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What is Child Protection? Concepts and Practices to Support War-Affected Children Michael Wessells Christian Children’s Fund Richmond, VA [email protected]

Anne Edgerton Christian Children’s Fund Richmond, VA [email protected]

civilian casualties remains elusive. Think tanks and universities that count the devastation of wars do so with an outdated system of battle deaths only, which has led one of them to declare that there are fewer wars on the planet today and those wars are less deadly (Edgerton, 2007). Even after a ceasefire is signed, significant challenges to peace remain, as banditry and crime often increase post-conflict, and have the same violent patterns (Wessells & Monteiro, 2008). Compounded by the use of landmines, which turns vast swaths of agricultural land into killing fields, the destruction of a community’s infrastructure amplifies ongoing problems of poverty and food insecurity even after a conflict is over. The wake of too many wars today is strewn with devastated infrastructure that includes landmines and unexploded ordnance, severely strained government resources and dysfunctional political systems, and deep psychological wounds and social divisions that plant the seeds for future violence. Yet the destruction listed above does not address the additional human and social cost of war (Collier et al., 2003). Include in war’s wake the non-violent causes of mortality (e.g., due to disease, but through the loss of hospitals and medical centers), non-fatal injuries, displacement, psychological harm, sexual and gender-based violence, an increase in violent behavior and criminality, loss of property, and loss of livelihoods, and the human cost of war becomes staggering in scope, and is currently not measured in quantifiable terms (Edgerton, 2007). The impacts of armed conflict are not distributed evenly among a population but fall disproportionately on people who are already extremely poor and already vulnerable (Pilisuk, 2008; Wessells, 2006). Nowhere is this

Abstract: Challenges to humanitarian organizations that respond to children impacted by armed conflict start with an understanding of what protection means. Humanitarian agencies increasingly view child protection as the mitigation and prevention of all forms of exploitation, abuse, violence, and harm toward children. Organizational responses to protect children can still be described in three ways: as a narrow definition of legal and physical protection; in a broad definition that covers all preventable deaths; and in a deficits-emphasis, protect children from risks, but that does not focus on children as agents in their own protection. The authors, who both work for the Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), use the example of the definition of child protection at CCF to focus on increasing awareness of children’s rights, reducing risks, and creating an enabling environment as a response to child protection during crises. This article also explores the growth of interagency systems that contribute to the current thinking and future coordination of child protection.

The Risks to Children Posed by Armed Conflict Many of the wars fought today have an objective to control resource-rich territory (Keen, 2000; Klare, 2001). Non-state armed groups, who can make up one or both sides of these conflicts within a state, have tended to purposefully target civilian populations for control and manipulation, and such control has become a means to an end. These conflicts are marked by butchery, genderspecific violence, child recruitment, and human rights violations, but quantifying these violations and counting

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What is Child Protection? Concepts and Practices to Support War-Affected Children

more visible than in the case of children, who are defined under international law as people younger than 18 years of age. Typically, children comprise half of a population and exhibit special vulnerabilities that vary according to gender and developmental stage. In armed conflicts, children can suffer attacks, loss of family members and friends, destruction of their homes and means of livelihood, and lack of access to education. Children can become separated from their caretakers, leaving them in a situation of very high risk. For girls in particular, the risks of gender-based violence are very high, if not at the hands of the armed groups that attack and frequently abduct children, then in camps for displaced people or the resultant breakdown in social order in their communities. Also, threats and desperate circumstances drive many children into armed groups in which violence is normalized and many learn to kill. Owing in part to the global proliferation of light but deadly weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles, which in many parts of Africa can be purchased for the price of a chicken, even relatively young children can become effective fighters (Singer, 2005). The socialization of children into systems of structural violence contributes significantly to ongoing cycles of violence (Wessells, 1997, 2006). As shown in Table 1, children face a multiplicity of risks in zones of armed conflict. Because these risks are so diverse and come on top of existing, chronic risks such as poverty, discrimination, and malnutrition, the first United Nations study on the impact of armed conflict on children spoke of a holistic assault on children. In the ten years following the publication of that 1996 study, only modest improvements have occurred in the situation of waraffected children (SRSG/CAAC, 2007), making it appropriate at present to continue to speak about a holistic assault on children. This assault has profound implications for a child’s development, as exposure to multiple risks can lead to negative developmental outcomes, such as weak

