On Tuesday 26 January 2016, The Gender & Development Network and What Works To Prevent Violence Against Women & Girls Programme are presenting the first set of emerging findings on preventing violence against women and girls at The London School of Hygeine & Tropical Medicine. Speakers include Professor Rachel Jewkes from SA MRC, who will provide an overview of the…

As this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign draws to a close, it’s a good time for us to pause and reflect on the progress we have made toward ending violence against women and girls (VAWG) in the 20 years since the Beijing Conference, a significant turning point for the global agenda for gender equality. Jennifer McCleary-Sills…

In a recent article in The Guardian newspaper, Gemma Ferguson from our Change Starts at Home Programme provides tips on how to get the best out of collaboration. During a recent presentation, I was given a raucous round of applause from the academics in the room for correctly describing our project’s study as a “pair-matched, repeated cross-sectional, two-armed, single-blinded, cluster…

Professor Rachel Jewkes writes: Living in South Africa I have become painfully aware of how VAWG deeply impacts on every family, most heinously in the murder of women by their partners. So it feels right, that on the eve on the 16 Days of Activism, we are announcing a series of new evaluations in South Africa that, with support from…

A year ago, The Lancet published a Series on violence against women and girls ahead of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov 25. The day marks the start of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, which this year, for the first time, has prevention as its theme. This focus is encouraging. One…

In this article we’d like to showcase DFID’s What Works to Prevent Violence: A Global Programme in which SDDirect is a core partner.  We are part of a consortium led by working with the South African Medical Research Council and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that is supporting 10 innovation grants and seven research projects across Africa,…

I am writing this blog from a stunning villa in Umbria, looking out on the ancient city of Todi, which at this moment emerges from an ocean of mist like an island. My three young children are at home in Australia with my husband, their father. Sadly, having just relocated our family across the world, we felt incapable of enduring…

The phrase "spare the rod and spoil the child," commonly claimed to have come from the King James version of the Bible, implies that if one does not discipline a child, he or she will never learn obedience or good manners. This proverb is still today often used as a justification to violate children, a rationale for being violent without…

The Ministry of Education and Professional Training will recommend the incorporation of play and sporting in the National Education Policy 2015 and advocate that all four provinces devise a policy to place sport and play on their education agendas. A pledge to this effect was made by Minister of State for Education and Professional Training Baligh-Ur-Rehman while speaking as chief…

Little is known about the factors that drive the geographical distribution of partner violence or how macro-level factors might combine with individual-level factors to affect individual women's risk of intimate partner violence. We aimed to assess the role that women's status and other gender-related factors might have in defining levels of partner violence among settings.We compiled data for the 12…