Search site

 

Child Protection

 

The programme has continued providing services in various areas of work as at the heart of our promotion of Children’s Rights lies the responsibility to ensure the protection of all children from any form of abuse and neglect. It is essential that our standards in this aspect of our work are of the highest level and consistently applied.

The report will seek to give an overview and highlights of activities undertaken over the year. In particular we will provide an in-depth review of key issues arising from our experience in the difficult areas of our programme work. The following are the key areas where we have been focussing our work.

Advocacy and Awareness Raising

 

The nature of our work is mainly on engaging our constituencies on dialogue and debates pertaining to issues affecting children. Core to this, ios the concept of child rights and protection. This hasd been undertaken in the four regions of the country where we have field officers. The following is a summary indicating the typr of audience we have been engaged with on our advocacy. The approach used was open discussions, debates and presentations to the subject of child rights and protection. As part of our advocacy work, we are continuing with awareness raising on the Rights of the Child and Protection in the four regions with schools, communtiy leaders and out of school youth including the community at large.

 

• A total of 38 schools, both primary and high schools, were visited in the whole country
• One group of out of school youth
• Eight community leaders’ workshops
• Community police from four tinkhundla centres were covered in the whole country
• One meeting with regional education staff
• Eight sessions with rural health motivators
• Five head teachers and teachers meetings
• Four community meetings comprising of rural men and women
• One church group
• Three child to child clubs
• One Scouts meeting

In view of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, most of the sessions include issues around HIV/AIDS as a crosscutting issue.

Key Issues coming out of the discussions

 

Evidently, the debate around child rights is still a very contentious issue, which still needs a lot of discussions and dissemination to the members of the public in general. Some people still hold the view that rights are meant to make children be disrespectful and wild. Hence our approach aims at opening dialogue and honest debate on the subject.

Networking

 

Underpinning our work in child protection is the importance of teaming up with other stakeholders including communities and children themselves. We try as much as possible to forge alliances and partnerships with other service providers. This is primarily to ensure that there is sound linkage and referral across all sectors. Key partners include government departments i.e. Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, police, education and other NGOs. In essence we are trying to ensure that there is synergy with all partners to enhance the protection of affected children and address the issues collaboratively.

Save the Children and Caritas Partnership on the Orphan Aid Project

 

We have been working closely with Caritas on their OrphanAid project in terms of giving technical support. This was facilitated through a formal agreement outlining the areas of responsibility for both parties in the whole process. The aim is to provide a solid, impartial system for minimising, recognising and responding to neglect and abuse and ensure excellent care to the orphaned and vulnerable children.

A relationship has been built to provide service of the highest possible standard by visiting households that have been under the programme. We also provide an impartial external monitoring of the situation of children as provided for and adhering to the principles of our child protection policy. Outcomes of the visits are discussed in joint meetings with representatives to learn ‘on the job’ how to identify abuse in all its forms, counseling and assisting children, ascertain children’s needs, working and dealing with children generally and other critical areas of concern.

Capacity Building and Support to the Police Department

 

We have been engaged in suporting the department for some time now. Again for the last year we have continued to look at areas where we could assist as port of building capacity for the police to respond to issues of children, particularly those who have been abused sexually.

Five senior police officers went for a study tour to Pretoria, South Africa. The main aim was to familiarise them with operations and functions of Child Protection Units. The senior police officers had meeting with experts that deal with domestic violence, rape and juvenile sexual abuse victims and how they are investigates and prepared for court. On their return, they felt that the tour was extremely useful and educational in terms of the latest tools in investigating crimes relating to children. They all felt strongly that most of the structures already put in place in South Africa can be applicable to Swaziland to enhance our work.

On another note a total of ten Royal Swaziland Police desk officers were supported to attend a three-week training on Family Violence, Child Protection and investigation of Sexual Offences. Its main objective was to ensure effective prevention, investigation of crimes and excellence in service delivery to the victims of family violence.

Responding to Needs

 

Critical to our work is trying to respond to the unique needs of individual children. In most cases after engaging communities on issues of child protection and child rights there is always a demand and referral from community members to attend to specific needs of children. These are very unique and diverse for each child. This report will attempt to once again give an overview of some of the dynamics for such a process. Essentially we continue to respond to issues of needy children and those left on their own as they arise, and at times work collaboratively with other agencies depending on the type of need. Our experience shows that most of these children are either victims of violence and abuse including HIV/AIDS. We are witnessing as an organisation an increase in the number of child headed households primarily as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In addition we are also witnessing an increase in the number of child abuse cases, particularly within the peri-urban areas. Often parents request our officers to talk to their children and young people in their residential areas after working hours on child’s rights and HIV/AIDS. It is our view that the intensity in the awareness raising campaign has prompted more reporting of cases of abuse, particularly physical and sexual abuse.

As indicated earlier on, we have seen cases of children ranging from physical, sexual, emotional, neglect, uncontrollable behaviour and abduction. Our work entails mainly giving support, counseling and guidance to parents and children affected by the above-mentioned issues. In most cases we go out to visit the families within their communities. In addition, we refer cases to relevant sectors, most importantly the police and social welfare. Other sister organisations dealing with such issues also get referrals from us.

Education Support

 

We continue to give technical advice and support to rural schools on how to set up and manage feeding scheme programmes though technically the programme has been phased out from our core programmes. Parents meetings have been held in seven schools in the past year for both introducing and reintroducing school feeding.

Relief has also been given to 178 orphaned and destitute children for school needs. This has been achieved through some individual sponsors who were kind enough to give a one-off donation for that period.

Challenges

 

In carrying out our work we are meeting a lot of challenges and lessons, which we feel are critical to our work. An attempt has been made below to summarise some of the key and critical issues.

 

• More work needs to be done both in children’s rights and protection in the communities so that there is a clearer understanding of the concept.
• We need to ensure that children also participate in such forums to clarify some of the myths associated with rights.
• Legislation that deals with children’s issues needs to be reviewed and made child friendly.
• Need to continue lobbying the government for reforms in child related laws so that they are informed and consistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child including the African Charter.
• More work needs to be done in the rural areas to ensure that they are taken on board with children’s issues.
• In our day to day activities we need to mainstream goals on children’s issues so that they can participate actively in all issues that affect them. This will ensure that our plans are child friendly.

Way Forward

 

As mentioned earlier, there is still a lot of work to be done collaboratively with other partner agencies we need to adhere to the following:

• Mobilise families and communities to support initiatives aimed at child protection.
• Influence for law reforms in the light of the child protection policy.
• Undertake research and documentation on best practices of child protection.
• Mount aggressive educational programmes on rights and child protection.
• Work with government sectors and other partner agencies to respond and handle child protection issues effectively.
• Encourage participation of children in formulating and implementing child protection policies and guidelines.
• Formulation and documentation ofchild protection policies and guidelines.
• Extensive awareness campaigns on child rights and child protection to communities, schools and community leaders.
• Counseling and guidance to families and individual children.
• Facilitate and assist families to lay charges in cases of sexual offences.
• Set up regional collaborative forums with the police, NGOs and the social welfare department.
• Encourage formation of youth clubs in schools to promote child protection initiatives.