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Affiliation
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Centre for Evidence-Based Interventions, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; School of Behavioural Sciences, North-West University, Vanderbeijlpark, South Africa. |
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Abstract
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Enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is every child's right to protection from violence and harm. Although 196 of the 197 UN member states are signatories to the CRC (the USA is the exception), more than 1 billion children experience violence each year.1 However, there is good news—the elimination of violence in childhood now features prominently in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The newly formed Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children brings together a diverse range of stakeholders committed to eradicating violence against children, and is focusing resources to facilitate change.
Despite this increased attention, only in the past decade or so have rigorous nationally representative studies been published on the prevalence of sexual abuse and other forms of violence against children across a range of countries.1, 2, 3 In this issue, Catherine Ward and colleagues4 contribute to this nascent literature by reporting on the prevalence of sexual abuse among children and adolescents in South Africa. Their rigorous and well presented nationally representative cross-sectional study illuminates a high prevalence of lifetime experience of sexual violence, with 9·99% of boys and 14·61% of girls aged 15–17 reporting experience of non-contact or contact sexual abuse.
Ward and colleagues make a further important methodological advance—they show that prevalence estimates are higher via a school-based survey, which allowed for passive parental consent, than via a household-based survey, which required active parental consent. In both home-based and school-based surveys, self-completed questionnaires that enabled the anonymous disclose of abuse yielded higher prevalence estimates than interviewer-administered questionnaires.
What does this mean for the field of child abuse research? As Ward and colleagues' findings suggest, methods matter. Ward and colleagues4 and others,5 highlight differences in male and female adolescents' willingness to report sexual violence. In particular, boys seem to be more likely to disclose experience of sexual violence when they are afforded an anonymous method of disclosure than if they are interviewed face to face. This finding suggests that widely used face-to-face interview methods risk systematically underestimating the levels of sexual violence experienced by boys. Ward and colleagues also had higher rates of disclosure in their school-based survey, which required only passive parental consent, than in their household-based survey. Not requiring active parental consent is likely to enable the participation of more children who are vulnerable and marginalised, which could give more accurate prevalence estimates. Notably, the estimates from this study are substantially lower than those from the Violence Against Children Surveys (VACS) in other sub-Saharan African countries.6, 7 Direct comparison of methods is not possible since no VACS have been held in South Africa, but this wide variation does raise the question of whether part of the difference in prevalence could be due to the methods used...
Language: en |