Reducing violence in young children’s lives
Reducing violence in young children's lives is one of three goals the Bernard van Leer Foundation is pursuing from 2010 to 2015. The others are taking quality early education to scale and improving young children's physical environments.
The first time the UN ever published a global report on violence and children was 2006 and it was a report littered with concerns about the lack of reliable data. Some countries had no data at all – a situation with even less transparency when it comes to the youngest children.
What the reporting did find was the magnitude of the problem: it is spread across Northern and Southern countries; estimates suggest that at least 275 million children suffer from domestic violence annually; 86% of children 2 to 14 experience physical or psychological aggression; and an unknown amount are exposed to violence in the community.
This last aspect is of particular concern in the Americas and Israel. In the Americas, drug-related violence is rising at alarming rates. Our own research and projects in this region have found parents refusing to let their children outside, and 5-year-olds expressing their desires to become drug kingpins in the future.
This problem was highlighted in the strategic planning process because of the unique vulnerabilities of young children and the profound, lifelong impacts that violence can have on their development.
The youngest children are, first and foremost, the least protected. They are physically weaker, have fewer people to talk to (if they talk at all) and are less able to understand and manage the harmful social and emotional consequences of violence.
Recent research in the area of brain development has affirmed this, demonstrating the particular sensitivities of the young child’s brain to high levels of emotional stress. This research posits similar consequences both for those who are targets of direct violence and those who experience it only as witnesses.
The best single predictor of violence as an adult, as both victim and as aggressor, is the experience of violence in childhood.
Our preliminary research to find out who is addressing this problem, and how, found major gaps both in terms of the global understanding of the problem and the commitment of resources to address it.
International funding is scarce, and government agencies with a mandate for this specific concern are usually very weak, lack resources and are among the last to be considered in budgetary allocations. Very few private foundations have taken up this problem and none have done so exclusively from the perspective of the youngest children.
We have a foothold in this area, which we can use to break new ground and complement the existing global trends that favor legislative approaches and measures of special protection. While both of these are needed, legislation alone is insufficient and there is a gap in efforts to prevent violence and tackle the problem in such a way that considers the unique vulnerabilities of the youngest children.
Though only in their nascent stages, our experience has ranged from community-based initiatives to create ‘safe spaces’ for kids, hearts and minds campaigns, stress reduction through economic incentives and improved labor policy and efforts to measure and monitor child security in ways that produce reliable data.
Each of these has brought us into contact with ‘unlikely stakeholders’, from manufacturing associations in Mexico to community radio stations in Colombia – the kinds of new relationships we expect in the future.
