Abstract
Since the early years of her career working with children in some of the direst situations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, has witnessed children being targeted for such exploitative practices as human trafficking, recruitment into armed forces, and child labor. Violations of the child’s right to protection take place in every country and are massive, under-recognized, and under-reported barriers to child survival and development, in addition to being human rights violations. Children subjected to violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect are at risk of death, poor physical and mental health, HIV/AIDS infection, educational problems, displacement, and vagrancy.

 Protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is an integral component of protecting their rights to survival, growth, and development. UNICEF advocates and supports the creation of a protective environment for children in partnership with governments, national and international partners including the private sector, and civil society.  Bissell guides UNICEF’s Child Protection program in 170 countries, working with government officials and other partners to shape child protection policies. During this discussion, she will provide an overview of her role at UNICEF and the work she does to help ensure that governments honor their commitments to strengthen child protection systems and protect children.

In 2009, Susan Bissell was appointed to her current position in New York, heading all of UNICEF’s Child Protection work.  She oversees a team of professionals guiding efforts for children affected by armed conflict, child protection systems strengthening to prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children, and a range of other matters.

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Without a Fight is a feature length documentary film that explores how soccer can facilitate social change in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums.

When: Thursday, April 11th at 6pm

Where: Branner Lounge, Stanford University

RSVP: Join the event on Facebook

Dinner Provided from DARBAR Indian Restaurant

· Introduction by Sarina Beges, CDDRL Program Manager

· Post-screening Q&A with CFK-Kenya Executive Director Hillary Omala and Producer Beth-Ann Kutchma

About the Film

Footage of violent clashes fueled by polarizing national presidential elections is intertwined with profiles of youth from different religious and ethnic backgrounds as they navigate daily life and prepare for the final championship soccer game of the season. The film provides a glimpse often a very positive one into an Africa few have seen. It attempts to break stereotypes associated with people who live in extreme poverty while depicting sports as a tool that could be used to prevent violence among at-risk youth. The film made its World Premiere at the 11 MM Festival in Berlin, Germany in March 2012 and its North American Premiere at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, NC in April 2012. The soccer league is run by the international development organization,Carolina for Kibera. Watch the Film’s Trailer.

Abstract:

The levels of violence in Mexico have dramatically increased in the last few years due to structural changes in the drug trafficking business. The increase in the number of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) fighting over the control of territory and trafficking routes has resulted in a substantial increase in the rates of homicides and other crimes. This study evaluates the economic costs of drug-related violence. We propose electricity consumption as an indicator of the level of municipal economic activity and use two different empirical strategies to test this. To estimate the marginal effect of violence in the rate of homicides (per 100,000 inhabitants) we use an instrumental variable regression created by Mejía, Castillo and Restrepo (2012). For the average municipality, the marginal negative effect of the increase in homicides rates is substantive for earned income and the proportion of business owners, but not for energy consumption. Although negative and statistically significant, the effects are mild for labor participation. We also employ the methodology of synthetic controls to evaluate the effect that inter-narco wars have on local economies. The analysis indicates that the drug wars in those municipalities that saw dramatic increases in violence between 2006 and 2010 significantly reduced their energy consumption in the years after the change occurred, which is interpreted as a significant reduction in GDP per capita for these municipalities.

Speaker Bio:

Gabriela Calderon holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. Her research interests include policies that affect gender differences in developing countries, policy evaluation, violence in Latin America and the effect of institutions and governance on the provision of public goods and health/education outcomes. She did her master's degree in economic theory and bachelor's degree in economics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Currently, in the Program on Poverty and Governance, her research analyzes the way institutions and democracy affect the provision of public goods, and the impact they have on health outcomes like infant mortality trends. She is also studying the effects of government interventions that combat drug-trafficking organizations over violence in Mexico.

Her research has focused on the topics of development, public finance, and the evaluation of public policy programs in Mexico. For example, during the summers of 2009/2010, she conducted a field experiment in Zacatecas, Mexico with Giacomo de Giorgi, an assistant professor from Stanford University, and Jesse Cuhna, a former Stanford student. The main task was to evaluate the impact of financial literacy classes on underprivileged women entrepreneurs in the region. To successfully complete an evaluation in an untreated region, they proposed collaborating with the Mexican NGO CREA on a joint project. They contacted local interviewers, trained them, and identified all women entrepreneurs in the 17 communities, in which we conducted the experiment. Preliminary results suggest that the female entrepreneurs who were randomly assigned to treatment earned higher profits, had larger revenues, and served a greater number of clients. They also found that they were more likely to implement formal accounting techniques.

She has also studied programs that are not randomly assigned as an experiment. For example, she has analyzed the effects of a national policy in Mexico of child care services, called Estancias Infantiles para apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI), using administrative, census and household data. Her empirical research strategy identifies the effects of the program on both the men and women who were eligible for the program. She used time, location and eligibility variation, and considered a major threat to identification of the actual effects: for example, a manufacturer who moves into a municipality at approximately the same time as the EI program and who happens to disproportionately demand the skills of women who were eligible to the program happened to have. To ensure that such scenarios do not affect her results, she chose not triple difference strategy, in which all ineligible people are treated as “controls” for the EI-eligible families. Instead, she employs Synthetic Control Methods, using the same methodology as Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond and Hainmueller (2010) to ensure that her control group has the same mix of skills and preferences as the EI-eligible group. She adapted the Synthetic Control Method to analyze repeated cross-sectional household data, which are data that are typically available in developing countries

Following the highly successful conference "Violence, Drugs and Governance: Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective", the Program on Poverty and Governance is partnering with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to host a new conference on violence, crime and citizen insecurity in Latin America. The greater objectives of this two day conference are to:

• Deepen the critical analysis of insecurity in Latin America through an interdisciplinary dialogue and the creation of methodological tools
• Create an interdisciplinary network of academics focused on the study and comprehension of insecurity in the Western Hemisphere
• Share the findings and recommendations from this network with key actors and decision makers of the region

• Develop a program of annual Forum-Conferences on citizen security in Latin America, with a high degree of academic analysis, and open to dialogue with government officials and authorities

• Launch a new collaborative database for crime and violence research among the networks of scholars

Presenters will speak on four thematic areas:

1. Citizen Insecurity Tipping Points
2. Costs and Impacts of Insecurity
3. Drug Trafficking and Drug Regimes
4. Interventions and Best Practices to Decrease Violence

The conference will be held at ITAM's Santa Teresa campus in Mexico City on March 11-12.

Anuncio del evento en español via ITAM: haz click aquí.