In her talk, Prof Lucie Cluver explores: can we really improve parent-child relationships, reduce child abuse and reduce poverty? This ERC Starting Grant,Preventing Abuse of Children in the context of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, has developed and tested a free child abuse prevention parenting programme for low and middle income countries. The project has been in close partnership with UNICEF, the World Health Organisation and USAID-PEPFAR. Lucie will report for the first time on the new findings from the final cluster Randomised Controlled Trial of 1100 children and families in 40 sites in South Africa. The programme is currently being scaled up to 90,000 families in DRC, Uganda, Lesotho, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Cameroon, the Philippines and Thailand.

Lucie Cluver is a Professor of Child and Family Social Work, in the Centre for Evidence-Based Social Intervention in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, and an Honorary Lecturer in Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town.