Child Protection Systems in Emergencies

The effort to build or strengthen child protection systems can perhaps be most easily explained in contrast to an ‘issue-based’ approach. Until recently, many development and humanitarian agencies have organised their child protection work by identifying and responding to priority threats facing boys and girls, such as the recruitment and use of children by armed actors, or sexual violence against children. Agencies have often targeted responses at a particular vulnerable group, such as ‘ex-child-soldiers’, street children or separated children. However, there is increasing interest in reframing child protection work by looking more broadly at the deficits in the protection available to all children and addressing the structural or root causes of those gaps in both prevention and response – in other words, building and strengthening child protection systems. As discussions around child protection systems are at an early stage, interagency agreement on key concepts and terminology has yet to be established. While the move towards a ‘systems’ approach has gained more momentum in development contexts (where the attainment of long-term sustainable solutions is explicitly or implicitly an overarching goal for all sectors), thinking and guidance on how emergency responses should seek to build, strengthen or transition into child protection systems is only now beginning to be developed. Innovative field experience does exist and promising practices are beginning to emerge, but agencies have yet to systematically collect, review and analyse these experiences. This paper is a first step in developing much-needed guidance in this emerging area within the field of child protection in emergencies (CPIE) response. In the longer term, it is clear that the growing commitment to building or strengthening child protection systems in emergencies is likely to have significant implications for how agencies operate in a number of areas. These include how they carry out needs assessments; how they plan and implement humanitarian interventions; the type, volume and duration of funding required; the role of advocacy in humanitarian situations; the orientation and training of staff; approaches to post-emergency work; and the direction of research in the sector, including evaluations and multi-context studies.