Protection
UNICEF helps to protect children and adolescents from any kind of violence, including gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse.
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Challenge
Providing all-round protection for young people in Venezuela is one of UNICEF’s daily challenges, and of the main issues that we focus on is protection for children against violence.
Violence can take many different forms: it can be physical, psychological or sexual, and may occur at home, at school or in the community.
The five countries with the highest youth homicide rates in the world are located in Latin America. Venezuela is one of them.
The risk of violence is exacerbated when children and adolescents live in situations of extreme vulnerability. We consider people in this category to be: survivors of violence (including gender-based violence, abuse, exploitation, neglect, and trafficking), unaccompanied and separated children and adolescents, those with disabilities, indigenous populations and Afro-Descendants, and children involved in the worst forms of child labour.
The current economic crisis in Venezuela has led to an increase in the number of migrants moving from Venezuela to other countries in the region. This has had many negative consequences such as family separation, unplanned migration, and difficulties for children in accessing basic healthcare and nutrition services, education, water, sanitation, and hygiene and all-round protection.
Solution
UNICEF uses the term ‘child protection’ to refer to all interventions preventing and responding to violence, exploitation, and neglect and abuse of children and adolescents, such as sexual exploitation and abuse, trafficking, child labour and adolescent pregnancy.
To help ensure that children and adolescents are protected from violence and other situations that affect their physical and psychological integrity, UNICEF supports the strengthening of child and adolescent protection systems in Venezuela at the national, local and community levels, as well as specialized services for the protection against and response to gender-based violence, psychosocial support programmes, alternative care and birth registration.
UNICEF contributions to the protection of Venezuelan children in 2021:
- More than 130,000 children received child protection services and programmes supported by UNICEF, including legal and psychosocial services, referral of cases before various instances of childcare, and alternative care.
- 353 separated and unaccompanied children or in situations of high vulnerability were integrated into family foster care programmes, thus strengthening care and support for family placement programmes.
- More than 45 thousand girls, adolescents, and women survivors of gender-based violence received psychological care and legal guidance.