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About Childlight
Childlight is a global child safety institute, that was established by Human Dignity Foundation, is hosted within the University of Edinburgh, and has a global reach. We believe that no child should live their life in the darkness of sexual abuse and exploitation, and we produce data on the prevalence and nature of CSEA around the world to catalyse change. Our data however shows that the scale of CSEA is so large that it is not simply a law enforcement issue – rather, child sexual exploitation and abuse should be treated as if a global health emergency.
What we do:
Data sits at our core and is the thread that joins Childlight’s activities together. Everything that Childlight does is data driven – whether that is creating or collating data, turning that data into insight, building data standards, or getting that data turned into action to better prevent and protect children from CSEA.
Importantly, however, we start with “impact”, as often data alone is not enough to catalyse change. We assess what gaps exist in current data or knowledge and how we can fill these, but also understand what is most important for our partners across the ecosystem to know so that they can better effect change. As well as looking to the past and what data tells us about historic trends and behaviours, we also look to the future and identify upcoming trends that require a proactive response. This means that we focus our efforts on areas that are of importance to others, rather than just of interest.
The main vehicle that brings all of Childlight’s activities together is our Into the Light global index, which measures the prevalence and incidence of child sexual exploitation and abuse around the world. Through this index, we aim to provide high-quality, trusted data to catalyse policy makers and framers, governments, NGOs and public services to build better policies, legislation, funding, and capabilities.
Childlight has different strands of activity that therefore contribute to not just building and assuring the index itself, but to proactively get the index data to those who can use it: Research and analysis drives Childlight by both bringing together data sources to improve our understanding of the risk factors and drivers of CSEA, and also undertaking new research where data or knowledge doesn’t exist. Our research directly feeds prevalence and incidence data into the Into the Light global index across a number of indicators each year, as well as contributing to our compendium of research, our Searchlight report and dashboard.
Data is nothing without people, so we also operate a Global Data Fellows Programme. This is a selected cohort of people working with CSEA data as academics, practitioners or in industry across sectors. We support our Global Data Fellows with new skills and methods, building global networks and solving their own data challenges. The learning from our Global Data Fellows, and access to their data, informs and strengthens the Into the Light index.
We also care strongly about the professionalisation of data within the wider child protection system and the role Childlight plays in building the data capabilities of tomorrow. We host a Masters of Science programme at The University of Edinburgh on Child Protection Data Futures, to bring academic and practice worlds together to better understand and exploit the data that they hold. Because we have a strong grounding in research rigour and data quality, we also understand the importance of building consistent ways of collecting, analysing and using CSEA data around the world and across sectors. We identify where gaps exist or data activity is fragmented and develop minimum standards to guide individuals and organisations. We work with others to build this connectivity through the data so that the sector can better interoperate and learn more from each other.
Sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of data but not being able to use the data that is already available. We work with frontline practitioners and data owners across the world through our Childlight Technical Advisory Programme [C-TAP] to connect up what data already exists so that they can themselves become data-driven. We provide on-the-ground support to not just understand data access and use challenges but practically work together and across our networks to solve systemic problems.
And finally, data and insights aren’t useful if nobody knows about them or understands what they mean. We use a range of proactive, targeted communications and outreach methods to ensure that our data and insights get to the people who can use them.
We know that we need to think global but act local. We have Childlight Hubs in Edinburgh and Sydney that cover European and East Asia & Pacific Regions respectively. Over the coming years, we intend to develop further regional Childlight Hubs to act as centres of data excellence and also better catalyse action within a regional or country context.
Find out more about Childlight here: childlight.org
Visit our LinkedIn page: linkedin.com/company/childlight
View the Into the Light global index here: intothelight.childlight.org