Preventing and responding to violence against children in Mozambique
Every child has the right to live free from violence, exploitation and abuse.
Every child has the right to live free from violence, exploitation and abuse. No violence against a child is justifiable. In Mozambique, urgent action is needed to prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children. UNICEF Mozambique is working with the Government and partners to ensure that every child in the country can grow up in a supportive, nurturing environment that is free from violence.
Child Protection Programme Briefs
THE ISSUE
Violence against children in Mozambique
Violence against children is endemic in Mozambique. Social norms that condone violence help to perpetuate it. There are strong links between gender inequality and physical and sexual violence against women, and violence against children. This is exacerbated by a lack of bodily autonomy, decision-making power and economic independence for girls and women.
Persisting gender inequalities, normative gender roles, cultural practices, like initation rites, poverty, poor access to quality education and high levels of teenage pregnancy further contribute to the vulnerability of girls. An outcome of these complex and interconnected factors is often child marriage – nearly half of girls marry before 18. This practice is far more prevalent in Mozambique’s rural areas.
The stresses caused by poverty, conflict and economic instability can trigger violent behaviours and make children more vulnerable. One study from 28 countries showed a strong link between all forms of child abuse and household poverty. And it is a vicious cycle. Violence against children is often the outcome of economic privations and social norms, and children who experience violence are more likely to enact it as adults.
Child marriage and adolescent pregnancy
Climate disasters, poverty and food insecurity expose children to separation from their families, forced marriage, working and living in the streets and child labour. Furthermore, with only around 30 per cent of children with their birth registered, many more remain unaccounted for, invisible and further at risk.
UNICEF, with the support of the Global Programme to end Child Marriage (GPECM), produced and painted a mural on the wall of a secondary school in Monapo district (Nampula province) to sensitize the community on the negative impact of child marriage and on the appropriate reporting channel to follow: Child Helpline 116.
Birth registration, residential care and unaccompanied children in Mozambique
Children in the north of the country are particularly vulnerable. Since 2017, persistent conflict has affected this part of the country, with the proliferation of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs). NSAG operations lead to displacement and human rights violations, injury and death. In addition, the region was affected by multiple natural disasters with increased intensity due to the global climate crisis. As a result, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that in Mozambique 2.3 million people, 56 per cent of whom are children, will need humanitarian assistance by December 2024.
UNICEF ACTION
In recent years, the Government of Mozambique has demonstrated considerable commitment to progress child-sensitive legislation and policy. However, children continue to face multiple forms of violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect and harmful practices.
UNICEF is supporting the Government to address this through five critical programme priorities and intervention areas:
- Prevention and Response to Violence against Girls, Boys and Women;
- Promotion of Legal Identity and Birth Registration;
- Prevention of Family Separation
- and Alternative Care;
- Ending Child Marriage; and
- Access to Justice.
UNICEF also contributes to humanitarian preparedness and response across these thematic priorities. In the north of the country, UNICEF efforts focus specifically on supporting children affected by armed conflict.
UNICEF addresses these priorities together, focusing on prevention, systems strengthening, awareness raising and provision of comprehensive support to children who have experienced violence. UNICEF works with the Government across sectors – including health, education, the justice system, civil registration and vital statistics and other social services – to prevent and respond to violence against children. This holistic approach is vital to breaking the cycle of violence and promoting the overall development and well-being of children. UNICEF’s strategic interventions span across three pillars:
I. Creating an enabling environment
UNICEF is supporting the Government to improve the enabling environment for a strategic, coordinated and coherent programme that prevents and responds to violence against children, through:
- Strengthening legal and policy framework: UNICEF has supported the Government of Mozambique several key areas:
- the development, adoption and implementation of the Plano Nacional de Ação para Crianças, PNAC III (National Action Plan for Children); and
- promoting the adoption of secondary legislation for the implementation of laws pertaining to birth registration, child marriage and access to justice for children.
- supporting the Government to adhere to the Paris and Vancouver Principles on the protection of children affected by armed conflict, as well as of the handover protocol of children associated with armed groups.
- Improving knowledge management and availability of quality data and evidence: UNICEF advocates for greater investment in disaggregated data collection and analysis. UNICEF is also strengthening the information management systems across all relevant sectors.
- Advocating for increased budgetary allocation: UNICEF advocates for child-centred budgeting and financial commitments to support child protection systems strengthening in humanitarian and development settings.
II. Providing quality services
- Strengthening services: UNICEF’s priority is to increase the capacity of child protection and gender based violence services, including justice, social, health and medical, civil registration and education. This is to address the need for coordinated, quality programmes and services for children and their families in both development and humanitarian contexts. It includes strengthening the justice system with child friendly procedures, mobile courts, birth registration services, social service workforce and provision of mental health and psychosocial support and medical care. In addition, UNICEF is strengthening a nationwide child-friendly mechanism – the child helpline (Linha fala Crianca) – to improve reporting of violence against children.
- Developing risk-informed humanitarian-development nexus programming: Increasingly, UNICEF is bringing development and humanitarian programming together, recognising that solutions for complex problems and vulnerabilities are long-term. For UNICEF, this means building resilience of communities, ensuring service providers are prepared for any contingency and strengthening systems so they can withstand shocks. For example, supporting care reform in a broader child protection system so that unaccompanied and separated children will be cared for in the case of an emergency. In addition, UNICEF will build the capacity of stakeholders – especially children, young people, and their families and communities – in peacebuilding efforts to strengthen social cohesion.
