At the end of last year, I attended an online course organised by Harvard X: Child Protection: Child Rights in Theory and Practice. It was an interesting course that gave a very good overview of what Child Rights and Child Protection entail, looking in detail at several aspects, and also providing insight into what is needed to work towards effective Child Protection. On this latter subject, one of the issues that came up was that in the past – and to a certain extent still – the tendency was to use a siloed approach to individual child protection issues, which usually led to limited success.
For example, an organisation or government department would focus on rescuing children who were being trafficked or sexually exploited, or they would take action to end child labour or child marriage. However, in their quest to rescue the victims, they were mostly ‘treating symptoms’ without looking for – let alone addressing – root causes. Yet is it exactly those root causes that make children vulnerable to various kinds of exploitation or abuse, and addressing them will prevent most cases of any of these child protection issues.
It is much more effective to use an integrated systems approach, which involves many different stakeholders working together, and developing strategies that help both address the child protection issues and prevent them.
Going through the course, all of this made a lot of sense to me, and when I thought about it a bit more, I realised that it is the basis on which I have been working all along. On the surface, it can seem like I am focussed on a very limited child protection issue: getting children out of institutions and into families. However, if you look below the surface, you see that that is only the door opening into a much wider child protection approach.
From the start, I have placed great emphasis on the fact that transition of care or deinstitutionalisation is not about pushing children out of institutions or closing the doors of institutions. It is about creating a new system that allows far more children to grow up in their own families because there are family strengthening measures in place and community services available. That system will also support family-based alternative care provisions, such as foster families.
And by making sure that this support is available to all families that need it, you are addressing the root causes of problems like child marriage, child labour, child trafficking, street children, as well as those of children ending up in institutions.
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