Protection against violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect, and harmful practices
Every child, including adolescents, is protected from violence, exploitation, abuse, neglect, and harmful practices.
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Protecting children and adolescents from violence in both humanitarian and development settings is an important shared priority for UNICEF and the Government of Mozambique.
Humanitarian crises, including conflicts and climate-related disasters, place children at heightened risk of all forms of violence. Risks include emotional and psychosocial distress, separation from families or care givers, abduction, killing or maiming, recruitment and use by armed groups, and sexual violence. UNICEF is working closely with the Government of Mozambique to make sure that children, particularly children made vulnerable by humanitarian crises, emergencies, and displacement, are protected and kept safe from harm in all situations.
To ensure the protection of children and adolescents in all situations, UNICEF supports the Government of Mozambique to strengthen child protection systems, including design, development and operationalization of a national case management system, and improving the child-friendliness of the country’s justice system. UNICEF Mozambique also works directly with boys, girls, adolescents, and their families to provide guidance and support and to promote their active engagement in the creation of a protective environment, while building resilience and promoting the progressive abandonment of harmful practices.
THE CHALLENGES
- Violence against girls, boys, and women: : In 2019, 1 in 7 females (14.3 per cent) and 1 in 12 males (8.4 per cent) reported having experienced sexual violence before age 18. Nearly 1 in 4 girls (23.9 per cent) and more than 1 in 3 boys (34.1 per cent) reported having experienced physical violence before age 18.
- Lack of birth registration and legal identity: In 2017, national coverage of birth registration for children aged under 5 stood at 49 per cent, and for children under age 1 at 33 per cent. 70 per cent of children were born in hospitals.
- Lack of alternative care: The lack of a formal alternative care programme or family-based alternative care system means that residential care becomes the predominant option. Thanks to efforts by the Government, with UNICEF support, the number of children in residential care has fallen to 3,381 children, but additional efforts are required to reduce this number further.
- Child Marriage: Mozambique has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. More than half (53 per cent) of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18. In Mozambique, 4.4 million girls were married before the age of 18, and the majority of girls aged 15-17 who are married are also out of school.
- Access to justice: In 2018, children and young people (aged 16-21 years) accounted for 16 per cent of the overall prison population - 2,934 out of 17,908 prisoners – representing an increase from 2017. During this period, the number of incarcerated girls also rose, from 87 in 2017 to 151 in 2018. In this context, there is a need to further strengthen capacity on child rights and child protection across the justice system, including among lawyers and judges.
- Protection risks in humanitarian settings: Climate-related disasters have left 1.3 million children in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, including at least 20,000 children needing psychosocial support. Pandemic-related school closures have affected 8.5 million students.
- Children affected by armed conflict: Armed conflict has left 779,000 children in need of humanitarian protection services; over 1,900 children are unaccompanied or separated from their families, and 117,000 are in need of specialized psychosocial support. Children remain at risk of abduction, recruitment and use in armed groups, trafficking and further displacement due to attacks.
Child Protection: Alternative care
Despite legislation recognizing that provision of alternative family care should be prioritized for children without parental care, no guidelines exist for selection, training and support for family-based care models. UNICEF has helped to establish a National Registry of alternative care providers, including foster families who have been screened and trained to care for children. This enables the Government to monitor supply of alternative care, and link children requiring care to appropriate care providers.
Fun with a purpose - psychosocial support through play
The Eduardo Mondlane IDP resettlement camp in Mueda, Cabo Delgado province, is home to 12,235 people. “That’s a lot of people to manage,” says camp leader Daniel Nambalema. Most people have been living in the camp for two years, and challenges abound, with people sleeping on the floor and not enough food or water, and children are particularly affected.”
Since 2022, UNICEF has partnered with Fundação para o Desenvolvimento da Communidade (FDC) to implement child protection activities in the resettlement camp, in order to strengthen the child protection system, raise community awareness, support parents to take care of their children and refer cases of violence and mistreatment,” explains Hector Motatano, UNICEF Child Protection Officer in Pemba. “Special attention is given to unaccompanied minors living alone, in need, and at risk of violence, sexual abuse and child labour.”
In addition to material needs, displaced children require psychosocial support and a safe, child-friendly space. “It is not easy to provide psychosocial support. We therefore offer different levels of intervention,” explains Denilson Ticongolo, FDC project manager. The organization’s case workers identify children in need, assess the type of support they require and refer them to service providers.
