Making schools safer for children with disabilities

Sightsavers researchers Dr Steven Kaindaneh and Dr Julia de Kadt explain how our new research project puts the voices of schoolchildren with disabilities at the centre of efforts to combat gender-based violence.

Finding ways to ensure that children with disabilities, especially girls, can safely speak out about school-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) is challenging, but essential. Globally, SRGBV is a huge challenge and impacts more than 246 million children and adolescents a year. Children with disabilities are three to four times more likely to experience violence than other children, yet very little is known about how it affects them, or how to ensure they feel safe at school.

That’s why Sightsavers is conducting an innovative research project with schoolchildren with disabilities in junior secondary schools in Sierra Leone to understand how gender-based violence affects them and what they want to be done to address it. Ensuring that children with disabilities are actively involved is crucial to making sure that policies and interventions are effective and truly disability inclusive.

In response to this need, our study focuses on four junior secondary schools in the Karene district in northwestern Sierra Leone and supports the creation of disability-inclusive SRGBV response action plans centred around the voices and perspectives of children with disabilities. Funded by the Sexual Violence Research Initiative, we’re collaborating with two organisations of people with disabilities (OPDs): the African Youths with Disabilities Network and Concern for the Development of Disabled Women and Children.

Rosanna Kamara and Abu Bakarr Bangura, co-investigators from these OPDs, are active members of the core study team. In each of the four communities, two young people with disabilities are also working for the study as Young Researchers. This is part of Sightsavers’ commitment to involving people with disabilities in disability research, recognising that their lived experience strengthens research and ensures its relevance to children’s lives.

Meet our co-investigators

Young Researchers are essential in fostering connection and enabling space for dialogue. They have helped organise focus group discussions with teachers, parents and other community stakeholders. They are now helping to prepare workshops in each community where preliminary study findings will be shared, and community and education system stakeholders will co-create disability-inclusive SRGBV-response action plans.

Meet two Young Researchers

Our next steps

Researchers will be returning to study schools to validate study findings and to co-develop disability inclusive SRGBV response action plans.

In November, SRGBV took centre stage at the first Global Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children, where we were proud to be signatories to an open letter that called on ministers to take urgent action to prevent and respond to sexual violence in schools. The recent 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence campaign raised awareness of the threat of violence that women and girls experience. Our approach allows their voices to come through loud and clear.

You can sign the open letter to world ministers here.