attachment, developmental delays, failures to thrive, and severe emotional or social dysfunction, among many others. Although any one of these risks poses a significant threat to a child’s healthy development, it is the accumulation of risks that poses the greatest threat. Indeed, studies indicate that the damage to children increases exponentially as risk factors accumulate (Garbarino & Kostelny, 1996; Rutter, 1979, 1985). For example, the accumulation of three or more risks can produce ten times as much damage or negative outcomes as results from the presence of a single risk factor. As risks accumulate, a child’s plight worsens rapidly. Sadly, risk accumulation is the norm for many children living in war zones. The constellation of risks to children in war zones varies according to gender and developmental stage. In most situations, girls are at significantly greater risk of sexual violence than are boys, and the threat may not diminish with the signing of a ceasefire. For example, in Liberia in 2007, Wessells listed two reports by hospital officials in Monrovia that told of the rape of children as young as three or four years of age. In contexts such as Afghanistan, where gender-based violence occurs on a monumental scale, boys are often targets of sexual violence. With respect to age, very young children are among the most vulnerable people in war zones, particularly when their caretakers are overwhelmed or otherwise unable to provide effective care. In Angola during the height of the fighting in the mid-1990s, approximately one out of three children died before reaching age five. At the other end of the spectrum, teenagers and youth also exhibit special vulnerability. In many war zones, youth live in a situation in which 80% of people are unemployed and few educational opportunities exist. Feeling hopeless and politically disenfranchised, many young people are at risk of turning to crime or joining armed groups, when their prodigious energy could be harnessed for more constructive purposes such as peace building.

Table 1. Diverse sources of harm to children in war zones Common Sources of Risk to Children in Situations of Armed Conflict

Attack Displacement Gender-based violence Loss of home, belongings, loved ones Living and/or working on the streets Dangerous labor Disability Detention

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Recruitment Trafficking Separation Landmines and unexploded ordnance Discrimination Child abuse, including emotional abuse Institutionalization HIV/AIDS

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The Journal of Developmental Processes, 3(2)

The Humanitarian System for Child Protection In light of the enormous risks to children in war zones, it is natural to think that the international humanitarian system would have created effective mechanisms at all levels to protect children. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth—one of the greatest gaps in humanitarian aid is the gap in the protection of civilians (Slim & Bonwick, 2005), particularly children. In most war zones, children are invisible and exploited, abused and harmed on a massive scale. The damage to children occurs in no small part because war shatters many of children’s existing means of protection. In many situations, the shocks of war transform children’s roles and family relations in ways that heighten the risks to children. For example, the loss of homes and means of livelihood often creates family pressures on children to work outside the home as a means of boosting household income. Too often, children in such situations drop out of school and engage in dangerous labor that violates their rights and places them at risk. This illustrates how war can transform families from sources of protection to sources of risk. At the same time, the child-protection gap is due to a shortage of donor funding for child protection relative to other areas such as health. Donors’ unresponsiveness may owe in part to a view, grounded in part in the ideas of Abraham Maslow (1970) that there is a hierarchy of human needs, and before needs for belongingness and emotional well-being are met, one has first to meet basic physical and survival needs. Also, donors sometimes assume that large scale reconstruction of roads, health facilities and other infrastructure will “trickle down” to children. Practitioners in the field, however, often see infrastructure flourish while the children’s condition shows little improvement. In addition, there are uncertainties about how to conceptualize child protection, which in many ways is a cross-cutting issue that defies treatment as a specialized sector of humanitarian assistance. And there are formidable challenges to implementing child protection on the large scale that is needed and in fluid environments riddled with complexity and insecurity. Fortunately, significant steps are being taken globally to address the child-protection gap, and it is worth describing briefly the humanitarian architecture that is involved. In most emergencies, humanitarian aid is coordinated and delivered through a system of clusters that includes a Protection Cluster, a Health Cluster, and a number of others. The work on protection is overseen by the global Protection Cluster, which is led by UNHCR in armed conflicts and by UNICEF in natural disasters. In

turn, the Protection Cluster has five sub-groups, one of which is the global Working Group on Child Protection in Emergencies, which is coordinated by UNICEF and involves a large number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). At the level of a war-affected country, UNICEF typically convenes a Child Protection Coordination Group, which includes not only NGOs but also Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) that work closely with the national government to promote childfriendly policies, to enable the delivery of child-friendly services, and to build sustainable capacities for child protection. The foundation of this system is the view that child protection is a collective responsibility that no agency can fulfill by itself. Only a well coordinated, interagency effort can effectively address the welter of risks to children’s well-being in a war zone. However, many challenges can undermine coordination, which is the Achilles heel of nearly every humanitarian response. For one thing, the situation is very fluid, as security conditions change rapidly, new risks emerge and old ones morph and link up with others, and large-scale population movements occur unpredictably. Also, humanitarian agencies compete for the same scarce funding, and coordination is often limited by an agency’s desire to obtain a competitive edge over other agencies operating in an area. Not uncommonly, turf struggles hamper coordination efforts. Furthermore, coordinating with local governmental agencies can be difficult if those agencies compete for scarce funds, or if the government wants to take on significant child-protection responsibilities yet lacks the capacity to fulfill its obligations. Challenges also arise from the organization of humanitarian aid into separate sectors. For example, the coordination of work on mental health and psychosocial well-being cuts across multiple Clusters, particularly the Health Cluster and the Protection Cluster. Yet it can be very challenging at the field level to enable different clusters to coordinate with each other since each has a very busy agenda and tends to think that it should do only its own focused, technical work. Despite these challenges, the global network of actors that address issues of child protection is growing rapidly in size and sophistication. Coordination is occurring in many situations in part because it is seen as a humanitarian priority. In addition, there is growing interagency consensus on the conceptualization and practice of child protection, and a greater number of agencies are beginning to make civilian protection a priority. These developments are discussed in the following section with an emphasis on the work and learning of Christian Children’s Fund.


