These discussions and examination of evidence-based examples led to the re-launching of a Ugandan-based network of actors working across crises aiming to continue to explore what we “know” and what we still need to learn in the field of child protection. This learning group will undertake a number of new learning initiatives throughout the country starting with an inter-agency learning initiative to explore household violence and child security and well-being.

To hear from workshop participants’ perspectives on the problem of violence against children click here.

Participants undertook collaborative group work, breakout panels, and discussed future plans with an eye towards strengthening networking and impact.

The major outcomes of the conference were:
consensus on the importance of establishing effective relationships and communications within the CPC Learning Network;
defining roles and priorities of CPC Learning Network members;
capturing lessons learned from the field and effective dissemination of knowledge within the CPC Learning Network and with external stakeholders;
understanding the challenges and opportunities of building a global network;
learning about ways to establish and develop successful local working groups.

An especially important connection was made between country level and global technical working groups, as well as across country level groups.  This connection will help drive the implementation of the network’s vision and purpose.

The next step will be to synthesize learning and key decisions and recommendations made during the meeting and develop a strategy document to inform the next period work-plans of the various CPC Learning Network groups (Program Learning Groups, Global Technical Groups, Advisory Group, and Secretariat).

From the Spanish Civil War to the Genocide in Rwanda to the Asian Tsunami, outsiders have used tragedy as an occasion to evacuate girls and boys out of their homelands, usually with dire consequences. We see history repeating itself yet again in Haiti as international actors with misplaced sympathy advocate sending children “orphaned” by the earthquake to other countries.

Just this past weekend, ten Americans from Idaho were arrested in Port-au-Prince for trying to take 33 “orphaned” Haitian children to a safe haven in the Dominican Republic. One of the many troubling aspects of this incident is that many of the children do have parents (some of whom willingly put their children in the Americans’ care reportedly in hope that the children would have access to better opportunities.)

Assuming the best of intentions on the part of all of the adults involved – which, admittedly, may be a stretch – the presumption that the children would be better cared for outside of Haiti contradicts the lessons learned from previous disasters.

First, the global community needs to understand that “orphan” is often a misnomer in poor countries as many children living in orphanages have at least one parent alive.  They may be in the orphanage to receive food and education that their parents could not provide or sent there for their own safety during a crisis situation (like the one facing Haiti today.) In cases like these, parents continue to visit their children until they are better able to care for and support the children at home.

History is full of tragic and unnecessary separations. During the Spanish Civil War, 100,000 children were separated from their families and taken to over a dozen countries.

In Rwanda, hundreds of refugee children living in make-shift orphanages and assumed to be orphans were taken to France, Belgium and Germany for adoption. Days later, their mothers (who had temporary placed them in these shelters while they went back to Rwanda to look for lost loved ones) came to reclaim them and were told it was too late.

In the aftermath of the tsunami, a Virginia based church’s plans to remove “orphaned” Muslim children from Aceh and raise them in a “Christian” orphanage in Jakarta were averted at the last minute by coordinated actions of both the Indonesian and U.S. governments. Even so, religious elements in Indonesian society used this incident to foster anti-American sentiment.

Make no mistake, in recent years Haiti has had serious child and family care issues. UNICEF estimated in 2007 that 380,000 children lived in orphanages. Prior to the earthquake a reported 1100 children were in the process of being adopted.  This catastrophe adds to an already weak system with an estimated additional 50,000 children separated from their families.

The “humanitarian parole policy” approved by the Obama administration appropriately targets those children who were already in the adoption pipeline prior to the earthquake and legally confirmed by the Haitian government as orphans eligible for adoption.

But citizens should not ask the government to relax our immigration rules to save children who were “orphaned” by the earthquake. While the images of Haitian children haunt us, our first responsibility is to focus on reunification not separation. It must be a priority to find families – the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, or godparents – just as we would do here in the United States.

Instead we should support the Haitian government in enforcing existing adoption laws designed to protect children. These strict guidelines are not meant to keep children in desperate straits, but to prevent unintended separations from families or, worse yet, the very real possibility of abuse or trafficking.

We – the outsiders – need to incorporate the lessons learned from past humanitarian emergencies and understand that separating Haitian children from their extended families and their countries of origin can result in long-term harm above and beyond the devastation they have already experienced.

