Making meaning from data on school-related gender-based violence by examining discourse and practice: insights from a mixed methodology study in Ghana and Mozambique

Abstract

Efforts to address school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) globally are hampered by conceptual and methodological difficulties in capturing meaningful data needed to inform policy and practice. Whilst the emphases of influential studies tend to be on measuring practice of violence, the authors investigate whether they can develop a more meaningful analysis that incorporates attention to both discourse and practice. They do this by examining data collected through a five-year mixed-methods study assessing change in SRGBV in Ghana and Mozambique. The analysis reveals how in the two quite different contexts there were different discursive emphases and in turn practices which were invisible in the SRGBV disclosure data. They identify how both quantitative and qualitative data contribute to understanding changing gender violence in ways that can be illuminating. It is by understanding the interplay between discourse and practice that can really help us understand ‘what works’ to address SRGBV.

Keywords:

• Gender
• sexual
• violence
• mixed methods
• Ghana
• Mozambique

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to project staff working on ActionAid’s project: Stop Violence Against Girls in School in Kenya, Ghana and Mozambique, and to members of the research team who contributed to the research design, execution and analysis, particularly Samwel Oando and Antonia Simon.

Notes

1. The full endline study gathered survey data from 1855 schoolchildren and teachers, and qualitative data from a further 1377 individuals through the endline and longitudinal studies (girls, boys, parents, head teachers, school committee members, and community and religious leaders, district level education, health and police officers and national policymakers). Full details can be found in Parkes and Heslop (2013).

2. Views on teachers asking girls and boys to do personal errands, corporal punishment against girls and boys, whether teachers who have sex with schoolgirls should be dismissed, whether girls are at fault for being sexually harassed, and whether schools should allow girls who became pregnant to remain at school

3. We use the term ‘disclosed’ to refer to affirmative responses by girls to survey questions about whether they had experienced different forms of violence (in the past 12 months) – i.e. that experience of violence was disclosed to researchers. We use the term ‘reported’ to refer to responses from girls about what they did as a result of their most recent experience of violence. Reporting indicated that they took some action through telling someone.

4. Community Advocacy Teams are trained community members who provide a first point of contact to abuse survivors and help provide a link to formal services.

5. This summary variable calculated whether a girl had said that they told one of five identified people listed in the instrument for at least one of the 13 types of violence they were asked about. This binary number was divided by the binary number which summarised whether they had disclosed experiencing any of the 13 types of violence.