In today’s blog, I want to share with you the email that I have sent out to 19 big organisations in May. It is a bit longer than my average blog, but it is worth it:
I am trying to make organisations aware of both the dangers that lie ahead for vulnerable children, and of the opportunity to do something to mitigate those dangers, and I wanted to bring this to your attention as well.
I have been involved in grassroots work in alternative care and child protection in Africa, Asia and South-America as a consultant for 13 years now, including last February being a co-organiser and co-facilitator of the conference ‘ Immersive Simulation Lab: Transition to Family-Based Care in India’, in Pune. Currently, we are facing a crisis that can only partially be addressed at the grassroots level. So, I am appealing to state parties and overarching organisations to take the lead in preparing for the situation we will most likely be facing once the lockdowns end.
There are predictions – most likely to be accurate – of a huge influx of children into residential childcare institutions after the lockdowns are ended, in many countries. This is likely to be caused by deaths of caregivers (due to the Coronavirus itself, lack of access to medical care for other problems and due to starvation) and by the financial strains caused by the economic recession into which we will be emerging. Aside from children ending up in institutions, there is also a high likelihood of a rise in child trafficking and in children living in the streets.
Although generally I am involved in moving children out of institutions, into family-based care in responsible, well-coordinated ways, I think that right now, rather than trying to get the 200 children out of a given institution, we need to start working – immediately – to prevent 500+ children lining up to enter that same institution after the lockdown. Working on family preservation will reduce the number of children in all three categories mentioned above.
I do not want to offer this as just a general suggestion. There are very concrete, practical things that we can and should start doing straight away.
The first of all we need to start raising awareness about the benefits of children growing up in their own families. We can use the radio, tv, newspapers, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and whatever else to get the message out that we understand that things are very hard for many families at the moment and that it can seem like children will be better off if they are placed in an institution or handed over to the person who comes promising a better future, but that actually it has been shown that children do much better both in school and in life if they grow up with their own family.
Obviously, just telling desperate families that they should just keep caring for their own children is not going to be effective if it is not backed up with support offered. This is why I think for the moment we need to skip a few steps on the road to working towards family-based care and move ahead to prioritising ‘design of services’, specifically the design of family-preservation services.
Right now, in many countries, there is a need to provide daily workers and people living in profound poverty with food rations to keep them alive. However, I think we can also look towards other forms of support, particularly ones that empower families to get back on their own feet once the opportunities to do so become available again, rather than just keeping them alive from day to day. These services can include various things known to be very effective, such as microloan schemes, income-generating activities, or provide support to families to allow their children to go to school.
We also need to look at the various countries where children have been moved out of institutions and sent back to their families from one moment to the next when the Covid-19 pandemic reached their country. These family reunifications are at extremely high risk of breaking down, due to lack of any kind of preparation or support. To prevent these children from being sent back to an institution, ending up in the streets or being trafficked, high priority needs to be given to getting services and support in place that will allow the reunification of these families to turn into a proper, sustainable reintegration.
It would be useful to do a survey asking vulnerable families what kind of support they feel they would need to be able to take care of their children. And it would be useful to link up with other organisations in each country, district or city to see if you can coordinate support efforts for family-preservation and family strengthening in a variety of ways.
It is essential that things are thought out and organised now so that services and support will be in place from the moment that they are needed. And awareness needs to be raised on the kind of support that is available so that families know that there is help out there. This would also be a very good time for lobbying and advocacy to make sure that that government support that is available de Jura actually materialises.
As countries and intergovernmental organisations are looking for how to finance first the course of and then the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic – in a situation where no one really knows whether the wheel will still work and what may need to be invented next to be able to keep going -, I think it is very important to push the message of the need to invest in order to save money when it comes to community services and child protection.
After the last financial crisis many countries and financial institutions grabbed on to ‘austerity’ as the answer, and in doing so, they gave us the clearest proof possible that cutting funds to community and support services comes at a very high cost, a cost not just in terms of human suffering, but also financially. With support services gone, problems are not recognised, let alone addressed until they reach full crisis mode and at that point the price tag for dealing with it has inflated exponentially. To avoid this mistake being made again, we need to push out the message that when it comes to child welfare investing in universal services saves on having to spend on targeted and specialised service, spending on targeted and specialised services saves on having to spend on out-of-home alternative care and spending on out of home alternative care saves on having to spend on adults leaving care and getting tied up in unemployment, mental health crises, the criminal justice system and being unable to care for their own children.
After previous disasters – whether natural or man-made – we have regularly seen a surge of foreigners going into ‘developing’ countries to ‘help’ vulnerable children by setting up ‘orphanages.’ This too is something we need to be prepared for and that we need to try to cut off at the pass. Preventing this requires a two-pronged approach:
- Lobbying governments not to allow people to come in and set up residential childcare institutions, and to actually enforce this policy.
- Raise awareness among people who are likely to decide to go start an ‘orphanage’ to ‘help’ – such as, for example, faith-based communities in high-income countries – about the harmful effects of institutionalisation and about the benefits of setting up or supporting community-based services and family-preservation projects.
Under lockdown, with the threat of the pandemic hanging over us, it is easy to start feeling helpless and hopeless. But there is a lot that we can do and particularly large international organisations are in a very strong position to take up this challenge and lead the way. In recovery systems will have to be reinvented, so let’s try to make sure that they are not just rebuilt, but remodelled and that this is done in ways that are most cost-effective and beneficial to children and families in the long-term.
Please let me know what you think about this. I would be happy to meet online with anyone who wants to discuss this further.
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