Child protection
Updated: May 2009
Across the region, disparities affect children, their families and communities in ways that threaten their lives, security and well-being. The multiple disparities are based on socio-economic status, age, gender, ethnicity and geographic factors (urban–rural). Consequently, many of our region’s children are subjected to violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect – and are in need of better protection. The following are a few examples of key child protection issues across the region:
- • Violence against children. Children can experience violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect in homes, schools, institutions, streets, workplaces and through new technologies, including the Internet. However, violence against children is often ignored and perpetrated with impunity.
• Justice for children. While the majority of children in conflict with the law committed petty offences, children are being tried as adults and forced to share prison cells with adults in some of countries in the region. This renders them vulnerable to serious physical, social, and emotional repercussions.
• Child trafficking. Children are trafficked for a variety of purposes, including for bonded and exploitative labour, begging, sexual exploitation, illegal adoption and child marriage.
• Commercial sexual exploitation of children. Local and foreign demand fuels the commercial sexual exploitation of children, with child sex tourism representing only a small part of the problem. However, the growing use of new technologies, including the Internet, has made it easier to promote sex tourism, lure children, and disseminate child pornography across the globe.
UNICEF believes that all children have the right to survival, development, protection and participation. Every adult shares the responsibility of building an environment that safeguards children from violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect, and which helps them reach their full potential.
Given that child protection issues are complex and inter-related, UNICEF takes the position that a narrow ‘symptom-based’ approach fails to recognize and address the range of factors involved in protection. UNICEF has thus moved from developing issue-specific programmes, such as those which focus exclusively on, for example, child labourers or trafficked children, to adopting a systems-building approach to children protection. This provides the most logical, sustainable, effective and resource-efficient means for achieving long term impact on the protection of children, regardless of the type of issue.
Through this approach, UNICEF seeks to build and strengthen, together with governments, effective child protection systems for our region’s children by bolstering legal and regulatory frameworks, reinforcing social welfare systems for children and families, and advocating for social behaviour change that is protective of children.
