Partner Resources

US Based, this comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why. States can use this information to ensure that their child welfare systems support the safety, stability, and well-being of all families in their state.

Global estimates suggest that more than half (1 billion) of the world’s children aged 2–17 experienced physical, sexual and/or emotional abuse during the past year.1 Addressing violence against children and adolescents is part of UNICEF’s core mission to protect the health and well-being of children and adolescents, grounded in gender equality programming priorities articulated in the 2018–2021 Gender Action Plan and the 2018–2021 Strategic Plan, particularly Goal Area 3: Every child is protected from violence and exploitation. As UNICEF prepares a new Child Protection Strategy and Gender Policy to accompany the next organization-wide Strategic Plan, this paper examines how and why UNICEF and international partners should pay greater attention to gender dimensions of violence against children and adolescents (VAC/A), including drivers of violence and opportunities for more effective violence prevention and response. Greater attention to gender across all violence programming and evidence generation responds to recommendations of evaluations of UNICEF’s work on violence,2 child protection,3 and Gender Action Plans.4,5 This paper also explores the rationale for greater attention to links among different forms of violence across the lifespan, including ways in which violence against adult women, particularly intimate partner violence (IPV) affects children’s and adolescents’ health, well-being and risk of violence, and the implications of those intersections for UNICEF’s violence prevention and response programming.

Thorn published youth-centered research that digs into the experiences of German youth (aged 12-16) with online sexual harms, including cold solicitations, online grooming, sexting, NCII, and the hurdles they face in disclosing their experiences. GERMAN Version

Thorn published youth-centered research that digs into the experiences of French youth (aged 12-16) with online sexual harms, including cold solicitations, online grooming, sexting, NCII, and the hurdles they face in disclosing their experiences. FRENCH VERSION

In this TL;DR video, we explore the findings of the research “Sexual Exploitation of Children: Barriers for Boys in Accessing Social Supports for Victimization,” published in the Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect. This discussion paper, based partly on ECPAT International’s Global Boys Initiative, sheds light on the unique challenges faced by boys and gender-diverse children who are victims of sexual exploitation.

This TLDR video examines the study “‘She was willing to send me there’: Intrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse, Exploitation, and Trafficking of Boys,” featured in the Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect. The research delves into the deeply complex and often concealed world of intrafamilial child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), focusing on the experiences of male victims and survivors.