Johannesburg - In all aspects of society, there are phenomenal women who are making a difference in the lives of those around them while also striving to new heights. This Women’s Month, The Saturday Star will be profiling some of the nation’s leading ladies.
Professor Shanaaz Mathews’ vast expertise lies in children and violence, child protection, child abuse, gender policy, Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and evidence-based programming. She is currently the director of the Children’s Institute, which is made up of a multi-disciplinary team of research and support staff and supplemented by a pool of contract research assistants and post-grad students and three Honorary Professors. Staff members have qualifications in public health, psychology, sociology, information sciences, law, public policy and development, political science, and social work.
The experience of Mathews and her colleagues covers the statistical analysis of large administrative datasets and household survey data; social and legal research; ECD policy and programming; local and indigenous knowledge; and participatory methodologies for doing research with vulnerable children.
As the head of the Children's Institute, Mathews is committed to building a cohort of researchers skilled in the area of child-centred and policy-oriented research, and staff supervise postgraduate students from a range of disciplines.
She joined the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town as the director back in 2012, and prior to this, Mathews was a specialist scientist with the Gender and Health Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council for 12 years.
Mathews is passionate about fighting violence against women and children, as much of her research over the years has focused on pathways for men to develop into perpetrators of violence in the home.
She has also led two national epidemiology studies on female homicide and the socio-cultural context of intimate femicide. Mathews was also the primary investigator on a study into the psychosocial needs of children and parents post child sexual assault as well as the services needs of children as co-victims of domestic violence.
More recently, Mathews led the Determinants of Violence Against Women and Children Study for the South African Inter-ministerial parliamentary committee and served as a technical advisor on South Africa’s Diagnostic Review of Government Programmes to address violence against women and children.
She is also working on developing an understanding of the risk factors associated with sudden unexpected deaths among infants as the critical point to reducing under-5 mortality in South Africa.
Mathews also takes an active role in post-graduate teaching through the supervision and training of Master’s and PhD students in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town.