The nexus between child protection and gender-based violence programming; the impact for displaced adolescent girls in Jordan

Sammanfattning: Gender-based violence (GBV) and violence against children are pervasive and destructive globally, but the exacerbation of violence in emergency contexts makes addressing them an urgent priority in humanitarian action. However, despite recognition of overlapping risks and intervention opportunities, child protection programming and GBV programming have hitherto followed discrete trajectories, resulting in adolescent (aged between 10 and 19 years) girls falling between the domains, despite their heightened vulnerability to GBV. This research explores how humanitarian protection interventions address GBV against displaced adolescent girls in Jordan. Data is collected using detailed, semi-structured interviews with four specialist humanitarian practitioners from leading organisations in child protection and GBV programming within the refugee response in Jordan. Qualitative, grounded coding and analysis is conducted on the transcribed data to identify key themes and patterns. The findings report child marriage, domestic violence and sexual violence as the most prevalent forms of GBV against adolescents. The social ecology of the girls is explored and salient risk factors at each level are identified, including lack of awareness, cultural norms and stigma, and absence of data information to direct programming. Corresponding protection interventions, including case-management, capacity-building of service providers and awareness-raising are identified, and the limited extent to which they empower adolescent girls is debated. Finally, the nexus between child protection and GBV programming is discussed, and key challenges, including coordination between child protection and GBV policies, campaigns, services and actors, decreasing funding and nationalisation of services, an absence of meaningful participation of adolescent girls in programming, and the organisations’ issue-focused approach, are identified and explored in the context of empowerment of adolescent girls. The research concludes that addressing GBV by meaningful participation of adolescents, adopting rights-based approaches, and proactive coordination of protection actors, is essential for the empowerment of adolescent girls to be agents of their own protection.