A/HRC/22/55 parliaments is a crucial step to ensuring children’s participation, if children’s voices fail to be taken seriously and discriminatory attitudes toward children are not addressed, these platforms run the risk of remaining symbolic and ineffective. F. Ensuring a gender perspective 88. Gender influences perceptions and attitudes towards violence, as well as the manner in which violence is perpetrated and experienced. Gender-based violence against girls includes differential access to food and services, domestic or intimate partner violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, deprivation of inheritance or property and harmful practices, such as child marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting and honour killing. Gender-based violence also includes specific types of violence against men and boys, including bullying, fighting, and assault and gun crime. 89. Many governmental responses highlighted that gender equality is established as a fundamental principle in the national constitution or specific legislation; in some cases there is a policy to promote gender equality and equity, or legislation to address specific manifestations of gender-based violence. 90. At the same time, there is a significant gap between these legal and policy frameworks, and implementation and public response. Working with both boys and girls is critical to overcome prejudice and preconceptions and support victims in seeking help and report incidences of violence. This is an area where incremental efforts are being made, including by engaging men and boys to change social norms of masculinity and encompass gender-equal relations free from violence, including more equal sharing of caregiving activities and domestic work within the household. IV. Accelerating progress in a complex global environment 91. The analysis of Governments’ responses, together with the overall findings from the global survey, constitute a crucial reference for the years ahead. The findings confirm the urgency of consolidating and scaling up initiatives to achieve the three priority goals pursued by the Special Representative, namely developing a well-coordinated and wellresourced national agenda on violence against children, enacting a comprehensive and explicit legal ban on all forms of violence and consolidating data and research to inform accelerated progress in this field. 92. The implementation of the Study recommendations over the last three years has also helped a better understanding of the multidimensional nature of violence and the importance of maintaining a holistic view of the child in all initiatives for violence prevention and elimination. It is indispensable to address the cumulative exposure of children to various manifestations of violence in different contexts and throughout the child’s life cycle. Indeed, for children at risk, violence in the home, the school and the community is often a continuum, spilling over from one setting to another and, at times, persisting across generations. 93. Moreover, this process has made clear that violence does not take place in a vacuum. Indeed, as addressed in the sections below, children’s vulnerability, as well as genuine opportunities for violence prevention and responses, is strongly impacted by factors such as poverty and vulnerability, climate change and natural disasters, and armed violence and organized crime. 18