Who perpetrates violence against children? UNICEF publishes results from a global review of age-specific and sex-specific data

The key findings from the analysis underlined by the UNICEF:

1. The most common perpetrators of physical and emotional violence across a range of ages are household members. An important finding indicates that violence inside the home, perpetrated by a caregiver or other household member, is the most common form of violence experienced by both boys and girls. While prevalence of both emotional and physical violence is above 50% for most ages, emotional violence is more widespread than physical violence. Further, while levels of past-month emotional violence remain relatively constant over age group (at about 60%-70%), levels of past-month physical violence appear to decline slowly as age increases. While at age 2 about 60%-70% of boys and girls experience physical violence from a caregiver or household member, this has decreased to about 40%-50% at age 14.
2. Boys tend to report experiencing school-based violence at higher rates than girls, driven by physical violence. The second most common form of violence is that perpetrated at school by other students. Boys appear to report higher levels of past-year physical violence as compared to girls, whereas both sexes report similar levels of emotional violence. This could be in part due to the higher proportion of boys who attend school globally across the full age range examined. Younger age groups (8-11 years) appear to report higher levels of both emotional and physical bullying (between 70%-80%) as compared to older age groups (12-18 years, estimated at around 50% prevalence).
3. Even at ages as low as 15-19, girls suffer significant rates of intimate partner violence. Based on available data, intimate partners are the third most common source of violence against girls. Physical and emotional violence from dating/intimate partners for girls are about 7% of all girls at age 15 and 13% at age 19. Sexual violence is also non-trivial at 5-7% of 18 and 19 year olds. These figures increase if we consider only girls in partnerships. Unfortunately, a lack of data mean we cannot compute comparable figures for boys. These findings underscore the tendency for partner violence to start young and the need for prevention programs to tackle drivers of violence before marital partnerships are formed.
4. Children are at high-risk of violence from teachers and authority figures. There are too little data to compute global estimates for violence perpetrated by teachers and authority figures. However, available data summarized from four studies among children aged 9-18 years shows rates of violence perpetrated by teachers and authority figures are very high. For example, more than 75% of 9-16 year olds reporting past-year physical violence from a teacher in Uganda. While we have limited understanding of the magnitude of this problem across settings, it is clear that school environments must be targeted for prevention programming.
5. There are too few estimates of sexual violence for boys to understand the true magnitude of the problem. Despite the impressive range of data sources available, huge data gaps still remain. For example, due to the low number of data collection efforts that include questions on sexual violence against boys, we know little about who perpetrates such violence against them and across age ranges. There are also few estimates from violence perpetrated by strangers, and of outcomes of neglect or witnessing violence in the home. It is critical for the global community to close these data gaps and invest in reliable and ethical data collection efforts in the coming decade.

The analysis published in BMJ Pediatrics

Article on UNICEF page