Beyond Risk Factors: Structural Drivers of Violence Affecting Children

Abstract

As global data on violence affecting children (VAC) has emerged, the scope of violence has become increasingly clear as well as alarming: over 1 billion children between the ages of 2 and 17 experience violence every year (Hillis et al., Pediatrics 137(3), e20154079, 2016). Although the numbers may be clear, understanding why and how this violence manifests in children’s lives is a critical and still developing field of practice. The Multi-Country Study on the Drivers of Violence Affecting Children in Italy, Peru, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe set out in 2014 to understand what drives violence and what can be done to prevent it (Maternowska et al., Vulnerable Child Youth Stud 13(Supp 1), 2018; Maternowska et al. The multi-country study on the drivers of violence affecting children. A cross-country snapshot of findings. Florence: UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti. Retrieved from www.unicef-irc.org/publications/8, 2016). Through a systematic literature review, secondary analysis and an intervention mapping, national teams analysed individual, family and community-level risk and protective factors as well as the macro forces or “drivers” of violence—the often invisible forms of harm that create the structural and institutional context in which violence affecting children occurs. Our approach, working in close collaboration with national teams, demonstrates how violence manifests in children’s lives. The study considers a nation’s geohistoric place as essential to understanding how structure-based inequalities work in potent combination with the risk and protective factors to determine a child’s safety. We present a model, called the child-centred integrated framework, for placing our understanding of VAC squarely within the child’s social ecology. In this chapter we use examples of two drivers of violence common across all study countries—poverty and migration—to illustrate the power of structural factors on children’s everyday lives, with a focus on our findings from Peru. Our interpretations of violence are useful in that they lend practitioners of peace psychology a kindred view of the world but focusing on violence affecting children and their families from a population-based perspective, while also proposing ways to build more effective violence prevention policy and programmes.

Understanding and ending violence against children: A holistic approach.

“…Increasing the violence still further are the markers of race or ethnicity-the children's physical appearance-which often evokes bullying and psychological abuse such as teasing by peers. In this manner, indigenous children's lived experiences of violence are deeply intertwined with structural factors such as deep poverty, corporate exploitation, migration and uprooting from wider families and communities, and racism (Maternowska et al, 2019). Galtung (1990) defined cultural violence as "those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence-exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art .…”

“…Analyses of the structural drivers of violence against children also help to illuminate the reciprocal relationship between structural and episodic violence. In Peru, for example, there is widening economic inequality, and nearly 8 million people—mostly indigenous people in very poor, rural areas—remain trapped in deep poverty (Anderson, 2016; Maternowska, Fry, Potts, & Casey, 2019). To enable family survival, many mothers migrate to neighboring Chile or to large cities, leaving their children behind.…”

Violence and adversity among pregnant women and new mothers in central Vietnam

“…The INSPIRE framework underpins the risk factors of IPV at three levels individual, relationship, and structural factors (Loan et al, 2018;Maternowska et al, 2020). At the structural level, our research emphasised social norm barriers that are influential in Confucian societies that are influenced by the three teachings that can prevent women from disclosing victimisation and seeking support services.…”

Polyvictimization and Adolescent Health and Well-Being in Ethiopia: The Mediating Role of Resilience

“…This framework emphasizes how risk factors and broader societal drivers interact with each other; how these risk factors change based on the individuals' identity, developmental stage, and social context; and how these risk factors and drivers are complex and dynamic. Unlike the original social ecological model, the framework situates the individual at the center of this graphical representation rather than being in the smallest of a series of concentric circles [43,64]. For this study, the framework was adapted by centering an adolescent, rather than a child, in the model (Figure 1), and it was used to guide the development and interpretation of this paper's analytical models, including the selection of independent variables and covariates.…”

“…At the interpersonal level, polyvictimization risk factors include family structure (e.g., living with a non-biological father or in a single-headed household), household poverty, parental history of substance use, parental illness or psychiatric problems, parental intimate partner violence (IPV), and quality of relationships (both family and peer) [13,31,[38][39][40]. Community, societal, and structural polyvictimization risk factors include neighborhood-level poverty, living in unsafe neighborhoods, mistrust and low social cohesion, gender and social inequalities, weak legal sanctions, and gender and social norms that support violence or foster conditions in which violence may be more or less likely to occur or to be condoned [38,[41][42][43]. Inequitable gender norms in particular are significantly associated with experiencing physical and or psychological household violence [37].…”