As many as one billion children under the age of 18 experience some form of violence every year. This exposure is not only a violation of child rights; it can also hamper children’s cognitive development, mental health, educational achievement, and long-term labor market prospects.
Meanwhile, an estimated 1.9 billion people in 136 countries benefit from some type of social safety net, such as cash transfers and public works that target the poor and vulnerable—presenting a vast policy instrument with potential to help prevent childhood violence.
While childhood violence results from a complex array of factors at multiple levels and is not isolated to the poor, data indicate that children in poorer households are at somewhat higher risk and economic hardship can intensify the risk. Economic shocks, for example, put households under stress, which could be expressed through harsher corporal punishment and other forms of child maltreatment. Safety nets might help prevent adolescent transactional sex, and related sexual violence risks, brought about by economic hardship.
Yet, for all of the research we have on both topics separately, we have very little global evidence at the intersection of social protection and childhood violence.
To be fair, social safety nets were designed with other objectives in mind, such as helping poor households to smooth consumption through shocks and invest in children’s education and health. Moreover, governments—especially in low-income countries—often have to take care not to jeopardize vital social safety nets by layering on too many implementation complexities.
[For more of this story, written by Mathew H. Morton, go to http://blogs.worldbank.org/voi...g-childhood-violence]
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