Peer-reviewed article
Thirty years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: Progress and challenges in building statistical evidence on violence against children
Claudia Cappa, Nicole Petrowski ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This article reviews progress in collecting statistical data on violence against children over thirty years since the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted. While data collection has expanded through international surveys like MICS, DHS, and VACS, revealing that violence is widespread (affecting roughly 3 in 4 young children and half of school-aged students), significant gaps remain in measurement practices and data quality. The document identifies major challenges including inconsistent definitions, inadequate safeguards for participants, limited research capacity, and underexplored forms of abuse such as sexual violence against boys and commercial sexual exploitation.
Key points
- Roughly 3 in 4 children aged 2-4 years worldwide experience physical punishment and/or psychological aggression by caregivers
- Half of students aged 13-15 experience peer-to-peer violence in and around school
- One in three adolescent girls aged 15-19 have been victims of intimate partner violence
- Data quality is highly uneven due to partial definitions of violence, poor implementation of study protocols, and inadequate participant protection mechanisms
- Few countries collect comparable data at regular intervals, making it difficult to assess progress in reducing violence over time
Limitations
This document reviews existing evidence and methodological challenges but does not present original empirical findings or test interventions. It does not provide data on specific countries beyond aggregated global statistics, and cannot definitively establish trends in violence reduction without longitudinal comparable data.
Abstract
Data and Analytics Section, UNICEF, United StatesThe protection of children from all forms of violence is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations General Assembly, 1989) and other international treaties.Yet an increasing body of statistical evidence documents children's widespread exposure to old and new forms of violence, from harsh disciplinary methods to online bullying.The availability of data on violence against children has significantly increased in recent years, allowing a more refined understanding of the magnitude and underlying risk factors (United Nations Children's Fund, 2014 and 2017).This achievement is due in part to the integration of violence-related questions in multitopic surveys as well as the surge in national studies dedicated exclusively to capturing information on children's experiences of violence.International household survey programmes such as the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS, programme website) and the Demographic & Health Surveys (DHS, programme website) have incorporated modules on exposure to corporal punishment, psychological aggression, sexual abuse and intimate partner violence in their standard questionnaires.The Global School-based Student Health Surveys (GSHS, programme website) and the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children Study (HBSC, programme website) have sought to capture different forms of peer violence.Violence Against Children Surveys (VACS, programme website) have measured boys' and girls' victimization in fifteen countries.The data collected through these sources indicate that violence against children is both common and widespread: roughly 3 in 4 young children between the ages of 2 and 4 years worldwide are regularly subjected to physical punishment and/or psychological aggression by caregivers in the home (United Nations Children's Fund, 2017); half of students aged 13-15 experience peer-to-peer violence in and around school (United Nations Children's Fund, 2018); and one in three adolescent girls aged 15-19 years have been victims of intimate partner violence at some point in their lives (United Nations Children's Fund, 2014).While the available evidence has begun to shed light on the global nature of violence against children and the fact that some forms, like violent discipline, affect all children regardless of socioeconomic status, data have also confirmed the vulnerability of certain groups of children due to individual characteristics such as sex (United Nations Children's Fund, 2014) or race (United Nations Children's Fund, 2017).And because only a handful of countries have collected comparable data at regular intervals, it is difficult to assess whether there has been any significant progress in reducing violence against children over time.Despite the increase in data on violence against children, there are currently no established, internationally agreed best practices for measuring and producing statistics on this sensitive issue.A review of quantitative studies on violence against children over a 15year period found that the quality was highly uneven, for a variety of reasons.In some cases, partial definitions of violence were used, resulting in underestimates (Child Protection Monitoring & Evaluation Reference Group, 2014).In others, no measures were put in place to ensure the rigorous implementation of the study protocols.And in too many instances, data collection was undertaken without adequate mechanisms to safeguard the protection of the participants.These deficits were compounded by the limited availability of national research institutes with technical expertise specific to collecting data on violence against children.Some forms of child abuse that are particularly challenging to measure, such as commercial sexual exploitation, sexual violence against boys, and the wide variety of forms of psychological maltreatment, have been largely ignored in data collection (United Nations Committee on