Every year, up to 1 billion children are victims of violence worldwide and in most countries, such violence is socially tolerated. Violence against children can take different forms and have long-term consequences on a child’s development. Most child physical abuse takes place in the context of punishment. There is ample evidence that physical punishment has negative consequences for child development and health as well as psychiatric disorders in adulthood.
In 2011, a Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) study in Papua and West Papua provinces, Indonesia, found that over 80 percent of children aged 2-14 years were subjected to at least one form of physical or psychological punishment by their caregiver or other members of their household. The same epidemiological data are not available in other Indonesian provinces. A survey of 625 children aged 13-18 years living in institutions in DKI Jakarta, Central Java and South Sulawesi found that many children came from families where violence (27% of children), verbal abuse (19%), and sexual violence (1%) occurred.
Aware of the need to develop an approach to parenting that gives parents clear guidance on discipline while respecting children’s rights to protection, Professor Joan Durrant at the University of Manitoba developed Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting (PDEP) in collaboration with Save the Children Sweden in 2006. While ensuring fidelity to the original PEDP, Durrant and colleagues adapted the program to the West Java context in collaboration with Save the Children UK & Indonesia
Particularly, this entailed the cultural adaptation and translation of teaching materials and the addition of four home visits to the group sessions delivered by trained community facilitators. The resulting Families First with Home Visitation Program (FFHVP) was pilot tested in 2015 and findings were used to further refine the program.
This study aims to compare the effectiveness of the FFHV program among caregivers of young children in selected communities in Cianjur District, Indonesia. The overall objectives of this study are:
- To contribute evidence for the effectiveness of the FFHV program in preventing violence against children aged 0-7 years in the home and achieving other family level outcomes;
- To identify any unintended positive and negative effects of the FFHV program;
- To identify factors that facilitate and hinder the implementation of the FFHV program in this context; and
- To measure community facilitators and families (including children) satisfaction with the FFHV program.
Specifically, this study aims to answer the following research questions:
- To what extent does the addition of a group and home visitation service to vulnerable families reduce rates of violent discipline episodes in the home to children aged 0-7 years compared to a standard community health and social service wait-list?
- What factors facilitate and hinder the implementation of the home visitation program?
- To what extent are families, facilitators and mentors (including children) satisfied with the program?
This study adopts a mixed-methods experimental approach (cluster-randomized controlled trial, CRCT) in real-world settings In this study, 20 rural and peri-urban settlements, involving 720 caregivers of children up to 7 years of age, will be randomized to two parallel arms. A delayed-entry, parallel-group, stratified, cluster-randomized controlled trial (CRCT) design will be used to answer the first evaluation question (i.e., to what extent does the addition of a group & home visitation service to vulnerable families reduce rates of violent discipline episodes in the home to children aged 0-7 years from experiencing violence in the home compared to the standard community health and social service?). A waitlist control design is adopted to reduce attrition so that everyone in the study will receive the intervention sooner or later.
A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to generate evaluation data for primary and secondary outcomes as well as to map the causal chain.
