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ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen an upsurge in parent education programmes in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) that aim to help reduce violence against children. This article draws on a narrative review that examined the impact of 42 programmes working with parents of adolescents in LMICs. Here we focus on 17 initiatives that aimed to reduce neglect of, or physical, emotional or sexual violence against adolescents, or to reduce child marriage. Programmes aiming to prevent sexual violence or child marriage generally focused more strongly on understanding and challenging prevailing norms, while those oriented to preventing physical and emotional violence emphasised sharing information and practising new communication skills. We argue that key elements of programme design (group-based participatory sessions, formative research that enabled sensitive framing and adaptation of content) have strong potential to help shift norms that underpin violence against adolescents. To fulfil their potential to change norms underpinning violence against adolescents, programmes should expand their reach, with a particular focus on embedding initiatives within institutions that can take them to scale, promoting male engagement, and support participants to maintain changes over the long-term.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge funding from UK aid for the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) research initiative. For more information please see www.gage.odi.org
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 CitationCure Violence Global. (Retrieved November 22, 2019).
2 UNICEF Data: Child marriage around the world. (Retrieved December Citation16, Citation2019); UNICEF Data: Child marriage among boys. (Retrieved December Citation16, Citation2019). Globally 21.2% of 20–24 year old women and 4.5% of 20–24 year old men married in childhood.
3 For reasons of space, hereafter we will refer to parents and caregivers as ‘parents’ while recognising that not all adolescents live with their parents.
4 For two programmes, FMP and Sinovuyo Teen, it also draws on the available supplementary reports.
5 Some of the studies reviewed additionally indicated that supplementary qualitative studies had taken place but did not report their findings.
6 Schwandt and Underwood (Citation2013); Jejeebhoy et al. (Citation2014).
7 Sim et al. (Citation2014); Jordans et al. (Citation2013).
8 Whether adolescents were included in any sessions was not clear for the other two programmes.
9 Some studies only reported on study sample rather than the number of programme participants, thus possibly biasing numbers downwards.
10 In discussing these two forms of violence together, we are following the approach taken in majority of studies reviewed.
11 The two that did not were the SRH programme in Turkey (Kok & Akyüz, Citation2015) and COMPASS (Stark et al., Citation2018).
12 Families Matter! is currently active in 11 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. It is aimed at 9–12 year olds and their parents with adolescents up to the age of 14 commonly participating (K. Miller, personal communication, September 10, 2019).
13 It is important to note that our analysis may be affected by the level of description of curricula, which is highly variable between evaluations.