A growing call to classify gender-based violence services and child protection services as essential services and to invest in them: Child Protection in the age of COVID-19
Why this is important!
Given the mounting evidence that COVID-19 is leading to increased violence against women and children, it is well past time for the big international aid agencies to immediately classify gender-based violence (GBV) services and child protection services as essential services. While this classification from non-essential to essential would not be a full fix to a historical problem based on structural inequalities between men and women and adults and children, it would usher in a number of dynamic changes: funding, scale and quality would be achieved, which in turn would lead to a reduction in violence, which after all is central to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, 2030.
COVID-19 is a human rights crisis for women and children.
While COVID-19 is a global public health crisis with a twin economic crisis, it is also more than that. We are seeing growing evidence that the pandemic is creating an epidemic of violence against women and children, in both industrial and developing countries.
According to UN Women, approximately 137 women globally are murdered each day by a member of their own family. This occurs against a backdrop of an estimated 35 per cent of women worldwide having experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or sexual violence. The pandemic is worsening the situation for women by increasing economic and social stress, restricting their movements and access to essential services, and increasing their social isolation.
The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, reports that 1 in 2 children experience violence every year, a child dies of violence every 7 minutes, and 10 million children worldwide are subjected to modern slavery. The pandemic is worsening the situation for children by increasing the risk factors associated with violence and neglect. UNICEF identifies that during previous health emergencies girls were subjected to increased levels of violence, early marriage, and pregnancy. Lockdowns and restrictions on children’s movement increases their isolation and places them out of reach and out of sight of support agencies.
This evidence has led to the United Nations Secretary General António Guterres to call for measures to address a “horrifying global surge in domestic violence” directed towards women and girls, linked to lockdowns imposed by governments responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Violence against women and children has occurred throughout human history, but prevention is possible.
Child abuse and violence against women have occurred throughout human history. They are not original events with defined points of emergence but rather are part of the mainstream of human history, based on structural inequalities between men and women, and adults and children. There are various theories about why these structural inequalities exist, but my favorite interpretation is by Florence Rush, a second wave feminist, social worker, thinker, and early researcher into child abuse. She writes in the Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children that:
“Traditionally women and children (male and female) have been cast together. They shared the same minority status, have been exploited as domestic and wage slaves and for the greater part of history even wore the same clothing to distinguish them from adult males. Together they have been idealized, romanticized, infantilized, trivialized, and desexualized. Since both women and children have been lumped together as helpless, dependent, and powerless, they even share the same “feminine” gender and consequently both have been sexually used and abused by men.”
So, while the classification of GBV services and child protection services as essential services would not be a full fix to this historical problem, violence is a human action, which means that an alternative human action to violence is possible, which in turn means that prevention is therefore possible.
The inter-generational transmission of violence can be stopped.
For many women, in most places in the world, violence begins in childhood and continues for much of their lives. In childhood, girls who see violence perpetrated against the women in their families and communities can come to see this violence as normal. Boys who see violence perpetrated by the men in their families and communities against women and girls and against each other, can also come to see this as what boys and men do.
Breaking the inter-generational transmission of violence against women and children starts by helping children to understand that violence is not a given, something to accept or aspire to, or to inflict upon others. The best way to do this is to have mechanisms in place so that each case of child abuse, of sexual assault and of domestic violence generates a response whereby justice agencies such as the police (competent, well trained and bias free!), and welfare agencies, whether they be government or civil society, take appropriate action. When children see that violence is not the norm but an unhealthy aberration, and is penalized as such, inter-generational change becomes possible.
GBV and child protection services play an essential role in preventing violence.
In industrial and developing countries, GBV and child protection services play a crucial role in efforts to break the inter-generational transmission of violence against women and children. They often provide medical and counselling support for survivors of rape and child abuse. They often provide alternative accommodation options for women and children who cannot return to their homes because it is not safe for them to do so and this is usually because the State has not taken the necessary steps to make it safe for them to do so. They often provide phone-in or email-in helplines; professional support by social workers; counselling, prevention and response interventions; community-based mental health and psychosocial support; parenting support programmes; behaviour change campaigns, and much, much, more.
A quick way to scale up fast.
Some of the largest aid agencies provide gender programming along with various aspects of child rights programming. Retooling and funding them to also provide GBV and child protection services would be a relatively quick way for scaling up interventions and would see a radically improved development landscape where prevention does truly become feasible. This is after all, central to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, 2030. Theresa Puhr, writing in Devex, promotes this course of action and warns that coronavirus is driving a domestic violence pandemic.
The time for change is now.
There is a growing call from within the international development sector, particularly from UN agencies and NGOs, for the sector, and in particular donors, to immediately classify GBV services and child protection services as essential services and to invest in them.
The Committee for the Rights of Children, which is comprised of 18 Independent experts mandated to monitor the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has called on governments to classify ‘core’ child protection services as essential services, as part of its concern about the grave physical, emotional and psychological effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on children. While the Committee does not define ‘core’ services, a reasonable working definition would be services that prevent and respond to violence, exploitation abuse and neglect of children.
