Session: Risk and Health Outcomes Among Youth Who Experience Childhood Violence: Global Data to Inform Prevention (Society for Prevention Research 26th Annual Meeting)

More than 1 billion children—half of all children in the world—are exposed to violence every year. Violence has the potential to have deep and lasting impacts on the health and well-being of children over their entire lifetimes. Unfortunately, both the violence that children are exposed to and the consequences of it are largely hidden from view. This is in part due to the facts that such violence is often carried out in places where it is not likely to be witnessed, victims rarely come into contact with official or service agencies, and many of the consequences often do not become apparent until years after exposure. This symposium will examine global data on violence against children and youth, its risk factors, and long-term consequences, from multiple perspectives. The first paper uses nationally representative data from ten countries to assess the national prevalence of sexual violence against girls, identify individual and relationship risk factors, and examine mental and physical health consequences in young adulthood. The second paper uses data from a high-risk sample of youth in Uganda to examine individual and parent-related risk factors for commercial sexual exploitation of children. The third paper presents data from a longitudinal study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone to examine their experiences as parents and assess the long-term consequences of traumatic experiences in childhood. Taken together, these papers shed light on the contexts and consequences of childhood violence and have the potential to inform programmatic and policy efforts to prevent these experiences.