Today, Haitian families continue to desperately search for loved ones. Others are injured and unable to connect with their families.  For unaccompanied Haitian children, trying to survive one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has seen in a generation, being branded as orphans should not be used as an excuse to spirit them out of the country.

Focusing on the immediate care and placement needs of separated children, UNICEF and Save the Children are promoting much need family tracing and reunification assistance for all separated children. More Haitian women need to be enlisted by agencies to provide individualized care for children (especially infants and young children) already in orphanages.

Food for work and cash assistance programs, if targeted to the most vulnerable, can enable poor families to remain together and allow extended families to care for separated children. And economic support can also prevent poor families from having to place their children in orphanages because they cannot afford food and education on their own.

In essence, we need to take a long-term systems approach to help Haiti rebuild to become a safe and secure place where families have the economic means to raise their own children.

Dr. Neil Boothby is Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and is the co-author of Unaccompanied Children in Emergencies: Care and Protection in Wars, Natural Disasters and Mass Population Movements.

Click here to download the Executive Summary.
Click here to download the Full Report.

From the Introduction of the Executive Summary:

“Community-based child protection mechanisms are at the forefront of efforts to address child protection in emergency, transitional, and development contexts worldwide. The mobilization of such grassroots groups has become a common programming response in many settings, particularly in areas affected by armed conflict or displacement.
For international agencies, they are a favoured approach in places where local and national government is unable or unwilling to fulfill children’s rights to care and protection.

These groups are a vital means of mobilizing communities around children’s protection and wellbeing. Organised with care and in a contextually appropriate manner, they make it possible to: identify, prevent and respond to significant child protection risks; mobilise communities around child protection issues; and provide a base of local support and action that can be taken to scale through links with other community groups and with national child protection systems. These national systems include more formal, governmental mechanisms and also less formal, civil society mechanisms, such as traditional justice systems.

Although this approach is widely used and supported by international agencies, there is at present a lack of robust evidence about the effectiveness, cost, scalability and sustainability of community-based child protection mechanisms. This lack of systematic evidence impedes accountability and makes it very difficult to define effective practices, develop appropriate inter-agency guidance for practitioners, and harmonise and strengthen the quality of practice. The lack of systematic evidence also impedes efforts to obtain the funding needed to support children’s protection and wellbeing, advocate effectively for increased investment by governments in child protection systems, and encourage policy leaders to promote the most effective practices and policies.

To address this evidence gap, a number of child protection agencies came together to conduct a review of the available global evidence on community-based child protection mechanisms and their impact on children’s protection and wellbeing. The review is the first part of a two-phase process and raises key questions that will be pursued in the field research that will form part of phase two.

This report is an executive summary of the first phase findings. The full report presents the findings and methodology in greater detail, analyses more fully key issues and challenges, discusses a greater variety of case studies and models of promising practice, and explores the implications for national child protection systems. Annexed to the full report, is also a full set of descriptions and analysis of each of the documents reviewed according to a standardised matrix. The full report is also available at www.savethechildren.org.uk/onlinelibrary.”

The project will allow Barber to build on the intensive work he did in the 1990s with adolescents and youth emerging from the first Intifada. He will study the cohort now that they are adults.

“The basic question that we’re trying to answer is, ‘What is the impact of political conflict on youth as they transition to adulthood?’” said Barber, a professor of child and family studies, who is a leading expert on youth who experience political conflict and Palestinian youth in particular.

“The question is compelling for two reasons. First, the population of young people who experience political conflict is substantial and therefore deserves pointed attention. Second, existing research has not adequately answered the question of impact, leaving us still unable to confidently recommend policies or intervention strategies.”

The research team, which will consult regularly with members of the CPC Learning Network in oPt, will focus on Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

“Palestinians have been selected for this initial project because of several unique elements of their experience,” Barber said. Palestinian adolescents — more than any other youth population — have had extraordinarily high involvement in political conflict. The conflict in their homeland has been going on throughout their young adulthood, and is complicated by the recent factional divide among Palestinians themselves.

“The proposed project would be the first-ever, representative and comprehensive follow-up of a cohort of youth who participated substantially in political conflict during their adolescence and young adulthood, and periodically thereafter,” he said.

Barber plans to interview 2,000 males and females who were ages 7 to 17 in 1987 when the first Palestinian uprising against Israel began.

