Child Protection

Child protection involves keeping children safe from the risk of harm caused by sexual, physical and emotional abuse, exploitation or neglect.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) is universally recognised as the basis for child protection. Outlining the fundamental right of each child to be protected from abuse and exploitation, the Convention establishes a universal duty of care that is owed to children and young people. It provides a foundation for Plan’s work both locally and internationally.

Child abuse and exploitation

All children have the right to freedom from abuse and exploitation. However, every day millions of children are abused and exploited around the world. In family homes, institutions, organisations, on the streets, in war zones and in emergency situations, children are denied their human rights. Children are exploited through sexual abuse including prostitution and pornography. Enslaved in bonded conditions they are bought, sold, trafficked in-country and across national borders, used like commodities. They are forced to work in abhorrent conditions in the worst forms of labour, exploited in armed conflict as child soldiers, abused via cyber technology and subjected to harmful traditional practices such as early marriage and female genital mutilation.

Child abuse damages children physically and emotionally, negatively impacting their behaviour and vital stages of their growth and development. The impact of child abuse and exploitation has both immediate and long-term affects on the individual child, their family and their community.

Some of the factors causing or perpetuating such abuse and exploitation are:

• inadequate protective legislation
• weak or absent child protection systems
• prevalence of gender-based discrimination and abuse
• corruption and impunity from prosecution
• a tendency for children to be blamed for the abuse they experience
• breakdown of protective mechanisms – e.g. families and communities
• traditional beliefs and myths that sustain abusive practices
• lack of basic services
  
  

Plan's work

The socio-economic environment of many countries in which Plan works feeds the vicious cycle of child abuse. Factors such as landlessness, poor access to resources and production, gender inequality, inadequate access to education and livelihood opportunities and the affects of HIV/AIDS, often force families living in the most difficult of circumstances, to make risky and harmful decisions that affect the rights and protection of their children.

Plan's work with children and communities aims to address such causal factors and end child abuse and exploitation.

More specifically, with a focus on rights-based preventative programs that protect children, working with local partners, Plan's programs seek to build 'child safe' organisations and communities. This is achieved by increasing organisational, community and local government awareness and action, to prevent child abuse and neglect through the development and implementation of policy and procedures as well as community-based models for child abuse prevention and protection.

• community based child protection program in the Philippines
• health and educational services for working children (Vietnam and India)
• educating children who are in high risk situations about their rights
• micro-finance program that assists parents to generate sufficient income, preventing their children from having to work (in many countries in West Africa, South and South East Asia and Latin America)
• educating and securing the rights for AIDS orphans (Uganda)
• Kids Help Lines (Vietnam and Indonesia).