Clare Hanbury

The RISKS of Participation to Children and Young People: The June focus of the Children's Participation Group

Here are notes from the last meeting of the Children's Participation Group. there are 8 of us in this group and all of us work in international development with a particular focus on the participation of children and young people. This month the topic we focused on was The Risks to Children and Young People from Participation.

We began the discussion by reminding ourselves of the tools that already exist to help guide organisations and individuals who wish to strengthen of develop participation of children and young people. Links to ethical guidelines (or participation resources containing ethical guidelines) can be found at the bottom of the note to this meeting.

Some of the ideas for keeping children and young people safe and reducing risk that may arise from participation are as follows:

• To ensure that organisations working with children and young people have policies and procedures relating to safeguarding and child protection in place and ensure that these are current, up to date and compressive enough to protect children and young people.

• We should ensure that children and young people are consulted on processes for keeping them safe in a way that allows their perspective the risks they feel they may face to be incorporated into procedures and along with their views on what could be done about it. A very practical example was given about children being consulted on the logistics of their journey to and accommodation at a participatory workshop. Some of the issues these children faced were risk of attack on the way to the event, the sleeping areas for boys and girls, adults and children.

• One of the blocks to promoting children’s participation is that adult say its too risky. Therefore it useful to get perspective from children on this. For example, consulting children on logistics or the participatory activities themselves. It sets the tone and expected practice.

•  The consultative process needs to be done in an age appropriate and careful way so as not to create anxiety. The impact of the type of questions and tools used to support children and young peoples participation needs to be thought through.

•  Children and young people need to be made aware of an organisations child protection policies. In addition, there needs to be an appointed child protection lead. Then children are encouraged to report to this person (or use the process outlined in the organisations procedures) if they have any concerns. The lead person needs to be  appropriately trained and gender issues taken into account.

•  A distinction needs to be made between safeguarding (creating safe environments/practice) and child protection (physical abuse, neglect).

•  We need to recognise that participation is a means to enhance children's self protection - children who have no voice can be targeted for abuse.

• Children and young people are not a homogenous group and what may work for one group may not work for others. We had an example of where young people felt hostile to work younger children were doing on conflict and conflict resolution.

• One problem about trying to understand the when’s of children’s participation is that developmental psychology theory has a different stance.  For example - Piaget, a central representative of 'childdevelopment' can be a start for discussion; main obstacle in his research is that the stages of development are quite fixed.

• There are many theories. However we thought that it may be useful if we could work together as a group to update theory on the evolving capacities of the child.

• We need to support children who are enabled within a workshop setting to consider how this enhanced skills or increased voice may have an in the ‘real’ world. We need to do this to ensure that they don’t put themselves at risk. This can be hard and especially for children who are especially vulnerable or marginalized and who could be left at grater risk as a result of a project and once the project has ended.

• Save the Children Sweden has explored the balance of protection and participation and risks involved. This is documented in an SCS report called 'CultivatingParticipation' available here: http://resourcecentre.savethechildren.se/content/library/documents/participation-virtue-must-be-cultivated.

• It’s also important to inform children and young how the information they generate will be used. Any information given to children must be in a child friendly format.

• These are sometimes ethical issues around adult agencies approaching children to get information and ideas from them, but lacking the willingness to respond to children’s own agenda.

• We talked about the potential to over consult with some groups of children – checks need to be made regarding who has worked with the children before and why and how this information was used.
• Check that CP is inclusive and the risks to vulnerable children if they are excluded. Risks can be straightforward or more complex e.g. risks to mental health, self-esteem etc. (sorry not sure i understand this and cant remember what we were talking about here)

•  Risk of overburdening children to participate and create a situation where due to social desirability children don't dare to refuse to participation.

• We need to prepare people to work with children. If working with teachers we need to build in an awareness on the distinctions between teaching and facilitating participatory work with children. A reelection that even when our colleagues KNOW what and how they should do – how easy it is to slip inadvertently into behaviour that they maybe inappropriate but which just come up.

• Its important to realise that working with children in a participatory way can be a huge step for some adults who never experienced this as children or were taught how to practice it as adults.

•  Reflective practice for practitioners is an important place to start. In places where there are deep inequities the ideas that underpin participation are highly challenging to implement and needs developing over the medium/long term.

•  The best facilitators are often the younger people who have a natural rapport with children. Its important to be alert to natural talent and to nurture and support them with continues training, development and other professional support.
•  Maybe we need a checklist of criteria for people who are suitable of this work? Involving children in recruitment is useful where possible.

