Our interdisciplinary team will take advantage of existing data from three ongoing cohort studies in ten countries, and cross-sectional data from 96 countries, to explore how social norms and attitudes towards violent experiences affect the relationships between violence and various health, education, labour and biomarker outcomes.
The study is a collaboration between LSHTM, Bielefeld University, Germany and University of Waterloo, Canada.
This project is part of the Child Protection Research Group.
Are violent acts harmful when they are not perceived as ‘violence’? Violence in childhood is a pervasive human rights, health and development challenge. But there is a large international variation in what behavioural acts of violence are considered normal, acceptable and common. There is a large body of evidence showing long-term adverse health, education and other consequences of exposure to childhood violence, but this evidence is overwhelmingly drawn from high-income, lower prevalence settings where acts of violence may be considered less acceptable.
There is some cross-cultural evidence that acts of violence may produce fewer adverse behavioural outcomes for children when those acts are perceived to be normative, but existing studies have been hampered by small sample sizes, and critically, have not considered the role of biological embedding of exposure to trauma.
Our interdisciplinary team will take advantage of existing data from three ongoing cohort studies in ten countries, and cross-sectional data from 96 countries, to explore how social norms and attitudes towards violent experiences affect the relationships between violence and various health, education, labour and biomarker outcomes.
The study is a collaboration between LSHTM and Together for Girls.
This project is part of the Child Protection Research Group.
Project team
- LSHTM
- Bielefeld University, Germany
- University of Waterloo, Canada
For this project, there are six work packages.
Work package 1
Work package 1 aims to conceptualise and explore qualitatively and quantitatively how children define normal, acceptable and common acts of violence in a range of contexts. The outputs will be at least 2 academic papers, which will narratively explore the similarities and differences in conceptualisation and patterning of normative and acceptable childhood violence exposure across countries.
Work package 2
Work package 2 aims to measure the biological embedding of exposure to ‘normative’ physical, sexual and emotional violence 3 in childhood. We will produce one academic paper documenting whether exposure to violence is associated with stress system dysregulation, pro-inflammatory bias and accelerated cellular ageing in children from higher prevalence contexts. Potentially, these physiological alterations can be used as early risk markers.
Work package 3
Work package 3 aims to explore individual cognitive appraisals and emotional reactions to experience of ‘normative’ violence, and whether biological embedding varies according to these. We will produce at least one academic paper on how children and adolescents experience and process experiences of violence drawing on our qualitative and EMA data on cognitive appraisal and emotional reaction to violence. We will produce two further academic papers on the mediating and/or moderating influence of individual processing and attitudes on violence-biomarker; and violence-health/education/labour outcomes.
Work package 4
Work package 4 aims to explore how social norms about violence within families and schools affect individual attitudes and violence-outcome relationships. The output will be two academic papers corresponding to the data sources on the impacts of normative contexts and attitude-norm discordance on violence-outcome relationships among young people.
Work package 5
Work package 5 aims to explore how of social norms in communities, regions and across countries about violence shape family and school norms, individual attitudes and violence-outcome relationships. The output will be three academic papers (DHS, MICS, YL) on the impacts of macrosocial normative contexts and attitudes on violence-outcome relationships among young people.
Work package 6
All of these aims will be underpinned and refined by integrated knowledge translation techniques in work package 6, which involves collaboration with advisory groups of children, adolescents, and global leaders working in the field of violence prevention. These groups will advise on research design, framing, and interpretation of results, and will help us think critically about how to frame our findings so that they impact and influence policy. These integrated knowledge translation activities will be assessed by undertaking in-depth interviews with each of the participating scientists and advisory group members at the start and conclusion of the project.