSeptember 25, 2014

Gordon Phaneuf, MSW, RSW

Chief Executive Officer

Child Welfare League of Canada

www.cwlc.ca

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Presentation Outline

• Context• Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities• Evidence-Informed Strategies• Public Health Surveillance Model • Child Protection Data

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• The WHO World Report on Violence against Children (2006) identified violence against children as a serious threat to global development

• Children are one of the most vulnerable and resilient populations, who can experience multiple forms of violence over the course of their lives

Context

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• Violence against children is widespread and occurs in the home, family, school, work, community, in-care and justice arena.

• Research and evidence are essential to develop comprehensive national strategies to respond to violence against children.

• The lack of comprehensive nation-level data on child abuse has contributed to ineffective interventions, misdirected resources, re-traumatized children and the continued perpetuation of the cycle of abuse.

Context

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“There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.”

N. Mandela

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UNICEF Definition of Child Protection:

“Preventing and responding to violence, exploitation, and abuse of all children in all contexts. This also includes reaching children who are uniquely vulnerable to these threats, such as those living without family care, in the street or in situations of conflict or natural disaster.”

Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

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• One of the key drivers for developing + strengthening

child protection systems is to tie their development to nation-level social development strategies.

• Child protection must be a defining focus for social development, rather than being conceived as an afterthought or as an appendage to broader development strategies.

• Public policies that advance social development need to reinforce a child protective focus and those policies must be evidence-informed.

Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

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• Social development is a priority focus for virtually all countries.

• In pursuing their social development agenda (governance, capacity building, institutional development, etc) nations must focus on the rights, needs and protection of children.

• Social infrastructure and child protection should be seen as being complementary, not separate and distinct.

• Key aspects of child socialization - family, school, social organizations and community, must serve to protect children.

Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

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• Need to situate cp system development in the larger context of the social determinants child health and well-being, eg. access to social support + recreation services; safe physical environments; social + economic equality; adequate housing, nutrition, etc.

• Resist systemic pressures toward developing a reactive, fragmented, and isolated CP system.

• Promote continuum of social development initiatives to reflect & complement the CP imperative.

• Model evidenced-based, community-grounded, prevention-focused approaches. 

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Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

• Invoke the legal and moral authority of international instruments & commitments, eg. CRC, Optional Protocols, MDGs, and instruments for peace building etc.

• Re-focus and re-align international development assistance with child protection as a central focus.

• Forge new cross-sectoral partnerships focused on child well-being and child protection, eg. Gates Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, WHO’s Violence Prevention Alliance, UBS Optimus Foundation, Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.

• Solicit the attention and secure the interest of the corporate sector.

Child Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

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“Without good data, national planning is compromised, effective policy-making and resource mobilization are hampered, and targeted interventions are limited in their ability to prevent and combat violence against children.”

Marta Santos PaisSpecial Representative of the Secretary-General on

Violence against Children

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Evidence-Informed Strategies

• Evidence-informed strategies which address child protection serve to advance and reinforce social stability.

• Reliable, accurate population-based data is instrumental to social development + it is fundamental to the development child protection responses.

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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• Drawing the connections between child well-being and social stability.

• Promoting the progressive realization of children’s rights.

• Constructing on-going CP data collection systems and generating child protection data that give voice to child rights.

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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• Experience shows that countries without basic data on

child maltreatment have difficulties developing and implementing a child protection agenda.

• Evidence equates with visibility: absence of evidence feeds with denial.

• “If it’s not counted - it doesn’t count.”• The manager’s mantra “If you can’t measure it, you can’t

manage it.”• Each successive form of child maltreatment has been met

with denial, incredulity and ridicule the antidote is robust, incontrovertible evidence.

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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Without good data we don’t know which way we are going

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• Many countries do not have comprehensive systems to register all births and deaths.

• Child abuse data collection systems have major implications for child protection response and improved developmental outcomes.

• Public sector resources are often directed to child welfare administrative data or worse for management information systems (MIS) rather than robust national child protection surveillance systems.

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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• Not knowing the extent of a problem is a key way to undermine efforts to resource the solution.