News from Children’s Participation Group Members

We are all doing such varied and interesting work. This includes:

•  Child participation in Health and SMS messaging
•  CYP participation in health service design and delivery
•  CP and how poverty/low income impacts on disabled children’s rights (mainly social, economic and cultural rights)
• Helping to set up a counselling group run by children for other children, http://www.crc15.org/
•  CP and M&E work – Oak foundation project – forthcoming seminars and developing ideas around creating a digital hub for M&E work in CP
• Involving CYP in design of organisational assessments using qualitative and quantitative approaches
•  Internal youth mapping
• Regional analysis on community based child protection mechanisms supported by Plan in Asia;
• Engaged in M&E of children's participation (Oak funded) pilots with forthcoming webinars;
• Preparing for global advocacy with and by children's and young people's representatives on children, youth and peace building in New York in early September;
• Preparing training modules on child rights governance and humanitarian practice.
• Working on a paper concerning a life cycle approach to children, adolescent and youth participation in peace building
• Looking into the world bank’s lifecycle approach 10 + years

Possible actions formulating from the group:

We seem to often return to a need for more clarity or tips on how to use in practice the evolving capacity of child framework and understand how this has changed over time and across cultures. We spoke about looking at reports developed by Bernard Van Leer, on materials that have been developed on peace building and relayed to this. We agreed it would be great to trace a theory of change with children and young people.

Links to ethical guides to children and  young people's participation

http://www.ecpat.net/ei/Publications/CYP/CYP_report_Ensuring_ENG.pdf

http://www.unicef.org/adolescence/cypguide/resourceguide_ethics.html

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Child Participation in Child Protection: A FREE Toolkit and Training Module

I spent a part of 2010 preparing two sets of materials on children's participation in child protection for The Child-to-Child Trust and The Keeping Children Safe Coalition:

1. A toolkit for adults working with children to involve them in their own protection; and

2. A module to support trainers of these adults to provide guidance in some of the key concepts and skills needed to do this work.

The project involved testing the toolkit and training module in Sierra Leone, with colleagues in a number of different organisations based throughout Africa. All these organisations are members of the Keeping Children Safe Coalition. The materials took almost a year to produce and after a few months (with rather a high price tag), I am delighted to say that you that online versions of both sets of materials can now be downloaded for FREE. The materials are also available in French and the Spanish version is coming soon. It is important to emphasise that while these materials aim to encourage children to get involved in child protection, it is the responsibility of adults to ensure children are safe.

Here is a bit more on the materials...

The Training Module on Child Participation in Child Protection is the 5th Module within the Keeping Children Safe Tool 3. You will need to download the entire Tool by clicking here. Module 5 is from pages 91 to 132 and is set out in the following way:

Module Five: Childrens’s Participation and Child Protection: A Guide for Training Adults

• Exercise 5.1: Children’s participation
• Exercise 5.2: Children taking action on child protection
• Exercise 5.3: Overcoming barriers against effective children‘s participation
• Exercise 5.4: Working with groups of children
• Exercise 5.5: Active Listening
• Exercise 5.6: Asking open questions

Tool 4 aims to provide adults working with children with exercises and activities that will get them started in learning about how to keep themselves and other children safer. Tool 4 can be downloaded by clicking here. Tool 4 is structured as set out below:

Introduction     

Module One: Children recognise what is child abuse           

• Exercise 1.1: Children’s rights
• Exercise 1.2: Feeling safe and
• Exercise 1.3: Understanding child abuse           

Module Two: Children keeping themselves and others safe

• Exercise 2.1: Talking about feelings
• Exercise 2.2: Decision-making
• Exercise 2.3: Children keeping children safe           

Module Three: Making organisations feel safe for children

• Exercise 3.1: Safe or Unsafe in communities, schools, and projects?
• Exercise 3.2: Listening and talking about feeling unsafe
• Exercise 3.3: Setting up children‘s groups to help keep children safe            

Module Four: A Resources Guide         

Over the next 2 months I will be writing a series of posts based on these materials. 

Several organisations have already conducted training using the toolkit notably SOS Children's Villages and Plan International. It would be wonderful to hear your ideas and experiences of using and adapting the materials and to have links to any exercises you have improved, added to or expanded. I would be very pleased to feature these experiences, ideas, comments and cases studies on the blog.

*I was commissioned to write the toolkit and module by the Keeping Children Safe Coalition and The Child-to-Child Trust with support from The Oak Foundation.

Guest Post: Training Adults on Children's Participation in Protecting Themselves and Others from Abuse

I am delighted to host this fascinating guest post written by Barbara Lill Rastern in which she reflects on training adults on children's participation in protecting themselves and others from abuse. Barbara is a consultant who has conducted several training workshops in which she has been training practitioners and training trainers to take forward the ideas of children's participation in child protection in their organisations. She can be contacted at the following email address: [email protected]

When I was a young girl growing up in a sleepy Austrian hamlet,  I remember being given the rule to 'be wary of strangers, not to talk to them and not by any means enter their cars' because they can be dangerous. I had question marks in my head. After inquiring with my parents and other children. I dealt with the information that they (men, of course) 'can do bad things to your body'. The question marks in my head were only marginally smaller and still I stuck to the rule; although being encumbered by a kind of 'nebulous anxiety' along with it.

I was not given accompanying information or education in regard to sexual development, possible forms of abuse by adults or peers, child rights, child protection, let alone participation.

 

Some of the children I have worked with as a trainer and consultant for child participation and protection  unfortunately do know exactly what this means because they have either experienced abuse themselves or know of peers having suffered from it.