Christian Children’s Fund (CCF) and Its Challenges CCF describes itself as a nonsectarian organization that is part of a global Child Fund Alliance, which supports over 13.6 million children and their families in 56 countries. Its mission is to work to improve humanity by creating opportunity for the deprived, excluded, and vulnerable children of the world. The Alliance strives to eradicate the root causes and the effects of poverty on children by implementing meaningful, sustainable solutions resulting in positive futures. Whereas more than 60% of funding for CCF, the most operational member of the Alliance, comes from private donors, many of whom sponsor individual children, much of its emergency funding comes from the U.S. Government, primarily USAID, OFDA, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration of the U.S. State Department. The sections that follow give some examples of CCF child-protection programs not so much to promote its own programs as to illustrate otherwise abstract concepts. This work is presented with the caveat that it is only one small actor in a humanitarian system of considerable size and dizzying complexity. To contextualize CCF’s work, it is useful to mention briefly several of the key challenges it faces, apart from the coordination challenges already discussed. The single greatest challenge to CCF’s work is armed conflicts and other sources of children’s abuse and exploitation that arise from political sources over which CCF has little control. To address these wider political issues, CCF works through InterAction, the consortium of over 160 U.S.-based NGOs, to advocate on behalf of policies that protect children. Also, in emergency-affected countries, CCF works with members of the national child-protection coordination group to advocate with the national government on behalf of child-friendly policies. Often, CCF works in post-conflict contexts where UN agencies and other humanitarian actors are involved in political and economic reconstruction, and a significant challenge is to connect CCF’s efforts at provincial or district levels with this nationally-oriented work. Another significant challenge is how to respect the humanitarian imperative “Do No Harm.” Like all NGOs, CCF walks a fine line in deciding whether to work in an area where, for example, the government abuses children. Is it better to take a hard human rights line and criticize the government sternly, thereby risking expulsion from the country and losing one’s ability to support children? Or is it better to take a softer approach of criticizing gently with the idea that staying engaged with the government will eventually make it possible, through concerted

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advocacy and influencing efforts, to limit their abuses, thereby risking being co-opted by the government? In every war zone, the most minute acts are politicized, and actions initiated with humanitarian intent can be twisted by local actors for their own political purposes. Aside from external sources of harm, even well-intentioned programs can cause harm unintentionally. In a relatively young field such as child protection, which is maturing rapidly but still lacks a strong evidence base, it is possible that all agencies, CCF included, will inadvertently cause harm. In this respect, it is vital for all humanitarian actors to work with a self-critical attitude. A third challenge has to do with donor policies and priorities. In many war zones, the U.S. Government provides funding in year-long phases and requires specification of particular protection programs that support children. Yet many war zones require long-term support, and it can be damaging to begin a program on, say, the reintegration of formerly recruited children only to have to discontinue it in a year due to lack of funding. Also, the fluidity of many war and post-war contexts creates a need for flexible programs that adapt to the changing circumstances. CCF, like most NGOs, advocates regularly on behalf of these issues of funding, yet the decisions are often made by political leaders who do not have humanitarian issues as their top concern. These issues are only a few of the systemic challenges that CCF faces, and they are worth keeping in mind as the discussion below focuses on the technical aspects of child protection.

What is Child Protection? Humanitarian agencies increasingly view child protection as the mitigation and prevention of all forms of exploitation, abuse, violence, and harm toward children. For reasons outlined below, however, it has proven difficult to attach specific meaning and an appropriate measure of operational guidance from this skeletal definition. Many agencies have realized that an appropriate definition must be complemented with a framework that clarifies the scope and meaning of the words “child protection.” The development of a suitable definition and framework is best undertaken with a critical eye toward the challenges involved in achieving an appropriate definition.

