Adolescent girls’ and boys’ experiences of violence: evidence from Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE)

Age- and gender-based violence during adolescence is widespread, and the risks permeate all spheres of adolescents’ lives – family and marriage, schools, peer networks and communities. Yet this violence affects girls and boys very differently within and across low- and middle-income country contexts. Midway through the Sustainable Development Agenda, data from the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) research programme reinforces the urgency of investing in a tailored, adequately resourced package of interventions, coordinated across sectors and development actors.

This would allow the global community to make meaningful progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5 and 16 to eliminate all forms of violence affecting young people.

This brief draws on data collected in three of GAGE’s core countries – Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Jordan – using mixed-methods research. GAGE findings highlight that adolescent girls – and boys – regularly face myriad forms of age- and gender-based violence. Risks are context-dependent, which in some cases means adolescent girls and boys do not perceive what they are experiencing as violence, and in other cases leads them to embrace such behaviour because it demonstrates to their peers and communities that they are conforming to social norms.

Critical to tackling this violence is a recognition that age-based violence is often deeply gendered; that gender norms leave girls and boys at heightened risk of different types of violence; and that sometimes the best way to support girls to lead lives free of violence is to ensure that the boys in their environments are also free of violence.

Key Messages

Violent discipline at the hands of caregivers is common but too often normalised, with some adolescents failing to perceive it as violence and others failing to report it because they see it as a private family issue. This age-based violence is deeply gendered, and boys are generally at higher risk—especially of physical violence—than girls. Girls are usually disciplined for not conforming to gender norms around appropriate feminine behaviours, while boys face physical punishment largely because they show less compliance to parental rules.
Violence at the hands of teachers is universal in some contexts, and aimed primarily at boys in others, and is typically used to instil classroom order and to punish poor mastery of lessons. It is common for students to be punished for failing to master their lessons. When girls are punished, it is often due to the difficulties of balancing their school work with domestic and care work demands.
Boys are more likely than girls to experience and perpetrate peer violence because it is a way for them to act out their own experiences with violence and to demonstrate masculinity to their peers. The gender gap also reflects girls’ parents’ refusal to tolerate girls’ engaging in ‘masculine behaviour’.
Sexual violence is under-reported, by girls and boys, because survivors are stigmatised and blamed – and sometimes do not recognise their experience as a violation of their right to bodily integrity.
Girls’ risk of female genital mutilation (FGM), the age at which it is carried out and the type of cutting are all contextdependent; where FGM is seen as key to girls’ marriageability, efforts to eliminate the practice face deep-rooted cultural resistance and are therefore making slow headway.
Child marriage is seen – often by caregivers as well as girls – as critical to protect girls’ social and economic futures, as well family honour. This makes the practice hard to resist, even for those who understand the risks. For communities affected by forced displacement and where young people’s futures are especially precarious, the risks are exacerbated.
Intimate partner violence is extremely common, especially for the youngest girls who marry, because husbands believe they have a right to use violence to teach their wife how to behave and because girls and boys believe that wives owe their husband absolute obedience.

Authors: Elizabeth Presler-Marshall, Erin Oakley, Shoroq Abu Hamad, Riyad Diab, Nicola Jones, Bassam Abu Hamad, Sarah Alheiwidi, Workneh Yadete, Jennifer Seager and Sarah Baird

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Authors

Nicola Jones

Elizabeth Presler-Marshall