Presentation of the international classification on violence against children
An event for the Europe and Central Asia TransMonEE network
Webinar event
In 2015, with the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, the global community made a commitment to end all forms of violence against children by 2030. Although this draws much needed attention to the importance of preventing and responding to violence against children, the availability of comparable data remains limited, which was also confirmed by the recently adopted Guidance of the European Statisticians for the Improvement of Statistics on Children. In response, UNICEF has developed the international classification of violence against children (ICVAC) with inputs from more than 200 experts from national statistical offices, academia, and international organizations. The ICVAC was endorsed at the 54th session of the UN Statistical Commission as international statistical standard and was recommended for inclusion in the International Family of Classifications.
At the international level, the ICVAC aims to enhance comparability of statistics among countries. It will provide a consistent and comprehensive framework of the various forms of violence against children, irrespective of changes in legislation across countries. At the national level, the ICVAC aims to be used as a model to organize statistical data on violence against children across different data sources (i.e., administrative records and surveys). It will also provide the basis for disaggregating data, help raise the capacities of national statistical offices, and improve data quality on violence against children. This will help create data that can lead to better policies and programmes to prevent violence against children, especially for children who are especially vulnerable to violence.
It is anticipated that the implementation of the ICVAC at the national level will be a phased approach that will consider the maturity of data collection systems in each country.
To support the process, UNICEF will develop implementation tools and supporting documents aimed at:
- Facilitating the mapping of existing national statistical definitions into the ICVAC framework and identifying implementation gaps and needs
- Facilitating the transition from core and minimum disaggregating variables to additional disaggregating variables
- Developing a national implementation action plan
- Setting up multisectoral implementation task forces at the country level.
UNICEF is also planning to produce substantive guidance on:
- Minimum requirements needed to integrate the ICVAC, with increasing levels depending on the level of statistical maturity of countries
- How to harmonize population-based survey questions on violence against children with the ICVAC
- How to strengthen administrative data on violence against children and to harmonize that data with the ICVAC
- Counting rules for different statistical units such as violent acts and child victims or perpetrators, considering counting rules of similar statistical classifications
- How to use the ICVAC to collect data on specific manifestations of violence against children such as online violence, dating violence, school-based violence and sexual exploitation of children.
The webinar will provide an opportunity to learn about the ICVAC and the plans for its implementation.