School-Related Gender-Based Violence (SRGBV) is defined as acts or threats of Sexual, Physical or Psychological Violence occurring in and around schools, perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes, and enforced by unequal power dynamics. It also refers to the differences between girls’ and boys’ experiences of and vulnerabilities to violence. SRGBV includes explicit threats or acts of physical violence, bullying, verbal or sexual harassment, non-consensual touching, sexual coercion and assault, and rape. Corporal punishment and discipline in schools often manifest in gendered and discriminatory ways. In addition, boys are brought up in environments that promote harmful gender norms, roles and stereotypes, justifying aggression and violence as desirable masculine behaviors. Other implicit acts of SRGBV stem from everyday school practices that reinforce stereotyping and gender inequality, and encourage violent or unsafe environments. In Ethiopia SRGBV problem continues to deepen in recent years. It is one such problem that is creating tension not just for schools or parents but for students, particularly female students. School violence and bullying (for this text we understand bullying as a significant, pervasive form of school violence) is the condition when a student or group of students gets engaged in any type of harmful activity. Such types of activities are usually targeted to female students, and therefore, harmful and very serious for the schools, teachers, parents and nation as well.
Because of its deleterious effect on both victims’ and bullies’ current and future functioning, IA has focused on this issue as the first step to help national and local regional education agencies and schools create safe places for female students to learn. YCDF understands that school violence can be prevented by teachers, parents, and students as well. YCDF is unique in teaming up with Initiative Africa (IA), using a grant provided by the Swedish Embassy, to collaborate towards the reduction or even the outright eradication of school violence in Ethiopia. With collaboration between the IA, local civil societies, schools, public universities, and local authorities, YCDF has over the past two years made significant progress in designing a comprehensive tool for measuring school violence prevalence, concluding with the design of the Violence Measurement Index in 2017. The tool provides genuine measures about school violence and safety concerns and involves teachers, administrators, parents, and students’ representatives. It is designed to help schools understand and effectively prevent school violence, and can be administered annually or biennially to monitor the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of school violence, and what prevention strategies work.
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Today, it is quite common to find news related to school violence. Unfortunately, most of the people just listen and prefer to ignore such news. They even don’t want to know how this problem is getting bad to worse day by day. But ignorance is not a solution for any problem. YCDF together and IA developed a tool called School Violence Index (SVI) designed to reduce causes responsible for school violence.
The SVI was developed in 2017 in collaboration with the IA. It enables partners to ‘measure’ (assess) and discuss the level of violence, with a focus on capacities, progress, performance and joint learning, with the goal to:
YCDF took the initiative in adapting the SVI, in collaboration with IA, through an intensive process of meetings, discussions and information. In 2017, the SVI was used by 25 secondary schools in Addis Ababa, SNNP, and Oromia of Ethiopia targeted by the YCDF’s EIGSTA Project.
It is on the basis of this feedback and lessons learned that the SVI was refined, mostly to simplify principles and indicators that were subject to misunderstandings or broad interpretation. Detailed guidance on facilitating the SVI and the process of defining recommendations (plan of action) following the outcomes of the SVI have been included. A further round of development and testing of the tool is taking place in 2019.