How a simple question exposed a crisis hidden in plain sight

Uganda hosts the most refugees of any country in Africa, nearing 2 million. Our research found that in its refugee settlements, nearly half of all children have experienced some form of violence. Sexual violence affected over 19% of girls and nearly 10% of boys. Yet, over 12 months, in two primary schools in a refugee settlement, only 16 cases were reported. Then researchers started asking one deliberate question to school children. Within five months, they identified 653 cases in those same two schools — a vast increase that revealed the true scope of a crisis hiding in silence. This breakthrough in Uganda, where more than half of refugees are children seeking safety from conflicts raging across East Africa, offers a powerful lesson for humanitarian response worldwide. When children face violence in refugee settings, conventional methods of encouraging disclosure aren’t working as well as they should. But a new approach is proving that sometimes the most profound solutions start with the simplest act: asking. Surveying violence against children in humanitarian settings In all emergencies, there are immediate, lifesaving needs that must be met: water, food, shelter, basic medical care. But for children living in refugee settings, like children living anywhere, their needs extend far beyond the immediate, and this includes keeping them safe from violence. Humanitarian conditions can exacerbate exposure to violence. When children are faced with violence, they rarely tell anyone about it and are even less likely to obtain care, even where care exists. However, until recently, there has been no definitive data on the prevalence of violence against children in humanitarian settings and few effective interventions to identify child survivors and connect them to care. To address this gap, the Baobab Research Programme Consortium, an Africa-based research collaboration led by the Population Council, conducted the first Humanitarian Violence Against Children and Youth Survey, or HVACS, across all 13 refugee settlements in Uganda. This was the first time this survey — which countries around the world use to assess violence against children — had been used exclusively in a humanitarian setting. The results, released last year, were alarming. Among those aged 18-24 who reported on their childhood experiences of any kind of violence, we found that most girls and boys experienced their first incident after they arrived at the settlement. Those who experienced sexual violence often knew the perpetrators; very few told someone about their experience, and fewer still obtained care (2% of girls and none of the boys aged 13-17 who had experienced sexual violence in the past 12 months). It was clear that conventional methods to promote disclosure — such as having response services available to children without embedding proactive strategies for spurring uptake of services — weren’t working. To reach children where they are and provide a safe space to disclose violence, we needed to find a new way. A new screening intervention From our data collection, we knew that 92% of children in refugee settlements in Uganda are enrolled in primary school. There is also an existing cadre of parasocial workers — community-based workers providing social services and child protection support, many of whom are refugees themselves — who are trained to provide psychosocial support in their communities. Working with government partners and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, we designed and implemented a school-based screening intervention in refugee settlements using trained parasocial workers to ask children about their experiences with sexual violence in safe, structured conversations. For child survivors, parasocial workers could offer trauma-informed counseling right at school and facilitate referrals to appropriate care. We found that proactively asking made an enormous difference: Within five months of the initial intervention, we identified and responded to 653 cases in two primary schools based in a refugee settlement. This marked a dramatic increase compared to previous disclosure methods, which had led to only identifying 16 cases in the two schools over the previous 12 months, and just 40 cases that year across all five primary schools in the settlement. We learned that when we don’t proactively ask children about their experiences, they fall through the cracks. Starting in June 2025, the government of Uganda began to scale up this intervention nationally by including it as a component of its national training protocols for parasocial workers. This means that almost all children in refugee contexts in Uganda will be asked about their experiences with violence, can tell someone about it, and can receive the services they need. Uganda has been a pioneer in this effort, but, for the sake of children everywhere, it can’t be an outlier. We are now working in Ethiopia — which found similarly high levels of violence through its own HVACS survey in 2024 — to train incentive social workers to test sexual violence screening interventions in refugee communities. These experiences have proven that it is possible to carry out rigorous data collection in humanitarian settings and develop and implement responsive, survivor-centered interventions. Humanitarian response efforts — and the governments and donors who support them — need to invest in evidence-backed, localized solutions to meet the specific needs of displaced populations and create effective programming. In silence, violence prospers. To break this silence, we must forge safe, accessible pathways for children in refugee settings to share their experiences and receive the care they need. By listening, responding, and investing in survivor-centered systems, we lay the foundation for every child to survive and thrive into adulthood with dignity, safety, and hope.