Does the Good Schools Toolkit Reduce Physical, Sexual and Emotional Violence, and Injuries, in Girls and Boys equally? A Cluster-Randomised Controlled Trial

Abstract

We aimed to investigate whether the Good School Toolkit reduced emotional violence, severe physical violence, sexual violence and injuries from school staff to students, as well as emotional, physical and sexual violence between peers, in Ugandan primary schools. We performed a two-arm cluster randomised controlled trial with parallel assignment. Forty-two schools in one district were allocated to intervention (n = 21) or wait-list control (n = 21) arms in 2012. We did cross-sectional baseline and endline surveys in 2012 and 2014, and the Good School Toolkit intervention was implemented for 18 months between surveys. Analyses were by intention to treat and are adjusted for clustering within schools and for baseline school-level proportions of outcomes. The Toolkit was associated with an overall reduction in any form of violence from staff and/or peers in the past week towards both male (aOR = 0.34, 95%CI 0.22–0.53) and female students (aOR = 0.55, 95%CI 0.36–0.84). Injuries as a result of violence from school staff were also lower in male (aOR = 0.36, 95%CI 0.20–0.65) and female students (aOR = 0.51, 95%CI 0.29–0.90). Although the Toolkit seems to be effective at reducing violence in both sexes, there is some suggestion that the Toolkit may have stronger effects in boys than girls. The Toolkit is a promising intervention to reduce a wide range of different forms of violence from school staff and between peers in schools, and should be urgently considered for scale-up. Further research is needed to investigate how the intervention could engage more successfully with girls.

An Explanatory Model for the Relationship between Motivation in Sport, Victimization, and Video Game Use in Schoolchildren

“…The results indicate that girls suffer more verbal victimization than boys, while boys suffer more physical and relational victimization than girls [ 54 , 55 ]. In line with the findings of Devries et al [ 56 ], it is clear that boys are more likely to victimize or be victimized physically, whereas in girls there tends to be a greater bias towards verbal aggression and victimization. The reason for this may be that boys are less fearful of physical aggression, as a result of social and cultural factors [ 57 ].…”

Delivering a Parenting Program in South Africa: The Impact of Implementation on Outcomes

“…As highlighted in relation to intimate partner violence against women, violence is often under-reported and "willingness to disclose often improves with increased awareness about the definitions and extent of such abuse" (Kim et al 2007(Kim et al : 1799. Similarly, in a recent study of the whole-school violence-reduction intervention the Good Schools Toolkit in Uganda, the researchers found an increase in girls' experience of sexual violence as a result of the intervention, presumably due to increased reporting thanks to girls' increased sense of safety to report violence (Devries et al 2017). Although the intervention described in our study did not explicitly address definitions of child maltreatment or children's rights, it is possible that the intervention increased awareness of maltreatment by cultivating adolescents' experience with non-violent problem-solving and communication.…”

Interventions to reduce gender-based violence among young people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS in low-income and middle-income countries

“…The most common components were information on SRHR [29, [34][35][36][37]39,[41][42][43], GBV and gender norms [29,30,[34][35][36][37][38]40,46,48], relationships [29,34,40,42,47] and communication [34,35,37,40,41]. Less frequent were empowerment and self-efficacy [39,44,45], de-escalation [41,44,46,48], self-defence [44][45][46], safe spaces [30,35,36,42], financial education [35,42,43] vocational skills [41][42][43], networking/social support/mentoring [35,42,…”