Challenges in Definition The task of defining child protection is challenging for at least three reasons, not least of which is the multifaceted nature of child protection, which cautions against

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narrow definitions. Some humanitarian agencies have focused on physical and legal protections, which are necessary, highly important components of protecting children in conflict situations. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (1999) developed through a highly consultative interagency process the following definition of protection as “all activities aimed at obtaining full respect for the rights of the individual in accordance with the letter and spirit of the relevant bodies of law (i.e., human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law).” A strength of such legal approaches is their grounding in international legal frameworks, which are committed to universal rights and consistent application of humanitarian principles. However, legal approaches are very broad and focused on weighty issues such as state obligations to protect civilians. When they are operationalized in actual conflict settings, the emphasis is on wider protection concerns. Too often, children are invisible and child protection becomes a very small side bar. Also, legal definitions point toward action in the legal arena. In many conflicts, the emphasis is on advocacy aimed at getting the government and nonstate actors to fulfill their obligations to protect the civilians under their control. Although advocacy is highly important, a key question is what happens if the advocacy fails due to a government’s or belligerent’s unwillingness or lack of capacity to protect civilians. At some point, action is needed to protect the large numbers of children whom existing legal systems fail to protect. The problem of excessive narrowness also plagues definitions that focus on physical protection since some of the greatest risks to children are emotional and social. For example, in Sri Lanka, some children have joined armed groups owing to emotional abuse at home (Keairns, 2003). Similarly, some of the greatest risks for a survivor of sexual violence come from the stigmatization and isolation of the survivor (McKay & Mazurana, 2004). In some contexts, spiritual threats are seen as highly important. For example, in Angola, a boy who had been part of an armed group was unable to return to his village because people feared him and saw him as haunted by the spirit of a man he had killed. According to the local beliefs, the angry spirit could cause death or illness in the boy’s family or problems for the community such as drought and crop failure. Protection in this case entailed the conduct of a cleansing ritual by a local healer to rid the boy of the angry spirit, quiet village fears, and restore harmony between the ancestors and the living community (Wessells & Monteiro, 2004). This example illustrates the importance of having a definition that is not only appropriately broad but that can encompass local cultural understandings about the most important threats

to children. It also illustrates that protection can have spiritual as well as physical dimensions. In fact, child protection applies to multiple dimensions of child development—psychological, moral and spiritual, as well as physical. At the same time, defining child protection in an excessively broad manner runs the risk of diluting the focus of child protection and even rendering the term “child protection” meaningless. Some practitioners have wanted to define all instances of preventable deaths as within the scope of protection (O’Callaghan & Pantuliano, 2007). However, if a teenage girl died due to reproductive health issues and this was regarded as a child-protection issue, one would open the door to calling all health issues protection issues. This categorization faces the problem of reducing all health issues to protection issues, when a more reasonable stance is that a particular subset of health issues—those owing specifically to exploitation or abuse through discrimination, for example—are protection issues. Thus a key challenge in defining child protection is to strike a balance between breadth and specificity of focus. Another significant challenge is that of moving beyond the deficits emphasis that historically has dominated the field of child protection in emergencies. Faced with urgent child-protection risks in the field, many child-protection agencies and workers have tended to view child protection as a matter of reducing the risks to vulnerable children. Although this view is not without merit, it is too limited to be serviceable. For one thing, it pays little attention to prevention, which ought to be a high priority. In addition, a focus on deficits has often resulted in the labeling of children according to risk categories such as “orphans,” “separated children,” and “child soldiers.” Besides reducing human beings to mere categories and victims, these terms inadvertently stigmatize children and set them apart at a moment when they most need social support and integration with others. The use of these labels has seriously detracted attention from children’s resilience, which is visible to anyone who has worked in a war zone. When children are seen only as victims, one tends to forget that children are also actors who have agency and with appropriate support, can become agents of their own protection. Perhaps most important, protection entails not only the removal of risks but also the strengthening of positive coping skills and protective factors in the child’s environment at multiple levels such as the family, peer group, school, and community levels. What is needed is a systems framework that helps to build a protective environment at various levels (UNICEF, 2005). In the following section, we discuss CCF’s definition and framework in detail.


