Measuring gender and violence in education: Problems and prospects

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

Organised by the Global Working Group to End School-Related Gender-Based Violence (UNGEI and UNESCO)
The measurement and monitoring of School-Related Gender-Based Violence (SRGBV) has challenged the community of practitioners and academia over the past decade. The dearth of data on the magnitude of the issue and lack of evidence-based tools and methodologies to monitor SRGBV has resulted in a fragmented and patchy response to the problem. While specific language within SDG 4 including monitoring indicators of violence in schools has ensured that SRGBV comes into greater focus, without appropriate tools and guidance on how to track progress and change, national systems and stakeholders are unlikely to address SRGBV in the manner required.
The Global Education Monitoring Report, “Education for people and planet: creating sustainable futures for all” unequivocally outlines the challenges to monitoring the targets set for SDG 4 on education. The GEMR examines the poorly formulated targets, the technical challenges in monitoring the indicators and the inadequacy of existing indicators to measure change. It has undertaken the mandate to look at global progress in education, questioning the usefulness of existing indicators, reflecting on the quality of sources and introducing new ways of looking at evidence.
Given the current status of data on several of the monitoring indicators, the time is opportune to explore ‘new ways of looking at evidence’ as the GEM proposes. However, the complexities of violence in schools, its gendered nature and how unequal power dynamics borne out of poverty, ethnicity and race, sexual and gender identity, disability, gender and class posit a sizeable challenge for measurement. In addition, the sensitivity and ethical considerations around probing questions about sexual violence, especially in and around schools, has deterred a more systematic and concerted effort towards monitoring incidence of SRGBV.
This panel presented by members of the Global Working Group to End SRGBV, proposes practical methodologies and frameworks for measuring SRGBV embedded in a gender-based conceptualization of violence in schools and discusses approaches by which these tools could be adapted in varied contexts. The presentations offer the overall scope of the problem via evidence from different regions of the world; findings from the pilot of a measurement framework for SRGBV interventions; a proposed conceptual framing of SRGBV for the monitoring of the SDG indicator; and a tool to map evidence gaps in SRGBV.

Sub Unit

• Committee: Gender & Education

Chair

• Jenny Parkes, Institute of Education, University College London

Individual Presentations

• Findings from the Gender Review of the Global Education Monitoring Report - Katherine Redman, UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report

• School-Related Gender-Based Violence Measurement Tool - Julie Hanson Swanson, US Agency for International Development (USAID)

• Conceptualising SRGBV for global monitoring - Sujata Bordoloi, UN Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI)

• Using Evidence Gap Maps to Share and Build Knowledge around SRGBV (ECCN) - Karla Giuliano Sarr, SIT Graduate Institute