But FDC also takes a hands-on, creative approach to psychosocial support for children. They have hired a team of facilitators from the camp as well as the host community to engage children in activities and play. Every day, the team shows up in bright red shirts and bright smiles to run reactional activities for the children, including football and education and communication activities. This gives the children space and time that is their own, both sorely lacking in the camp.
“Before the attacks, the children had space to play, to learn, to have fun. Now we are trying to build psychosocial support through play,” Ticongolo explains. “The child-friendly place is a happy place. When children come to play, they connect with each other. When they are involved in activities, they forget what happened and they can be children again,” he says.
Child marriage undermines efforts to reduce poverty and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by halting girls’ education prematurely and leading directly to teenage pregnancy, with heightened risks of maternal and child mortality.
The Government of Mozambique acknowledged child marriage as a development priority through the promulgation of the 2019 law against child marriage and the evaluation of the first National Strategy to Prevent and End Child Marriage. UNICEF is supporting the Government to establish clear targets to achieve SDG 5 on Gender Equality, and to allocate sufficient resources at district levels to prevent and reduce the prevalence of child marriage.
Urgent need to protect children in conflict
The conflict in northern Mozambique is resulting in a protection crisis, amid reports of abductions of children that are presumed to be linked to the recruitment and use of children by non-state armed groups, and of sexual violence against children, particularly impacting girls.
The United Nations employs a multisectoral approach to supporting children affected by armed conflict and works with partners in Cabo Delgado and Nampula to increase community capacity to understand, monitor, and report on the six grave violations of children’s rights identified by the UN Security Council: killing and maiming of children; recruitment or use of children in armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other forms of grave sexual violence; abduction of children; and denial of humanitarian access for children.
UNICEF is strengthening service provision and informal alternative care options in emergency settings and helping to prevent children from being used or recruited by non-state armed groups. UNICEF works with the justice system to ensure that policies and laws are in place to treat children as victims. UNICEF is mainstreaming and integrating child protection programming with other sectors.
Core Commitments for Children in Humanitarian Action (CCCs)
The CCCs are the core UNICEF policy and framework for humanitarian action. They promote equality, transparency, responsibility, and a results-oriented approach to enable predictable and timely collective humanitarian action.
The CCCs are based on global standards and norms for humanitarian action, particularly the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its Optional Protocols. They apply to all countries and territories, in all contexts, and all children affected by humanitarian crises.
They also contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and include explicit strategies to link humanitarian and development action, strengthen local capacity and systems, and build resilience at all stages of humanitarian action.
Story: Linha Fala Criança – the Child Helpline
UNICEF’s experience shows that emergencies require comprehensive responses that protect children as they undergo complex, multidimensional crises.
With the aim of strengthening its response in Cabo Delgado, which has experienced conflict and insecurity, UNICEF has opened a new office in Pemba, the provincial capital. An important part of UNICEF’s child protection programme in Pemba is the Linha Fala Criança (LFC) child helpline. It is the country’s only free child helpline, accessible using the easily memorized number 116, which has become standard for all child helplines in Africa.
Staffing the phones in shifts, from early morning to late at night, LFC’s seven trained counsellors respond to hundreds of calls every day in Portuguese, Makua, Mwani, Makonde, and Kiswahili languages. When LFC was first launched, reports of child marriage went up by a staggering 700 per cent.
“We answer an average of 400 calls a day, with 15 to 20 cases of abuse and violence. The most common cases are early marriages, sexual violence, and physical abuse,” says Calisto Alexandre Guambe, LFC programme coordinator. Half the callers are children aged 10-16 years old.
UNICEF trains LFC counsellors to receive, refer, and follow up on cases until they are closed, working closely with government, police, hospitals and health centres, depending on the case. “If a child reports sexual abuse, for example, we first refer them to trained police units and health facilities and then we follow up,” he says. Importantly, LFC works in close coordination with trained community outreach workers and counsellors.
“In resettlement centres, children’s rights are threatened. They have to queue up for food together with adults and they sometimes have to fight for food,” says Arnaldo Portugal, supervisor of the LFC centre in Pemba. Some children are on their own, separated from their families. In some cases, their parents are dead. Portugal says they have received stories of displaced children being forced into sex work or working on the streets. “We need to increase protection of children.”
