Child Safety Index and Toolkit

Child Safety Index

The success of Child Safety Action Plans and Child Safety Report Cards is that they have focused on key responsibilities and actions at national level, linked to policies and to national statistical data. But this strength has limitations, too. Whilst national government is important in setting a framework, many policies and actions to enhance children’s safety happen at a more local level – within devolved regional governments, counties, and municipalities. These are the levels where services are designed and delivered, and where priorities are established. At the same time, national statistics conceal major variations and inequities – for instance, between localities and between population groups.

The Child Safety Index and Toolkit work package of TACTICs is a first move to take the work and successes of the Child Safety Action Plan initiative and seek to apply them at a more local level, through influencing local priorities.

First, building on a number of initiatives including Child Safety Report Cards indicators, the CHILD indicators project, the Environment Health Information System (ENHIS) and experience from the Nordic School of Public Health in applying the CHILD national-level indicators to the municipal level, the work package will assess and report on the feasibility of disaggregation of child safety measurement to sub-national levels, possibly leading to the development of a Child Safety Index.

Secondly, if this Index looks feasible, a Toolkit to enable its local application will be developed. Finally, these products will be tested in sample localities in up to six countries.

The work package will take an exploratory and open-minded approach, for instance considering a range of sub-national units from autonomous region to local neighbourhood, and looking at community empowerment to assess safety as well as compilation of local official statistics into a composite Index.

The Nordic School of Public Health has lead responsibility for this work, which is led by Professor Michael Rigby.