End Violence's Safe to Learn team is hosting another panel session on 'Reimagining Education to Keep Children Safe to Learn' with the first five Safe to Learn grantees from Nepal and Uganda.

Following participation in the Comparative and International Education Society Conference at the end of April, the objective of the panel will be to showcase the achievements and outcomes of the five Safe to Learn projects to a broader, global audience, including sharing how the projects addressed gaps and challenges to end violence against children in and through schools at the country level, including innovative solutions focused around COVID-19.

Register for the event at the link below, and add the event link to your calendar.

An estimated 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthdays. This harmful practice robs girls of the opportunity to fulfil their potential, denying them of agency, autonomy, equal access to education and full enjoyment of their rights.

Through the Sustainable Development Goals, the global community has committed to eliminate all harmful practices by 2030. Data and evidence are critical to sustaining this momentum, informing policies and programmes, and holding governments accountable for progress.

To support such efforts, the Child Marriage Monitoring Mechanism has been established as a platform to generate relevant analyses, make data accessible and promote data use. The initiative brings together international and regional organizations, civil society organizations and young people around a shared commitment to strengthening monitoring and accountability on ending child marriage. On 2 June 2021, UNICEF and its partners will host a launch event to present the vision behind this initiative and mobilise support. The event will feature keynote statements on the importance of data-driven action, a presentation on the Mechanism and its goals, and a stakeholders’ dialogue on child marriage monitoring.

This event will be an opportunity to take stock and share information on which INSPIRE approaches/programs can be scaled up in humanitarian settings as well as the specific risk and protective factors that must be considered in implementation.

Participants will get an understanding of how INSPIRE and the CPMS complement each other and can be used in humanitarian settings. Two good practices will get presented by practitioners to see successfully implemented approaches in humanitarian settings to end violence against children. Challenges and solutions will be discussed in a panel which will be finalized by a round of open questions.

The desired outcome is a shared understanding of the growing body of evidence on violence against children prevention and response that cuts across the humanitarian and development spectrum.

At this Together to #ENDviolence affiliate event, Human Rights Watch will launch their interactive index on violent discipline of children in the Middle East and North Africa Region. Objectives include:

• Informing participants of the harms of violent punishment of children in the Middle East and North Africa region
• Raise awareness about the HRW Index that will track the problem and the path toward prohibition
• Highlight the the Together to #ENDviolence campaign, and how we can all work together to protect children across the region and the world.

This will be followed by targeted advocacy with countries in the region to prohibit all corporal punishment.

The persistence of corporal punishment and its acceptance may reflect adults’ difficulties in taking the perspectives of children. Research on children’s emotional experiences of corporal punishment is rare. We seldom have opportunities to hear from children themselves how these experiences affect them. In this session, a new documentary will be shown on the emotional impact of corporal punishment on children. Spare the Child is the first film of its kind. Through interviews with three survivors of childhood corporal punishment, it reveals the lifelong impact of ‘spanking’ on the child’s body, brain, and psyche.

Spare the Child Trailer from Solis Films on Vimeo.

In this screening and subsequent Q + A virtual dialogue you will hear from:

• Joshua Overbay (MFA), the director of Spare the Child and creative producer at Justice Film Collective.
• Andie Morgenlander, producer of Spare the Child and creative producer at Justice Film Collective.
• Rev. Dr. Darrell L. Armstrong, D.Div. (Honorary), M.Div., Ed.S.-MFT, onscreen collaborator and producer of Spare the Child, Pastor at the historic Shiloh Baptist Church, and leader in the national/international welfare and family strengthening communities.
• Destiny Biggs, onscreen collaborator in Spare the Child, Mother and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania community member.
• Jess Overbay, onscreen collaborator in Spare the Child, artist and activist.

This session will be offered in English with Spanish translation.

The CSO Forum and its Working Group members are hosting a CSO Forum Safe to Learn Affiliate Event as part of the Together to #ENDviolence Solutions Summit Series.

Event objectives include:

1. To share experiences and highlight effective local practices implemented by CSOs
2. To bring attention to the need to adapt current practices to the challenges presented by the pandemic to ongoing work to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools.

Child helplines are often the first place called when a child is in crisis. Young people need the right help quickly. Yet many helplines are not able to connect through social media channels, and for the few that do, counselors often need to use entirely separate systems to handle the different channels.

Tech Matters, in partnership with Child Helpline International, will introduce you to Aselo, an open source, modern contact center platform that provides children with far more ways to reach the help they need, including voice, webchat, SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.

The goal of Aselo, co-created with members of Child Helpline International, is to triple the number of children that helplines can support by 2025 and improve processes for data collection and reporting for the entire helpline field. Thanks to a grant from the End Violence Fund, Aselo also streamlines the reporting of online child sexual exploitation and abuse and the reporting of child sexual abuse material.

You will hear from:

• Howard Taylor, Executive Director, End Violence Partnership
• Jim Fruchterman, Founder and CEO, Tech Matters
• Jeroo Billimoria, Founder of Child Helpline India and Child Helpline International
• Patrick Krens, Executive Director, Child Helpline International
• Dumisile Nala, National Executive Officer, Childline South Africa

The Civil Society Organisation Forum is hosting three upcoming webinars, aimed to help CSOs engage in the voluntary national review process through collective actions. These webinars will be hosted in three different time zones and adapted to specific regions: Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America; Latin America and the Caribbean; and Asia and Southeast Asia. The events will include:

• Opening remarks from the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children
• Guidance and resources to help CSOs engage in the VNR process and strengthen government reporting on ending of all forms of physical, emotional and sexual violence against children in the VNR process
• Sharing experiences from National CSO coalitions

Regional Webinar Dates & Times:

• Regional Webinar 1 (in English) - Africa/Middle East/Europe/North America: 29th April at 8:00
• EDT / 14:00 CEST
• Regional Webinar 2 (in Spanish) - Latin America & Caribbean: 6th May at 10:00 EDT / 9:00 COT
• Regional Webinar 3 (in English) - Asia/Southeast Asia: 6th May at 22:00 EDT/ 7th May 9:00 ICT

You can also download and share the events' Save the Date.