What you water, grows Development and evaluation of a community-led approach to enhance the protection of children

This dissertation focuses on the protection of children from violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation, specifically through the development and evaluation of a community-led child protection approach called Seeds. The seven chapters provide an overview of the global issue of violence against children, review existing literature on community-level child protection approaches, and describe the development of Seeds, including a formative study in Lebanon and a field test in Sri Lanka. The dissertation also presents the development and assessment of a tool to measure children’s sense of protection (PROTECT), which was co-developed with children in Bogotá and demonstrated good reliability in preliminary testing. In a next chapter, the results of a feasibility study in Colombia are presented. The study assessed both the Seeds approach and its evaluation procedures, finding that while some outcomes moved in the expected direction, others showed no or unexpected changes. Qualitative findings suggested that community-led action improved perceptions of child protection, increased awareness of risks and protective factors, and fostered more positive attitudes toward protecting children. Based on the feasibility study results, the subsequent chapter outlines a protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation of Seeds. Both quantitative and qualitative data are planned to be collected in eight communities, four intervention and four control. Overall, this dissertation aimed to help fill the gap in evidence on violence prevention strategies, deepen understanding of community-led protection, and provide a model for evaluating community-based prevention programmes. Recommendations for future research and practice highlight the need for context-specific measures balanced with global comparability, as well as attention to both individual- and community-level change.