The call that child protection services, including the workers in these services, should be designated as essential and resourced accordingly is also part of the Leaders Statement: Violence against children: A hidden crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, 8 April 2020. The Statement was signed by 22 global leaders who came together to call for action to protect children from the heightened risk of violence and to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on children everywhere.
Most significantly the UN has recently released two policy briefs on COVID-19 both of which call for GBV and child protection services to be classified as essential services. They are the Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on Women and the Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on children. The policy brief on women calls for designating domestic violence shelters as essential services and increasing resources to them, and to civil society groups on the front line of the response. The policy brief on children calls to policymakers to seize this moment to protect children from violence, abuse, or exploitation, and to classify core child-protection services as essential.
More than passion and care are needed to protect women and children from violence.
In my career in the UN which spans nearly two decades I cannot recall a time when there was such a consensus about the importance of GBV and child protection interventions. During this time, I have been involved in UN planning cycles and processes in multiple countries and multiple times. This included providing inputs and reviewing UNICEF specific Situational Analysis and UN wide Common Country Assessments to identity development needs and contributing to the design of UNICEF specific responses in the form of Country Programme Documents and broader United Nations Development Assistance Frameworks.
While UNICEF is passionate about child protection, there is not consensus that child protection services are essential in the same way that health and education are essential for children. Within the broader UN there is a genuine care about child protection concerns but not to the extent that child protection is seen as an essential development intervention in the same way that gender or environment concerns are seen. Each new UN planning cycle was a struggle to convince UN agencies to include child protection beyond an issue level i.e., child labour, exploitation, and violence rather than at the programme level that would enable a systems level response to improving the protection of children from harm. Child Protection colleagues working in the big international NGOs also reported facing similar internal challenges.
The recommendation from the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the call from the Leaders Group and the recommendations in the UN Policy Briefs are truly extraordinary and timely. What is needed now is for those agencies that fund international development and those that shape the practice of international development, to translate these calls into concrete action.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Group can fix this problem.
A key body for making this change possible is the United Nations Sustainable Development Group, (UNSDG) which is mandated to ensure that the 32 UN funds, programmes, specialized agencies, departments, and offices are coordinated in their efforts to facilitate and implement development assistance at the country level. The UNSDG is a high-level forum for joint policy formation and decision-making, overseeing the coordination of development operations in 162 countries and territories. It is the main mechanism within the UN for developing the planning frameworks and tools for UN Country Teams to use in developing United Nations Development Assistance Frameworks (UNDAF), such as the United Nations Development Assistance Framework Guidance. What is needed is for this group to set the policy by classifying GBV services and child protection services as essential services. This would include issuing guidance to UN Country Teams to plan accordingly and to donors to fund accordingly.
Shrinking aid dollars and competing need, calls for swift action.
Funding for international aid continues to be redirected to helping countries fight COVID-19. This shift combined with shrinking aid dollars and competing need will create unwelcome incentives for aid agencies to narrow the focus of their aid investments. In Turning back the Poverty Clock: How will COVID-19 impact the world’s poorest people, Homi Kharas and Kristofer Hamel estimate that around 50 million people will be pushed into poverty in 2020 alone. Such seismic shifts in the aid landscape will create more pressure to fund only what is clearly defined as ‘essential’.
When services become classified as essential a whole lot of positive things come into play.
The evidence tells us that when the international development sector invests in essential services, dynamic things happen. When money becomes available, the quality of essential services improves and scale up becomes possible.
Think about it in terms of schools and maternal and child health services both of which are defined as essential. The international community has agreed, through international human rights instruments and development targets (Millennium/Sustainable Development Goals), that all children, girls and boys, have the right to an education; that all women have the right to a safe pregnancy; and that all children have the right to the best start in life. Financial investments in translating this consensus into tangible results has seen the number of children in school in developing countries increase from around 83 per cent in 2000 to more than 90 percent today with close to a 50 per cent decrease in the number of out-of-school children globally, from 100 million in 2000 to around 57 million in 2015. The global under-five mortality rate has declined by more than half, dropping from 90 to 43 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1990 and 2015. Since 1990, the maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 per cent worldwide, and most of the reduction has occurred since 2000.
Prevention is attainable.
Change is possible when there is consensus for action with predictable and sustainable financial investments in that action. Eliminating violence against women and children is totally achievable. Violence is a human action, which means that an alternative human action to violence is possible, which in turn means that prevention is attainable. An immediate investment in essential GBV and child protection services supported by UN agencies and international and local NGOs with expertise in GBV and child protection, or with the capacity to build on their gender and or child rights focus would see a rapid increase in service provision for survivors of violence as well as a rapid increase in prevention activities.
Its time to make it happen!
Upcoming blogs and collaboration
Upcoming blogs will continue to look at different dimensions of child protection in the age of COVID-19 as well as broader issues relating to child protection in international development. Ideas for future blogs are most welcome as are offers to collaborate on writing blogs and think pieces.