CCF’s Definition and Framework In 2003, CCF adopted the following definition and framework: “Child protection and well-being consists of reducing risks to children’s holistic well-being, making children’s rights a reality, and creating an enabling environment that supports children’s positive development.” Consistent with CCF’s well-being initiative, the following elements are part of CCF’s work to improve child protection and well-being: •

•

• • • • •

•

•

Reducing risks to children’s safety and emotional well-being while promoting an environment conducive to positive development, effective coping, and resilience Promotion of children’s holistic development and age-appropriate physical, cognitive, and emotional competencies Helping to foster a secure and stable environment for children Strengthening family and community caregiving structures for children Support for children’s and youth’s voice and full participation in all phases of child-protection programming Integration of child-protection activities across humanitarian delivery sectors Support for community-driven processes of child protection that activate and build on local groups and resources Making children’s rights a reality through programming, education, advocacy, capacity building, and influencing policies and practices Strengthening local networks that enable child protection, care, and well-being

Visible in this definition is a strong emphasis on wellbeing, which is consistent with the CCF approach of strengthening children’s resilience. The three key elements—risk reduction, making children’s rights a reality, and creating an enabling environment—warrant additional comment since they contain a bit of code language and have meaning that may not be apparent at first glance. The emphasis on risk reduction is broader than in many traditional protection definitions because of the following phrase “children’s holistic well-being,” which clearly encompasses emotional, social, and spiritual risks as discussed above. The emphasis on making children’s rights a reality signals that CCF is strongly committed not only to children’s rights as they exist on paper but to the fulfillment and realization of those rights through steps such as advocacy, direct program intervention, and capacity building that enables affected children and families to learn about and assert their rights as duty bearers

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at multiple levels. Although this approach may seem obvious, it is considerably broader than the approach often seen in emergencies of teaching people their rights and engaging in advocacy. Because advocacy often fails to produce discernible, immediate benefits to children, particularly in situations in which the government is the main perpetrator of abuses of children, CCF offers direct program support in emergencies. Indeed, CCF views its programs as instruments for achieving children’s basic rights and is in this sense a rights-based organization. The third element, that of creating an enabling environment that supports children’s positive development, points toward the development of a system of child protection at multiple social levels. This systems approach is valuable because risks to children arise at many levels. It would be futile to try to develop effective child-protection mechanisms at the community level alone if there were national policies in place that cause harm by, for example, permitting child recruitment, dangerous child labor, or severe corporal punishment. It is convenient to think of child protection through the lens of social ecological approaches to child development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Dawes & Donald, 2000), thereby recognizing that child development in a war zone is influenced by the risk and the protective factors that exist at the nested levels of individual, family, community, province, and societal levels. No small part of the art of child protection in emergencies is to build synergies between these various layers of child protection, effectively merging micro- and macro-level approaches. In building these synergies, it is vital to avoid sacrificing a perspective on individual children in the process. Although in a war zone the main focus is on rebuilding community and systemic mechanisms of child protection, effective programs ensure that there are tangible benefits in the development of individual children (Duncan & Arntson, 2004). CCF’s emphasis on creating an enabling environment resonates with UNICEF’s definition and framework, which is called the Protective Environment Framework. This framework consists of eight elements: government commitment to fulfilling protection rights; legislation and enforcement; attitudes, traditions, customs, behavior, and practices; open discussion of, and engagement with childprotection issues; capacity of those in contact with the child; children’s life skills, knowledge and participation; basic and targeted services; and monitoring and reporting. It also resonates with the widely used ICRC (1999) “egg” model of protection that calls for three concentric layers of action in response to human rights violations: responsive action, remedial action, and environment-building. The enabling environment portion of CCF’s framework is consistent with the ICRC task of environment-building,

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which includes creating societal structures and processes that embody humane values and legal practices as well as rights supportive policies, attitudes, beliefs and practices (IASC, 2002). This systemic approach is spelled out in greater detail in the following section on practices for implementing child protection.

A Word about Age-Appropriate Protection A cornerstone of developmental sciences is the view that children’s capacities develop over time through interaction with the social environment. This view is reflected in work on child protection in emergencies in terms of a dual emphasis on the changing pattern of risks faced by children at different stages of development and the evolving sources of protection for children at different stages. In fact, age is an important determinant of not only types of protection issues, but also the responses that must be developed. While a child is defined internationally as someone under the age of 18, people who are within the age range 0–18 years experience according to their level of development a wide array of protection risks. It can therefore be simplistic to lump all child-focused programming into a single category. It is more useful to think about the various sub-groups nestled within the broader category of “children.” In situations of armed conflict, it is helpful to consider the specific vulnerabilities and needs for protection of children at different levels of development, and to structure protection programs that are appropriate to a child’s age or, more specifically, level of development. Because young children under six years of age are especially vulnerable, it is particularly important to prevent separation from their primary caretaker and, in cases of separation, to trace their families and reunify them with their primary caretaker or other responsible adults. Young infants typically receive protection through their caretakers. For this reason, it is often important in emergencies to support mothers, whose well-being is intimately linked with that of their children. Also, because young children under six years of age are the most vulnerable to malnutrition and disease (Machel, 2001), steps should be taken to enable the continuation of breastfeeding, provision of stimulation, and development of positive attachments between children and caretakers (Grossman, Grossman, & Waters, 2005; IASC, 2007). Young children are not immune to the trauma of witnessing death or rapes, and their mothers, vulnerable to health and psychological risks as well, may themselves be overwhelmed by war stresses. Not uncommonly, mothers are unable to provide care and protection