The project will help to refine an innovative method for doing longitudinal research on crisis-affected populations.  Using a life-event history calendaring method, it will examine patterns of education, employment and key social relationships, including marriage and children. Barber said he’ll focus particularly on how war and violence has impacted their economic resources (e.g., food, shelter, electricity, mobility), social resources (e.g., loss of parents, siblings, extended family members, friends and respected leaders), and political resources.

“We’ll identify the various pathways the subjects have taken since their early experiences with political conflict, and can specifically assess how patterns of loss, and loss recovery, over time predict their current well-being in the major areas of their lives,” Barber said.

Then, the researchers will choose 500 of the adults who represent those key trajectories and record life history interviews with them, using the life-event history calendar as the prompt.

“It is one thing to know the factual patterns of events or experiences; it is quite another to know what those moments meant to the youth and how critical they were or were not in their development,” Barber said.

The central hypothesis of the project is that the loss, particularly the repeated loss, of key resources will be more useful in predicting overall functioning than merely the exposure to violence that most other studies concentrate on. The hope, he said, is that this research will help better identify those whose lives have been seriously compromised through experiences with conflict, and those who have adapted effectively. For both cases, he said, the data will help determine the key factors that have contributed to their current state of well-being. These findings will assist significantly in developing programs and recommending policies for current youth undergoing protracted political conflict.

Findings from the research will be applicable to the thousands of young people worldwide who experience war and violence associated with political conflict, and the methodology will serve as a template for doing similar research in other conflict regions.

The project will culminate with three dissemination seminars — to be held in Jerusalem, Washington, D.C., and Zurich — where the findings will be discussed and implications for policy and practice will be identified.

The research team will include Center colleague Assistant Professor Clea McNeely and Khalil Shikaki, Professor and Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR). It also includes a group of “highly experienced and respected Palestinian scholars and practitioners, as well as leading experts in the methods of data collection and analysis.” The research team will train PSR’s 120 Palestinian field workers to conduct the interviews.

Barber is the author of “Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Violence.” Published in 2009 by Oxford University Press; the book is considered to be the authoritative work on research in this area.

UT’s Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence was established in 2005 with the aim of becoming an authoritative source and training agent for the potential joint role of scholarship, programming, practice and policy in serving the needs of adolescents involved in political violence around the world. For more about the center, see http://youthviolence.tennessee.edu/mission.html.

The Jacobs Foundation funds research in the area of youth development in an effort to “unlock young people’s potential and help them to become productive and socially responsible members of society.”

Thus far, the resource kit has been used—or is in the process of being used—in 12 countries across Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe. Previous pilot sites in Georgia, Indonesia and South Africa, informed revisions earlier this year. The kit was revised again midyear, and has undergone a rigorous field testing in Gambella, Ethiopia, which produced valuable information not only on the context of child protection concerns there, but also regarding the use of the resource kit itself. Recent, upcoming and current pilot sites include Sudan, Yemen, Bhutan, and the Central African Republic. The use of the resource kit in each site represents an interagency effort led by UNICEF or an NGO partner.

Courtney is in the process of contacting those who have led the assessments, to synthesize learning and experience from the various pilot sites. Currently, interviews are being held with those who have used the resource kit, in whole or in part, or thought about using the resource kit but decided otherwise. Through such interviews, Courtney first discusses with practitioners child protection concerns on a more general level, i.e. the specifics of the emergency context and the coordination environment surrounding the assessments, before moving to more specific discussion of what parts of the resource kit were most/least useful, what worked well during the assessment process and what needed improvement, what the main findings of the in-country assessment were, and any other “lessons learned”. For those who chose not to use the toolkit, the interview addresses why they felt it wasn’t the appropriate resource for that context. The main goal of this learning exercise is to draft a series of case studies that outline the need for child protection assessments in emergencies, the use of these assessments, how a resource kit can support these objectives, and the most appropriate methods for doing so. The work also addresses the key question of how assessment findings were translated into action.