- Engaging multisectoral partnerships: Given the many social and economic drivers of violence and the way it permeates society, action relies on the collaboration of a broad spectrum of government ministries, United Nations agencies, local and international NGO partners, community and faith leaders, children, adolescents and their families. UNICEF plays a significant role as a convener in child protection in Mozambique.
III. Creating demand for action
- Enhancing positive social norms and gender-equitable behaviour: UNICEF supports families, traditional and religious leaders, children and community groups – in both development and humanitarian contexts – to demonstrate more gender-equitable attitudes and support for girls’ rights. Additionally, UNICEF is working with boys and men to engage them in gender-transformative programmes that promote healthy relationships, positive masculinities and gender equality.
- Engaging and empowering children, adolescents, families and communities: Children and adolescents need to be at the table so that their voices are heard in decisions and policies that affect their lives. UNICEF works to promote the growth and engagement of networks of young people, including children and adolescents with disabilities, displaced populations and ethnic minorities, fostering a social movement advocating for equality and social change.
FOCUS ON: Child marriage
UNICEF is working with the Government of Mozambique, UN agencies, CSOs and communities, families and adolescents, to prevent and respond to child marriage. As part of the broader effort to address child marriage, UNICEF supports the implementation of the Child Marriage law. UNICEF works with partners on social and behaviour change through peer-to-peer and community dialogues, parenting programmes and programmes that amplify the voices of children, especially girls, to advocate for their own rights. UNICEF also works to strengthen services through provision of technical support at the district level to identify, refer and provide access to services to married girls and victims of sexual violence and severe physical violence. These girls are supported to reintegrate into their families and schools. They are also provided with psychological support through participation in self-help groups, life skills and empowerment and helped to access to justice through mobile courts.
FOCUS ON: Alternative care
UNICEF is working with the Government of Mozambique to formalize alternative family care arrangements for children living away from their parents. Pivotal to this programme is the National Registry of Alternative Care, a data management system that will match children in need of safe, protective, caring and supportive family care. Foster, adoptive or guardian families are screened and trained and the child is regularly monitored. These arrangements can be formal, informal, temporary or permanent. In addition, UNICEF is at the forefront of efforts to support the safe and sustainable transition of institutionalized, unaccompanied and/or separated children to family and community-based care. UNICEF advocates for formalized family-based alternative care arrangements, with residential care the option of very last resort.
FOCUS ON: Justice for Children
UNICEF is working with the Government of Mozambique to provide improved quality, specialized, preventive and responsive services to children in contact with the law. This includes child victims, children in conflict with the law and children requiring administrative justice. UNICEF advocates for systems change, with a vision for a child friendly justice system across Mozambique – one that protects a child’s best interest and does not leave them vulnerable to violence and abuse. This means ensuring the legal framework is in line with the CRC and that children and families know their rights. It also means improving resources and strengthening institutional capacity so that actors within the justice system have child rights skills and knowledge to do their jobs effectively. Justice reform in Mozambique is critical to violence prevention and response.
FOCUS ON: Civil registration and vital statistics
UNICEF has been working with the Government of Mozambique to develop the civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system in the country. UNICEF supports retroactive birth registration campaigns using mobile birth registration brigades in targeted districts and provinces. Critically, UNICEF also works on registering under one-year-olds by alleviating costs – advocating to the Government to increase the pro bono registration period to between 6 and 12 months – and distance – by expanding CRVS facilities into hospitals. UNICEF is supporting work to make health and civil registration systems interoperable, including training registration technicians and kitting out facilities. Awareness raising in communities forms the backbone of this work, so people know where and why to register their children.
FOCUS ON: Mental Health and Psychosocial Support
UNICEF is focused on strengthening multisectoral response for the prevention and improved access to care and services for children with lived experience of violence and children at risk of violence. Part of this work is through community mobilization and programmes to empower children with skills they need to access services. UNICEF is also strengthening the capacity of community-based mental health and psychosocial support services to enhance psychosocial well-being, resilience and coping mechanisms of children and caregivers. UNICEF aims to ensure that specific vulnerable groups, such as unaccompanied and separated children, children with disability, children of different ethnicity and children who have been associated with armed groups/force, have access to these services.
Social and behavior change (SBC) is a core implementation strategy to promote understanding the needs of communities and individuals to develop context-specific and people-centered solutions aiming to overcome challenges to the adoption of desired behaviors so that children and women, including the most disadvantaged, survive and thrive both in emergency and development contexts. Through SBC, UNICEF helps increase demand for and awareness of mental health services, the importance of birth registration, how to prevent violence against children, and how to end child marriage.
Call to Action
The fact that violence happens everywhere and threatens all children are not the only reasons to stop it. The fact that violence is cyclical – that it influences and is influenced by the world in which it operates – means that preventing it and responding to is imperative for all development goals to be met.
However, when violence – and the threat of violence – is so deeply embedded and accepted in society, addressing it is fraught. Tackling poverty, changing social norms and behaviours, building and strengthening systems and developing capacity to provide sustainable services takes time, even if a comprehensive legislative framework is in place. Meanwhile, the lack of adequate child protection services and low technical capacity to provide specialized and individualized support to children victims or at risk of violence continues to exacerbate their vulnerabilities.
The action required to address these issues are substantial. No single actor can accomplish this alone.
UNICEF promotes a comprehensive programme to tackle these complex problems. Stakeholders need to stop treating the symptoms of violence as discrete projects and elevate violence against children as a priority on which the country’s future lies. This is an opportunity for UNICEF and its partners to take actions that will, together, address the many different drivers of violence so that children’s growth and development can flourish unimpeded, free of violence – and their rights can be realized.