Construction of a Comprehensive Protection System
All children and adolescents deserve a fair chance in life.
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Challenge
All children and adolescents have the right to live a life of dignity and free from violence, with access to health, nutrition, and education to reach their full potential.
However, far too often, children and adolescents are exposed to the consequences of violence, abuse, neglect, and exploitation. To address this reality—which affects all sectors of society—it is essential to strengthen child protection systems, particularly those policies and programs that focus on the prevention, detection, response, and recovery for victims of violence.
Additionally, many children and adolescents are unable to fully exercise their rights due to poverty, discrimination, disability, or other vulnerabilities. To support this large segment of the child population, it is necessary to develop and expand social protection mechanisms, including policies and programs that allow them to live with dignity and overcome the barriers of poverty and exclusion.
Addressing violence through special protection mechanisms, and exclusion through social protection policies and programs, is what constitutes comprehensive child protection.
For these policies and actions to be truly integrated and coordinated, the country must establish a comprehensive child protection system—from national to municipal and community levels—that provides an effective response for all children and adolescents, especially the most vulnerable and excluded, ensuring that every child has a fair chance in life.
Solution
UNICEF promotes the development and strengthening of a national comprehensive child protection system with a multisectoral approach, enabling a more effective and efficient response to the multiple vulnerabilities faced by children and their families due to violence, poverty, discrimination, disability, and other causes.
This national system must expand both the coverage and quality of special and social protection services at the national, departmental, municipal, and community levels, with the active participation of all sectors of society.
Long-term financing strategies must be identified and implemented to protect and increase investment in effective comprehensive child protection programs—this requires urgent and sustainable political decisions.
Achieving an effective comprehensive protection system demands significant political, social, and economic effort. But it is the most just and smartest way to guarantee the full range of rights for every child and adolescent, and to break the vicious, intergenerational cycles of poverty and exclusion.
Child Protection Information Management System Primero™
The Child Protection Information Management System Primero™ is being implemented in Guatemala to support unaccompanied, separated, and other vulnerable migrant children.
Institutionalized Childhood
Context
The tragedy at the Hogar Seguro (March 8, 2017) demonstrated that the State of Guatemala has not yet managed to build a truly effective, articulated, and coordinated child protection system within a framework that respects the human rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Law for a Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents.
Therefore, the institutions responsible for protecting and restoring children's rights and providing care have failed to respond adequately.
Data and Figures
- In Guatemala, approximately 5,000 children and adolescents live in residential institutions.
- 94% of these children and adolescents have at least one living family member.
- 33% are placed in residential care due to poverty.
- In Latin America and the Caribbean, an estimated 240,000 children and adolescents still live in institutions.
- Institutionalization negatively affects the psychological, social, biological, and cognitive development of children, especially those under the age of 3.
- Every 4 months spent in institutional care results in a one-month delay in brain and emotional development.
- Institutionalized children are often separated from their families and cultural environments, leading to the loss of family bonds.
- For children with disabilities, institutionalization increases the risk of abandonment by their families.
- Violence in institutions is six times higher than in family-based alternative care programs.
- Sexual violence is four times more prevalent in institutions than in family-based alternative care settings.