Gender dimensions
Pushing for gender-responsive child protection work that recognizes the full diversity of children and different forms of violence against them
Why Gender Matters
Children have diverse and intersecting identities, and sexual exploitation and abuse affects each child differently. Gender plays a role in ways we don’t always notice, shaping who is seen as at risk of harm, who is believed, and who receives support. When child protection systems are not gender-informed, they can fail children whose experiences fall outside common assumptions about who is vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse. These gaps can prevent children from being accessing the protection and care they needed, leaving harm unaddressed.
Understanding and integrating gender into our work is therefore essential to building child protection systems that are inclusive and responsive to children’s diverse identities and experiences.
Our Approach
Addressing the Root Causes
Sexual exploitation and abuse against children are rooted in power and gender imbalances. Our work is guided by the understanding that to effectively respond to sexual exploitation and abuse, we must address these root causes. We apply a feminist and intersectional approach to examine how gender norms, ideas of masculinities, and power dynamics place children of different gender identities in vulnerable situations. This allows us to challenge the systems, structures, and rigid gender norms that enable harm, and to push for gender-sensitive child protection responses that recognise the full diversity of children’s experiences.
Challenging Harmful Beliefs About Gender
We work with practitioners, survivors, other organisations, and private companies to change the narrative on gender biases and beliefs that prevent children at risk and survivors of sexual exploitation from receiving support, recognition, and protection. A key focus of this work is transforming rigid ideas of masculinities that discourage boys from seeking help and expressing their emotions. By offering boys a different vision of who they can be, we strengthen broader gender equality efforts and creates space for all children to access the care they need.
Embedding Gender Throughout Our Work
We work across all ECPAT programmes to make sure our interventions are gender-sensitive, at a minimum. This means ensuring that our language, approaches, and activities are designed to recognise and support people of different identities across diverse contexts, not only for children, but also for everyone we engage and collaborate with.
In doing this, we help ensure that child protection interventions are safer, more effective, and don’t unintentionally harm the children they are meant to protect.
Learning from Practitioners Who Work with Boys
Gender expectations and biases can place boys at particular risk of being overlooked or unsupported. We examine how these dynamics affect boys in different contexts, including boys on the move and boys in detention.
Through the ECPAT Global Boys Initiative, we partner with local organisations working directly with boys to document their perspectives on the challenges they face and highlight the practices making a difference in the lives of boys they support. We transform these insights into case studies that help practitioners, policymakers, and service providers to improve their responses in gender-sensitive ways.
Building a Global Movement
ECPAT is the convenor of the Global Alliance for the Protection of Boys from Sexual Violence (GAPB), which builds on this work through global advocacy. The GAPB brings together global and local organisations to push for stronger international child protection standards, challenge harmful and rigid narratives around gender and masculinities, and ensure boys’ experiences are recognised within global child protection agendas, always in alignment with feminist and intersectional principles. The GAPB strives to change how gender and sexual violence are understood and addressed at global policy and practice levels.
