Opportunities and challenges in preventing violence against adolescent girls through gender transformative, whole-family support programming in Northeast Nigeria

Summary & Objectives

The study aims to assess how a gender transformative, whole-family support programme (SSAGE) affects violence against adolescent girls in two internally displaced communities in Northeast Nigeria. It seeks to understand changes in household attitudes and behaviours, and how these shifts build girls’ “protective assets” against gender-based violence. The paper also situates this work within a context where bride price and child marriage are common and harm adolescent girls, even though child marriage outcomes are not directly measured

Findings

The study finds that the programme improved communication within families and reduced the use of physical and emotional violence by caregivers and brothers. Participants reported greater awareness of girls’ rights and stronger support for protecting girls from abuse.

• Adolescent boys described using less coercion and violence towards their sisters.
• Caregivers reported less acceptance of harsh discipline and some decrease in intimate partner violence.

At the same time, patriarchal hierarchies in the household often remained intact. Protection of girls was frequently understood as tighter control over their behaviour and mobility, rather than expanded freedoms. The paper notes that harmful practices such as bride price and child marriage are widespread in Borno State and shape girls’ risk, but these forms of violence were not directly explored in the qualitative tools.

This limits the ability to assess how far household-level change might influence norms and practices around child marriage, even though the programme’s focus on gender, power and girls’ rights is highly relevant to that goal.

Recommendations

The authors recommend strengthening gender transformative, whole-family support programming as a strategy to prevent violence against adolescent girls in humanitarian settings. Future interventions should go beyond the household and engage community and structural drivers of gender-based violence, including norms and economic pressures that sustain practices such as child marriage.

Programmes should combine work on nonviolent communication and caregiving with efforts to expand girls’ mobility, voice and access to services, rather than relying mainly on restrictive “protective” parenting. The paper also calls for more rigorous, mixed-methods and longitudinal research to measure longer-term norm and behaviour change, and to capture impacts on forms of violence that were not directly studied, such as non-partner sexual violence, FGM/C and early or forced marriage.