Press Centre 2005/06/17: Child Protection

Conference on a New Model for Street Children

Birgün Newspaper, 17 June 2005

State Minister Responsible for Women’s and Children’s Issues, Nimet Çubukçu: It is true that children living on the streets are more liable to commit offences, but this does not give us the right to label them as potential or real criminals.
Photograph by Rana Mullan © UNICEF Turkey 2005

The State Minister Responsible for Women’s and Children’s Issues, the Minister of National Education, the Minister of Health, the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Justice have set up a joint commission to develop a new model of child protection.

The Ministry of State, the Social Services and Child Protection Agency (SHÇEK), UNICEF Turkey and the Coordinator of the EU Project for Support to Basic Education arranged a meeting in Maslak Princess Hotel to introduce new service models targeting children living and/or working on the street under the slogan Let’s Protect our Children.

Speaking at the meeting, the Minister of the Interior, Abdülkadir Aksu noted that supporting security measures with socio-economic preventions is the most critical issue in securing law and order and said that they were working hard to strike a balance between security and social policies:

We have launched initiatives to introduce short, medium and long-term solutions to the problem. A commission is addressing the security issue in the context of short-term solutions.

Minister of the Interior, Abdülkadir Aksu: mobile teams comprising psychologists, educationalists and social workers have been set up to prevent child abuse and nine of these teams are operating 24 hours a day in İstanbul
Photograph by Rana Mullan © UNICEF Turkey 2005

Minister Aksu explained that he has had meetings with the Governors and Security Chiefs of the 81 provinces over time to assess the situation take appropriate steps including the transfer of a division of the ‘Rapid Response’ police force to peace-keeping, reducing numbers of office-based personnel by assigning them to outdoor duties and the introduction of emergency measures to ensure the active participation of the public in the fight against crime.

As medium-term measures, Minister Aksu added that mobile teams comprising psychologists, educationalists and social workers have been set up to prevent child abuse and nine of these teams are operating 24 hours a day in İstanbul. The number of teams will soon be increased to seventeen and three first aid centres are offering rehabilitation services to street children.

In her address, the State Minister Responsible for Women’s and Children’ Issues, Nimet Çubukçu said that street children are vulnerable to all kinds of abuse and that the issue concerns society as a whole. Pointing out that factors such as rapid urbanisation, internal migration and poverty were generating fresh problems for street children every day, the Minister said:

It is true that children living on the streets are more liable to commit offences, but this does not give us the right to label them as potential or real criminals. The most important problem Turkey faces in combating social problems is that we are looking at the issue from the centre, there is too much distance and red tape between the authorities and the source of the problem. This gap has to be closed. If our street children are not safe, our streets are not safe.

Meanwhile İstanbul Governor Muammer Güler said they reserved a budget of 20 million lira for projects designed to solve the problems of street children. Governor Güler also added that they were planning to reopen old reform schools as child training centres.

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