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Up to one billion children worldwide are estimated to be victims of violence. Now, an intended study of 12,000 children in eight cities worldwide wants to discover what it really means to be a child of the city today – the adversities, the vulnerabilities, the resilience.

By comparing a new generation from each city, we can build a scientific backbone for interventions to prevent violence against children

Manuel Eisner

It’s 1960 and two boys are born into cities of different nations about to gain independence from the British. Their homelands have comparable GDP per capita, similar literacy rates and roughly the same levels of crime and violence.

Now nearing 60 years old, they are about to have grandsons of their own. The boy born in Kingston, Jamaica, will have a startling 15% chance of growing up to be a victim of homicide, if current murder rates continue. The grandson born in Singapore will have less than a 0.1% risk of violent death.   

How did these countries diverge over a single lifetime until they were at opposite ends of the spectrum of violence? Some blame politics, while others point to drug trade exposure or differences in crime prevention and health policies. 

State legitimacy waxes and wanes, illegal markets bubble and burst, neighbourhoods thrive or deteriorate – and all these fluctuations trickle down to entrench order or violence in millions of lives from childhood onwards. Yet we know little about how this happens.

“Experiences in the first years of life shape a person’s lifelong development,” says Manuel Eisner, Wolfson Professor at Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology. “If we want to understand the roots of adversity that lead a nation to violence and turmoil, we need to understand how it incubates in a child of that society.   

“For example, what does a child in Kingston experience – even before birth – that may increase the risk of failure at school, or mental and physical health problems, or criminality and substance use? How does that compare with children in the cities of South Africa, or East Asia?”

Eisner argues that everything from national and municipal systems, such as infrastructure and education, to proximal environments – the street, family and even uterus – contribute to the “psychosocial construction” of children, and consequently the stability of societies in which those children become citizens.   

His goal is to map the risk factors that influence early child development around the world, from the political to the hormonal. To do this, Eisner and his colleagues on the Evidence for Better Lives Study (EBLS) intend to follow 12,000 children yet to be born in eight cities in Jamaica, Ghana, South Africa, Romania, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and the Philippines.

1,000 days of life

Children will be tracked from the womb through the first 1,000 days of life, and hopefully on to adolescence, in a major birth cohort study that Eisner wants to see become a valuable resource for “understanding and promoting child wellbeing in the 21st century”. The ambition is to identify how policy can most effectively stem societal violence and “foster resilience”.

“For the first time in history, there are goals at a global level aimed at reducing child abuse, exploitation and all forms of violence, and to promote children’s mental health,” says Eisner, describing the United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. “The EBLS is our response to this challenge. It will provide important evidence for system-level changes to tackling violence against children. But it can also shine light on how violence evolves.

“If we want to address high levels of violence in a city like Kingston, we need to know the ages when active ingredients are added to young people’s development. Then we can design the right intervention strategies.”