for their very young children, or even the attention, stimulation, and affection young children need (Wessells & Monteiro, 2008). Children of school age, for example, often benefit from formal or informal education, which can be structured in ways that strengthen the protective quality of the environment (Nicolai & Triplehorn, 2003). Stable family relationships and peer supports are also critical to the healthy development of six-to-eleven year olds. Teenagers have significant intellectual, social, and physical competencies and can often serve as agents of their own protection. For teenagers, focused protection efforts are of vital importance since in most war zones, youth are influential political actors yet are marginalized and at risk of engaging in violence (Wessells, 1998). In many situations, youth are at high risk of recruitment by commanders who want to capitalize on youths’ physical size, intellectual capacities, and manipulability through the use of drugs, incentives, and terror tactics. Even if youth are not recruited, they can often be seen in war zones idling and feeling disenfranchised and hopeless. Without education or jobs, they are prone to engaging in crime and other forms of anti-social behavior. Fortunately, youth have significant capacities and, with appropriate support, can be effective agents of their own protection and also of peace building (McEvoy-Levy, 2006; Wessells, 2006). Well-designed protection programs take steps to engage youth in supports such as education and conflict resolution, and they seek to strengthen their social roles and identities in a community as peace builders rather than warriors.

Toward Effective Practice: A Tripartite Approach In operationalizing its definition and conceptual framework, CCF takes a holistic, community-based approach that aims to support or establish sustainable childprotection mechanisms and processes. This emphasis on sustainability means that everything that CCF does in an emergency is intended to support longer term development. To achieve sustainability, it is essential to work in an empowerment idiom that enables local people to take control over their future, to construct locally appropriate solutions to complex problems, and to build on the protective factors and resources such as youth groups, leaders, and supportive cultural practices that are present in any group of war-affected people. Implementing a community empowerment approach in the midst of an armed conflict is inherently difficult, since war often destroys social cohesion and shatters the


sense of community (Collier et al., 2003). Also, local power elites in a community or group of people often try to control the aid resources and process, leaving out the most invisible people and the poorest of the poor. Yet a growing body of literature attests that it is possible to enable effective community-based child-protection programs (e.g., Boothby, Strang, & Wessells, 2006; Boyden & de Berry, 2004; Miller & Rasco, 2004), and international guidelines exist on how to support effective community mobilization in emergencies in a manner that supports the most vulnerable people, including children (IASC, 2007). Also, it is possible to work in a critical, reflective manner that keeps an eye out for possible unintended consequences of programs and respects the “Do No Harm” imperative (Anderson, 1999). As CCF works in this vein, it pursues three complementary approaches of establishing focused child-protection programs, mainstreaming child protection into programs in various sectors, and building interagency systems of child protection.

Focused Child-Protection Programs Focused child-protection programs address the most significant child-protection risks that cannot be reduced through traditional programming in emergency sectors such as health, water and sanitation, shelter, or food aid. Typically, these programs are designed by child-protection specialists, including people from the local affected area, who work closely with community teams of trained volunteers or, in some cases, staff. For example, in northern Afghanistan, after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001, a significant protection risk to girls was the increasingly widespread practice of forced early marriage. Whereas Afghan girls traditionally had married at about age 15, girls of 11 or 12 years of age were being betrothed by their parents to older men, including 55-year-old men. This practice, which owed in no small part to worsening poverty and the desire of families to obtain a suitable bride price, was so upsetting to the girls that some committed suicide by throwing themselves off bridges (Wessells & Kostelny, 2005). In many respects, the problem fell through the cracks of the traditional humanitarian programs. To be sure, forced early marriage has profound reproductive health implications and is a health issue. Yet the local health staff and community health workers lacked either a strong sense of ownership of this problem or the capacity to address it. Also, to take on a highly sensitive gender issue in a society having some of the most oppressive gender practices in the world could create severe backlash and worsen the situation of girls and women. For these reasons, the issue

