Model to Support Data-Driven Child Protection Efforts in the Full Cycle of Armed Conflict Violence against Children
Abstract
The present thesis aims to support child protection mechanisms in the context of armed conflict violence by working in two main directions. The first direction involves widening the opportunities for data collection and analytical approaches to better understand the impact of the Six Grave Violations (6GV) against children during warfare. The second direction engages in broadening the analysis of the 6GV to encompass what the thesis considers “the full cycle of armed conflict violence against children”, including warfare, peace negotiations, and post-conflict reconstruction (PCR). Despite multiple efforts from the Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM) of the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG-CAAC), researchers, peace and human rights activists, data on 6GV is currently disjointed, dispersed, scarce, or unavailable across the world. This thesis helps to tackle this problem by offering a methodology to support future data-driven child protection initiatives during the war, peace negotiations, and PCR stages, and it applies computational methods to extract valuable information from longitudinal, spatial, categorical, textual, and relational data on how children are affected by the 6GV. The first chapter explores the theoretical aspects of child protection in the full cycle of violence against children, examines current approaches' limitations, and presents a rationale for designing and implementing a methodology to support data-driven child protection initiatives. The second chapter explains the methodological and technological aspects of the model proposed. Chapter Three applies the model to analyze the intersection between grave violations and patterns of child deaths in Syria from 2011 to 2018. A second case study is presented in Chapter Four, which explores data patterns across peace agreements worldwide since 1990 to explain how provisions regarding the 6GV have been included in peace negotiations. Finally, Chapter Five concludes the thesis project by highlighting its main findings and considerations for future endeavours. In summary, the thesis proposes a data-driven approach to understanding the full cycle of armed conflict violence against children, making a significant contribution to data collection and analytical approaches to better protect children from grave violations during the war, peace processes, and PCR.