The United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on violence against children underlines the. alarming increase in the reported forms of abuse and violence against children around the world.
Special attention is attached in the report to the issue of child maltreatment by parents and other family members, with the report recommending that States take effective action to combat this phenomenon. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) make these recommendations compulsory as State Parties are legally bounded to tackle the phenomenon of child abuse and maltreatment by means of a comprehensive approach. This is stated clearly in Article 19, Section 1, of the CRC: “States Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child”. Article 19 implicitly assumes that the maltreatment of children is a preventable phenomenon and it is a State’s responsibility to address this child phenomenon through a comprehensive approach: preventive and protective care for children and legal action to identify, intervene and follow up known cases of child abuse, implement data collection systems and monitor the phenomenon.
ChildONEurope has been sensitive to this issue, and it was the focus of specific research activity. The aim of this research was to review the existing national statistical and monitoring systems for child abuse in the member States. Drawing on the results of ChildONEurope’s review and the conclusions of the European seminar on “Child abuse: which kind of data for monitoring?”, held in Florence on 18 January, the ChildONEurope’s Assembly of 19 January 2007 proposed to continue the activities of the working group on this issue. It was decided that the main task of the working group would be to identify approaches and methodologies useful to improve the collection of data on child abuse, to monitor trends and changes in the phenomenon, and to evaluate child abuse programmes and policies.
This document does not claim to provide all the answers to these questions, but it does present, standards, definitions, criteria and experiences that can help to develop child abuse data collection and monitoring systems and create operational instruments, in line with each national situation and national priorities, in order to improve the data on reported cases of child abuse. The document then examines methodological and technical issues, which naturally come to the attention of researchers and policy makers when implementing a data collection and monitoring systems. The document is divided up into four sections, which correspond to the four basic dimensions of such a process.