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was best addressed by child-protection specialists who worked closely with local women who understood the local context. Child Fund Afghanistan (CFA), CCF’s Afghan branch, addressed this issue through its Child Well-Being Committees (CWBCs), which are local child-protection groups consisting of adult, youth, and child volunteers who are trained by CFA staff. The CWBCs formed through a child-participatory process intended to build children’s leadership and help children become agents of their own protection. First, groups of ten children between the ages of 7 and 13 years drew risk maps in which they situated all the dwellings and geographic landmarks and indicated the places that were dangerous or where accidents happened to children. Consistent with Afghan norms, CFA conducted separate groups for girls and boys, which was useful in highlighting gender differences in risks to children. Next, the children prioritized the risks and presented them via a role play or minidrama to the village. Typically, the performance evoked considerable excitement and interest, which created a space for discussion of how to organize and address the risks. Within this space, CFA staff facilitated a dialogue about establishing a local committee to serve as catalysts and mobilizers who help the village address the risks. The dialogue featured issues of inclusiveness, the value of children’s participation, and the importance of including people or sub-groups who live in the social margins of the village, usually due to ethnicity, class, or disability status. These discussions then led to the formation of CWBCs, which typically consist of ten people, half of whom were under 18 years. CFA staff provided initial training on child protection and then made regular follow-up visits for purposes of ongoing support and capacity building. Over time, the CWBCs acquired skills in monitoring protection risks, reaching out to marginalized and vulnerable children, and reporting abuses. It was in this context that they talked with girls and found that forced early marriage was an urgent concern. Working with the girls and also local shuuras, which consist of male elders, and village groups such as senior women, the CWBCs raised awareness of the severity of the problem and elicited ideas about how to reduce forced early marriage. In several villages, elders suggested working through the local imams, who often engaged in local problem-solving, were concerned about children’s well-being, and were aware of the shifts in marriage customs away from traditional practices. This strategy, which sought to channel the imams’ powerful influence on behalf of girls’ protection and well-being, was more successful than had initially been predicted by skeptics who thought that the

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imams would resist change. In approximately half the villages, the imam became part of a collective effort to increase girls’ age of marriage. Having received the backing of their local Islamic leaders, many shuuras and local communities decided that girls should not be married until they had reached the more traditional marriage age of 14 or 15 years. These decisions produced an immediate decrease in the numbers of girls being forced into marriage below that age. To be sure, this change did not transform the wider gender oppression in the villages, nor did it end the practice of parents arranging the girls’ marriage. Nevertheless, it significantly reduced the most urgent and life-threatening form of abuse. In its global programs, CCF regularly develops in emergency situations focused child-protection programs as a means of addressing specific, urgent forms of abuse, exploitation and violence. These programs address the situation and rights of vulnerable children such as displaced children, separated children and orphans, survivors of gender-based violence, street children, and formerly recruited children, among others. Two broad lessons that emerge from this work have to do with context and exclusivity of focus. Like other humanitarian agencies, CCF has learned repeatedly that there is no “one size fits all” solution to protection issues. To be effective, child-protection programs must be locally adapted or developed. This means that child protection cannot be done in a boilerplate manner but entails an ongoing process of learning through experience in different contexts. With regard to focus, CCF has learned the value of complementing focused supports for particularly vulnerable children with general supports for the wider group of war-affected children. In most war zones, all children have been affected and need support. It is inappropriate to support only one small group or category of children while not supporting others. In fact, programs that support only formerly recruited children or only survivors of gender-based violence (and that label them as such), can cause harm by creating social divisions and jealousies at a moment when integration and unity is needed. Here, too, the value of a “Do No Harm perspective”—even unintentional harm—is evident.

Mainstreaming Child Protection It is increasingly recognized that protection in emergencies is not something to be done by protection specialists alone and that a protection “lens” ought to be added into work in different sectors of humanitarian aid (IASC, 2002; InterAction, 2004; O’Callaghan & Pantuliano, 2007). If the addition of a child-protection lens

seems a luxury rather than a necessity, consider the folly of establishing an emergency education program without giving due attention to child-protection issues. The unfortunate result, witnessed by the authors in field settings, can be that children receive access to education but then are abused by teachers who demand sex in return for passing grades. Similarly, water and sanitation programs in camps for displaced people often place girls inadvertently at risk by providing latrines that are unisex, unlocked, unlit, or too far away from people’s homes. In such situations, using the latrines places girls at high risk of sexual assault. These problems can be corrected by analyzing protection risks as part of the design, implementation, and evaluation of any water/sanitation program. As these examples illustrate, child protection is less a sector than a crosscutting approach that ought to be mainstreamed into all sectors of humanitarian aid. A field example of how to mainstream child protection comes from CCF’s work in 2004 in northern Uganda, where the so called “Lord’s Resistance Army” led by Joseph Kony had extended its attacks on civilians into the east. As masses of people poured into newly formed camps for internally displaced people, there was need of food aid on a large scale. The UN World Food Program responded, in partnership with CCF. However, the delivery of food aid is highly problematic in such settings. Not uncommonly, men take the food and sell it to obtain palm wine, increasing the frequency of drunkenness and assaults on women and girls in the camps. Even if the food reaches the household, men often decide who receives it, and the needs of children, particularly those who are already marginalized, typically go unmet. To prevent these problems and to ensure that the food actually reached the most vulnerable children, CCF worked through local women and engaged in postdistribution monitoring of children. In contrast to the typical food distribution, which is organized by NGOs, groups of community-selected women organized the distribution. In addition to aiding local empowerment, this approach recruited the participation of women, who have proven repeatedly to be the best household managers and the caretakers who are most likely to ensure the food reaches at-risk children. Through a process of dialogue and consultation, they agreed on the importance of having the food reach the most vulnerable children. Following the distribution, CCF’s Ugandan staff visited randomly selected households in the camps to monitor whether vulnerable children were in fact receiving food as intended. Direct observation and self-reports by the children indicated that the food did reach vulnerable children amidst a desperate situation.