• Need to think of evidence generation & data collection as some of the first things we do in formulating child protection strategies.

• All major public investments are built on a foundation grounded in data. “an army moves on its stomach, and a bureaucracy is only moved with data”

Evidence-Informed Strategies: Political Economy of Child Protection

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• UNICEF: Global Monitoring for Child Protection - Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)

• MICS provide data comparability across jurisdictions • Core MICS Indicators for Child Protection:

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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Birth RegistrationChild LabourSchool Attendance among Child LabourersChild Labour among StudentsViolent DisciplineMarriage before age 16Marriage before age 18

Young women age 15-19 Years currently married or in unionPolygamySpousal age differenceApproval for FGM/CPrevalence of FGM/CAttitudes towards Domestic ViolenceChild Disability

• International Labour Organization - Statistical Information and Monitoring Programme on Child Labour (SIMPOC).

• Assists countries in the collection, documentation, processing and analysis of child labour data.

• Tanzania, for example, introduced a Child Labour Monitoring System under the guidance of the ILO, resulting in a National Action Plan to support vulnerable children. In turn this is generating a national/regional ILO conference on child labour

Evidence-Informed Strategies

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Public Health Surveillance Model

Source: Preventing Violence: A guide to implementing the recommendations of the World Report on Violence and Health (WHO, 2004)

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Ecological Model on Child Maltreatment

• Defining and monitoring the extent of the problem• Identifying the causes of the problem• Formulating and testing ways of dealing with the problem• Applying widely the measures that are found to work

Public Health Surveillance Model (Four Steps)

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Public Health Surveillance Model Child Maltreatment Surveillance Cycle

* Adapted from CDC

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• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Violence Against Children surveys (VAC) are transformative in their impact. Do not reflect a population health or system development focus- “what is counted, counts”

• Clinton Global Initiative, UBS Optimus Foundation & Violence Prevention Alliance (WHO) champion PH Model

• PH Model has the allure, rigour and credibility of the health sciences.

• In emerging democracies and societies with limited experience with political pluralism this approach can be uniquely persuasive.

Public Health Surveillance Model

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Summary

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• What is counted – counts.• What is not counted, counts less.• Change happens, but positive change must be

underpinned and reinforced with evidence.• Other sectors acknowledge they use and need

data to generate their desired outcomes.• Corporate sector, thrives on evidence. Data is

seen as an irreplaceable pathway to profits.• Child protection sector must “exploit” data to

assisting protecting vulnerable populations.

Child protection involves balancing the needs of the vulnerable with their right to self-determination

“Childhood decides.”

Jean Paul Sartre

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• Assists with assessing the impact of maltreatment• Supports identification & detection• Documents familial & social context • Determines distribution and burden of the problem• Contributes to understanding developmental

outcomes• Assists in planning

Child Protection Data: Nation-levelValue for Practice

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• Increased child protection capacity• Facilitates intersectoral cooperation• Strengthened understanding of abuse and

social determinants of health• Identification and documentation of service

structure gaps

Child Protection DataIndirect Benefits

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Child Protection DataValue for Research

• Analysis of rates of different kinds of abuse• Explores the interaction of social

determinants = risk of maltreatment• Identifies trends to inform planning + the

political economy of prevention • Examines demographic characteristics of

child, family, community and perpetrators

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• Establishes a national baseline to enable future trend analysis

• Enables comparison of CP data with other population-wide datasets on children

• Identifies areas for future research• Strengthens the salience of maltreatment as a

priority concern for social scientific inquiry

Child Protection Data: nation-levelValue for Research

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Child Protection DataValue for Policy

• Agenda-setting• Context-setting• Providing baseline data against which

prevention efforts can be assessed• Facilitates evidence-based decision-making• Enables analysis at local, national and

international levels

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Child Protection DataValue for Advocacy

• Gives visibility to the issues• Provides “Fact-based” advocacy• Legitimizes demand for public resources• Provides evidence to address reaction +

denial• Provides benchmarks for accountability• Supports a children’s rights approach

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