Dr Kate McAlpine
That gap between private belief and public silence is a measurable problem, not a moral one. Twenty-five years of research and practice in child protection, gender and governance across East Africa and the UK have been spent closing it.
Scholar-practitioner. PhD, Fielding Graduate University. Founder of Citizens 4 Change and ConnectGo. Lead strategist, Community for Children’s Rights, Tanzania.
Three territories
Violence against children persists not because people think it is right, but because everyone assumes everyone else accepts it.
Read the position → 02Children already know what makes a school unsafe. Almost no programme is built to ask them properly.
Read the position → 03Organisations that want to do good are rarely held back by intent. They are held back by not knowing whether any of it is working.
Read the position →Start here
Citizens 4 Change addresses the collective action problem of violence against children by learning from the wisdom of a crowd of child researchers.
Most of us believe there is no place for violence in schools. What happens to that belief when we learn a child has been harmed in one?
Putting a defensible number on what changes when ordinary citizens take responsibility for protecting children.
Peer-reviewed research
McAlpine, K., Henley, R., Mueller, M. & Vetter, S. (2010) A survey of street children in Northern Tanzania: how abuse or support factors may influence migration to the street Community Mental Health Journal, 46(1), 26–32
A survey of 1,923 young people in the Arusha and Kilimanjaro regions. Children living full time on the street reported significantly more abuse than those who were there part time, or not at all.
View publication →Henley, R., McAlpine, K., Mueller, M. & Vetter, S. (2010) Does school attendance reduce the risk of youth homelessness in Tanzania? International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 4:28
Based on interviews with 1,098 young people. Children who had stopped attending school faced close to eight times the odds of living permanently on the street compared with those attending daily.
View publication →