This example illustrates the wider principle that children’s protection can be increased by the way in which traditional sectoral support programs are organized and delivered. The keys are to ask whether the sectoral support actually benefits the most vulnerable children and to deliver the aid in a manner that strengthens local childprotection supports, in the case of northern Uganda, the mothers. If aid workers in multiple sectors build childprotection dimensions into their work, they simultaneously help to create a protective environment for children and boost the impact of their sectoral programs. In view of this win-win situation, CCF conducts all of its emergency work in different sectors under the umbrella of child protection, and it now seeks to mainstream child protection into all its long-term programs as well.

Building Child-Protection Systems Because the risks to children are systemic, it is vital to work at multiple levels to build a wider protective environment. Inherently, this is an inter-agency task that ought to engage different government agencies at the national and provincial, district or local levels, traditional structures such as the Afghan shuuras, UN agencies, NGOs, and community-based organizations. Since protection risks do not stop at national borders, it should also entail building regional mechanisms for child protection. Key steps in building child-protection systems are to construct broad networks and coordinating bodies; facilitate effective collaboration and coordination; activate appropriate legislation and promote enforcement of childfriendly laws; promote and implement relevant international standards; advocate for child-friendly policies and against the abuses of children; and monitor and report abuses of children. Throughout these activities, it is essential to build the capacities of stakeholders at various levels to fulfill their obligations to protect children. To illustrate, Save the Children-US worked in Afghanistan with its partners—CFA and the International Rescue Committee—in a consortium to develop a national Child Protection and Action Network (CPAN). This network included at the national level key government ministries, intergovernmental agencies such as UNICEF and UNHCR, NGOs, youth groups, and civil society associations that work in diverse areas, have contact with children, and are willing to integrate a protection lens into their work. The National CPAN connects with regional CPANs, for example, the CPAN in the northeast that CFA constructed. The power of this kind of network is that it enables the channeling of information from different regions into the national CPAN, where it

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can be used to make the case for increasing attention to urgent child-protection issues and implementing childfriendly policies and practices. Also, when policy changes occur at the national level, the CPAN is a useful channel for enabling their implementation at regional and local levels. As a case in point, many Afghan children reported in 2002–2005 that they had dropped out of school due to the teachers’ use of severe corporal punishment. This information from various regions was channeled to the national CPAN and used to advocate for a ban on severe corporal punishment. Fortunately, the Afghan Ministry of Education did pass such a ban, yet it was difficult to enforce because the practice was deeply rooted and reach of the Provincial Ministries of Education was limited. Implementation of the policy is being done through local partners such as CFA, who monitor the actual situation in schools and help to build the capacity of the local government for child-protection monitoring, reporting, and action. This emphasis on capacity building is particularly important for the construction of sustainable childprotection systems that can respond effectively to problems such as trafficking, child recruitment, and genderbased violence. Because they are a national network, the CPANs offer a potentially powerful venue for strengthening child protection on a national scale.

Conclusion This paper attempts to break the code of terms behind CCF’s definition of child protection, and show the challenges in creating programs that will achieve a measure of security in children’s lives that are impacted by war. The three approaches outlined here are not mutually exclusive but are highly complementary. In fact, it is hard to see how much progress could occur through, for example, the implementation of focused child-protection programs alone without steps also to build interagency child-protection systems. Without systemic change in protection, focused child-protection programs may amount to little more than band-aids. Furthermore, if mainstreaming child protection were one’s only approach, there would be inadequate support provided for the children who need targeted, focused support. The greatest contribution to children’s protection, then, can be achieved through a creative synthesis of these mutually enhancing approaches that deliver quality, age-appropriate services. A significant task for the future is to systematize the field of child protection in emergencies by expanding research on the outcomes and impact of various approaches

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and on how to combine them in ways that promote children’s rights and well-being even under very difficult life conditions.

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