INTRODUCTION:
More than one billion children experience violence annually, more so in with low and middle income countries. Violence impacts children’s health and wellbeing, yet is perpetuated by socio-cultural norms.

METHODS:
Focus groups and interviews with primary and secondary school children in five countries were undertaken to explore the lived experiences, perceptions of, and attitudes towards violence at school and home. These were undertaken in the local language by locally trained assistants, were digitally recorded, translated and transcribed verbatim into English for analysis using NVIVO qualitative software. Data were coded systematically both inductively and deductively resulting in very strong inter-rater reliability scores of < 80%. The results presented here are based on preliminary analysis of both Tanzania and Ghana that includes eight focus groups and 30 individual interviews.

RESULTS:
Results are organized around three emergent themes. First, the children report their views of what is ‘normal’ and common/typical in the context of their experiences of violence (physical, emotional, sexual) in their daily lives at home and at school, including the identities of perpetrators as well as their own definitions of punishment versus violence. Second, the children share in their own words the impacts of those experiences on their health, wellbeing, social relationships and thoughts about their future as they attempt to make sense of their circumstances. Third, the children describe their views of how the norms around the daily violence they experience (actual or threatened) should and could be changed.

CONCLUSIONS:
These data allow us to understand how the children contextualize their experiences and form their norms around violence. The interview data allow us to understand more fully the lived experiences of violence for these children, and their views on potential impacts on health and wellbeing as well as their thoughts on how these norms should or could be changed.