Arusina Dade, 34, is an outreach worker who goes door-to-door in the community to raise awareness on domestic violence, violence against children, and all issues affecting children’s rights. “This is very important work. Most families here do not even know that children have rights.” This is beginning to change thanks to LFC.
One case handled by LFC was that of a 7-year-old girl sexually abused by her cousin, 17, who worked in their house. The parents did not want to report the case. Instead, they tied him up and beat him, but LFC advised the family to report the case to the police. “Following procedure is important for the community to gain more trust in our process,” explain Arusina, who was herself a victim of abuse, and who found her voice to help women and children of her community thanks to LFC.
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN?
- Strengthening systems for child protection: To deliver quality services, child protection systems need to be strengthened. This will require prioritization of social welfare and justice systems and focus on strengthening linkages with other sectors that are essential to positive child protection outcomes, particularly the education, health, and social protection sectors.
- Promoting positive social norms and gender-equitable behaviour change: Prevention strategies need to address harmful practices and gender inequality through transformative action that engages children, adolescents, parents, families, opinion leaders, and service providers in promoting protective behaviours and norms.
- Risk-informed humanitarian-development nexus programming: There is a need to build strong interfaces between emergency and development programming and scale up the humanitarian response, including through strengthening systems and building resilience of communities.
- Improving availability of quality data and evidence: Investing in sex, age and disability disaggregated data collection, analysis and use is critical to informing an effective response and guiding advocacy.
- Engaging and empowering children, adolescents, families, and communities: Efforts must be made to support the participation and leadership of children and adolescents, and 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.
- Multisectoral partnership and engagement: Child protection is a cross-sectoral issue, requiring engagement and collaboration between a broad spectrum of government ministries, United Nations agencies, local and international NGO partners, community and faith leaders, children, adolescents, and their families.
Story: Special police ‘cabinet’ brings justice for victims of domestic violence
In 2009, Mozambique passed a law (19/209) against domestic violence that protects children and vulnerable people. The same year also saw the establishment of a designated office at the Monapo district police station to assist families and minor victims of violence: the Gabinete de Atendimento a Familia e Menores Vitimas de Violencia – ‘the cabinet’, or GAFMVV, for short.
Seven police officers were specially trained on providing support for children and dealing with gender-based violence, and a total of 15 people from different departments of the police were trained in various aspects of addressing domestic and gender-based violence, sensitizing communities, and dealing with these crimes, including through referral and processing.
“It is important to have specific training for police. If we understand specific issues related to gender-based violence, for example, we will be able to better do our intervention in the community to protect people that suffer from violence,” explains Bordaina Goncalves, chief of the GAFMVV.
The new law required a shift in mindset and education for the community to de-normalize domestic violence and harmful practices, and reframe them as criminal acts, punishable by law. Goncalves explains they speak to the community everywhere – in the streets, schools, markets, hospitals and even on the road on motorbikes, working to explain domestic violence and children’s rights and encourage reporting.
Manuel Calisto, GAFMVV Chief of Operations, says the cabinet has really made a difference in the community. “Before, it was normal for husbands to beat their wives… with the new law and sensitization of the police, we can see real changes.” Importantly, people are reporting early marriage. “If a community is reporting, this means our messages are going through…Ten years ago, we had so many cases of child marriage that we couldn’t even count. Now we barely see cases. Last year, we had three,” Calisto says. But even three is too many. UNICEF and partners are aiming for none.
UNICEF’S RESPONSE
With the support of partners, UNICEF works to ensure that children and adolescents in all situations are better protected. UNICEF supports the Government of Mozambique to strengthen child protection systems, including through support for specialized courts for children, building capacities of justice professionals, and introducing alternatives to detention for children.
- Supporting the creation of an enabling environment through improved data, evidence, policies, and programmes and increased public financing.
- Strengthened child protection systems, incorporating child protection services, social workforce capacity building, and promotion of child-friendly justice approaches for children and victims of violence, abuse, and exploitation.
- Primary prevention of violence against children and gender-based violence through building knowledge and awareness and promoting engagement with children, adolescents, families, and communities.
- Prevention and response to child protection concerns in humanitarian settings, including measures that form part of the agenda on children affected by armed conflict.
