Promoting positive gender norms and preventing violence against children in schools in Uganda: Lessons from practice

• In Event: Promising Approaches in Gender Transformative Education

Proposal

Violence against children (VAC) and in particular violence against girls remains pervasive in Ugandan schools, despite policy bans outlawing all forms of violence in education settings. The Uganda VAC Survey reports that for students experiencing sexual violence prior to adulthood, 18% of girls and 31% of boys report their first incident occurring in schools, and more than 90% of primary school students report they have experienced physical violence at school (Devries et al, 2015; Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, 2015). Such experience of VAC at school undermines learning outcomes, carries significant mental health consequences, impacts social and cognitive development and overall undermines many of the outcomes that education systems are trying to produce.

Schools present an extraordinary entry point for violence prevention and gender transformation. Since most schools are publicly funded, they are governable by policies that are shaped by proven and tested practices. Schools are therefore an excellent entry point to influence a key set of beliefs, not only for students and teachers, but the entire community. Ensuring safe learning environments and healthy relationships at school, however, requires prioritisation of violence prevention in schools in education sector planning and delivery strategies, beyond a myopic focus on learning outcomes. Yet the investments in preventing VAC in schools, is at best, an afterthought. For instance, the World Bank’s recent grant to the Government of Uganda of $150,000,000 for the Uganda Secondary Education Expansion Project (USEEP), less than 2 million is reserved for preventing VAC.

In Uganda, a whole-school intervention for preventing VAC in school lowered the chances of a student experiencing violence from school staff by 42% (Devries et al., 2017). Initially developed for primary schools, where children are forming their ideas about gender identity and norms, a recent adaptation of this intervention for secondary schools moves towards a more gendered whole-school approach for adolescents with specially tailored activities that seek to interrogate concepts of power and patriarchal education systems that underpin and perpetuate gender discrimination and the sexual violence and harassment that girls are disproportionately affected by in and around Uganda’s schools. Creating opportunities for shared leadership, equal voice and participation, this approach emboldens teachers, students, administration and community members to question prescribed gender roles and transform their schools into sites for gendered social change and incubators for new gender norms to take root and flourish.

This presentation will share key insights from a pilot trial on the secondary school adaptation and a mixed-methods study on a pathway to scale this intervention, as well as practice-based learning from practitioners implementing this work in 500 secondary schools in Uganda. It will explore this whole-school approach and how feminist principles of equality, justice, fairness, and non-discrimination can be implemented within schools by promoting positive relationships, safe learning environments and an accountable administration, with learnings for emerging adaptations throughout the Global South.

Author

• Devin Faris, RAISING VOICES