Courtney acknowledges that the job of analyzing experience across such a diverse range of pilot sites is difficult, in that every situation and context is unique. The key is in developing an approach to interviewing end users that allows for collecting information in a consistent, comparable way, to be able to distill learning across the multiple settings. And many practitioners are happy to participate. Feedback from the team leader in Ethiopia, for example, has assisted greatly with troubleshooting the different parts of the toolkit, based on the team leader’s assessment of which tools the assessment team understood and executed well, and which others required a much higher degree of supervision, such as sampling. This finding greatly enhances the team’s ability to target resource kit revisions that will translate into better experiences across settings. By soliciting and incorporating feedback grounded in field testing and direct experience, the resource kit is relying on many CPC partners to develop the initiative into a relevant, user-friendly tool for enhancing all aspects of child protection.

Professor Les Roberts and research assistants Kathleen Myer and Alina Potts conducted a nationwide survey of children’s rights violations in the Central African Republic (CAR) in collaboration with UNICEF.  The survey examined the “grave violations” of children’s rights that are to be monitored in selected conflicts according to the UN Security Council Resolution 1612, namely killing or maiming, abductions, recruitment, and rape or sexual abuse of children.

The survey was conducted using the Neighborhood Method, a survey methodology developed at Columbia University and built on the assumption that, in certain contexts, people are able to speak knowledgeably about the experiences of their neighbors.  The research team divided the country into two strata (the North being more affected by conflict and less exposed to government services than the South), surveyed 60 clusters throughout the country, and calculated prevalence rates for the grave violations listed above, as well as crude and under-five mortality rates.

They found the most prevalent violation experienced by children to be rape. Surprisingly there was a relatively high rate of abduction of adult men.  Overall more violations were reported in the Northern part of the country.

The survey uncovered a staggeringly high mortality rate throughout the country, with a crude mortality rate double the emergency threshold mortality rates established by the Sphere Project, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

These findings are being shared with UNICEF and partners in CAR to develop advocacy and program responses to address the highest mortality rate uncovered and further explore its causes; to direct programming related to the grave violations surveyed; and to improve current monitoring and surveillance processes.

The work, funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, would not have been possible without a strong team of six female interviewers, recruited in the capital city Bangui.

The Children, Youth and Economic Strengthening (CYES) Network is an effort, grounded in a series of partnerships across non-profit organizations, donor agencies and academics, to build a body of knowledge on effective economic strengthening programming for children and youth. It was formed in 2004, in response to a USAID workshop on supporting orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) through economic strengthening activities. Last year saw the launch of the CYES Network Learning Platform, established to further the key aims of the Network:

• Showcase the innovations and learning of CYES-focused organizations and programs
• Foster the creation of partnerships across participating organizations
• Provide a reliable source of information on the latest resources and opportunities
• Link CYES initiatives together to enhance the impact of investments in this area

The CYES Network advances these goals through strategic partnerships with key players in the field of child-focused economic strengthening, including the CPC Network. Support from the AED STRIVE Program, USAID/Displaced Children and Orphans Fund, the AED FIELD Program and The SEEP Network provides the CYES Network with several key tools:

• CYES Network Learning Platform

The Learning Platform was established to capitalize on the momentum currently exhibited in the CYES space by providing an efficient and reliable means of 1) sharing information from across diverse activities, 2) raising the profile of the most promising practices in the field and 3) informing newcomers by providing a clearinghouse of information specifically oriented towards economic strengthening for children and youth. The CYES Network welcomes contributions in the form of activity profiles, resources, event and funding announcements, and comments on expert posts.

• CYES Network Events

Through both stand-alone events and those put on through partnerships, the CYES Network aims to bring members together in an increasingly integrated fashion, expanding the reach of partner events while also pursuing opportunities to leverage the learning platform in order to provide access to those who otherwise are unable to attend. You can support these efforts but submitting upcoming event information to us for our calendar or approaching the Network with joint-sponsorship opportunities.

• CYES Network Newsletter

With an increasing number of activities underway and resources continually put out, keeping track of the latest thinking and experience in the field presents a substantial challenge to dedicated but busy professionals. The regular CYES Network Newsletter consolidates this information to keep the network up-to-date. Subscribe to the newsletter.

The CPC Learning Network is already developing an active cadre of member organizations who will, in the future, be capable of collaboratively employing assessment methodologies and able to identify, quantify, and understand the causes and consequences of key child care and protection concerns. Further, key members of Learning Network will build consensus among their peers on definitions, child protection framework, assessment methods, and standards in protection programming as an evidence base emerges. Local, national, and global members are already developing relevant learning agendas for their particular country or technical contexts, which will inform future global-level learning.