As mentioned in the email (which you can find HERE), children have been sent back to their families – or simply pushed out of institutions – in various countries at the start of the lockdown. Something which I foresaw would happen back in March (HERE), though this is not something I’m happy to have been right about. Without any preparation, support or monitoring. In fact, in many of these places, no one is entirely sure where these children are right now. And we are talking about thousands of children per country in various countries.
This is, of course, something that needs to be addressed. Efforts have to be made to trace the children. Otherwise, they are likely to end up in the hands of child-traffickers, of people otherwise intent on exploiting them. Or they may end up living on the streets, or not surviving very long.
This is not a simple thing to do, of course. Particularly in countries where there is generally very little monitoring or data collection on the situations children find themselves in. However, that does not mean that it is impossible. Efforts have to be made to find and identify children without caregivers and this needs to be followed up with efforts to trace their families and see whether -with support!- family reintegration is possible. If reintegration turns out not to be possible, other family-based solutions need to be looked at.
For those children who have returned to their families from the institutions without preparation or support, support and monitoring must be offered. If the child had been living in an institution for more than a few months before being reunited with his family, there are likely to be psychological and behavioural challenges when the child returns. The child and the family have grown and developed during the period of absence and they will have to get to know and trust each other again.
These are not simple things. In practice, if there is no training and guidance for the family to help them understand why this is happening and how to deal with it, it is very likely that after a while the family feels unable to cope anymore and sees no other option than to send the child back to the same or another institution. Similarly, the reason that led to the child being placed in an institution in the first place may not have been resolved and may again lead to an impossible situation and the child being sent back. Practical support needs to be offered to remove or mitigate the circumstances that led to the child being placed in an institution to make sure that the family reunification has a chance at becoming successful.
It is essential to make a real effort to give the family reunification a chance of success because if the challenges become too great to deal with and the placement breaks down, this will lead to a traumatic second rejection and abandonment for the child. Making successful reintegration in the future very unlikely.
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