Poverty and violations of children’s right to protection in low- and middle-income countries: A review of the evidence

Why do up to 1.5 billion children suffer physical violence every year? Why do up to 2251 million children suffer sexual violence every year? Why are 14.2 million girls every year married off to start adult lives in adolescence or before? Why are considerable numbers of young children left alone for long hours without competent adult supervision?

This report examines how far and in what ways poverty contributes to violations of children’s rights to protection in four key areas – child marriage, sexual and physical violence against children and inadequate care of children – and thus clarifies the significance of poverty as an underlying or risk factor for these different violations of children’s protection rights. It also assesses the strength of evidence concerning the relationship between poverty and child marriage, sexual and physical violence against children and inadequate care of children, and thus identifies knowledge gaps.

Key findings:

There is considerable variation in the ways poverty affects child protection outcomes. Overall, the extent of most of the child protection violations examined is exacerbated by poverty. In the majority of areas examined, sociocultural norms that condone particular practices appear to be key underlying factors. However, poverty increases children’s risk. One key route by which this takes place is by increasing economic pressures on households, which respond in ways that do not safeguard and may directly conflict with children’s rights to protection. Examples include economically motivated child marriages, children’s entry into commercial sex work and leaving children without adequate care while parents are working. Poor children are also at greater risk of protection violations because they are often exposed to a wider range of social contexts in which violations can occur, for example in workplaces, in their neighbourhoods or through relationships with landlords or patrons.

There is variation within each of the thematic areas analysed. For example, commercial sexual exploitation of children and transactional sex are strongly related to poverty; domestic sexual abuse less so. At community level, physical violence is strongly associated with economic deprivation; the evidence concerning corporal punishment is much more contradictory, with aggregate statistics suggesting a relationship but many individual country analyses finding none. There is limited evidence supporting an association between poverty and foeticide, with most evidence suggesting cultural factors play a more important role.

The evidence reviewed suggests some groups of children are at greater risk of one or more of the child protection violations examined in this report. Disabled children face increased risk of sexual and physical violence. Some violations affect one gender more than another: significantly more girls than boys are married as children; girls are at higher risk of sexual violence, and boys are at higher risk of homicide and of severe physical punishment. Orphans are at increased risk of inadequate care, child marriage and sexual violence than non-orphans. There is also some qualitative evidence of orphans being at greater risk of physical violence.

At aggregate level, education both of children and of parents is an important factor, with clear evidence that it is associated with reduced levels of child marriage, physical violence and inadequate care, and reduced risk of intimate partner violence in adulthood. However, there are high levels of violence in many schools and, for individual children school may be an additional site of violence rather than offering protection.

Summary