CHILD PROTECTION

Our work is focused on fulfilling our global ambition for children by 2030: protect children and change behaviors that expose children to violence in homes, schools, and society. In Kosovo, we aim to achieve this by strengthening the capacities of children, families, communities, NGOs, and institutions to understand the consequences of all forms of violence on children’s well-being, to challenge traditional norms that may affect children, and to provide a positive approach to child rearing and education. We also advocate establishing and adopting laws and policy frameworks, applicable at the national and local levels, that promote and protect the best interests of the child.

Our Strategic Objectives for Child Protection 

Protection from Violence

Children in Kosovo are protected from all forms of violence in all settings

Strong and Resilient Child Protection System

Children in Kosovo are protected by a strong and resilient child protection system

Appropriate Care (including Mental Health and Psycho-Social Services)

Children, adolescents, family members, or caregivers demonstrate improved mental health and/or psychosocial wellbeing

Through Appropriate Care, we aim to promote and support children’s needs and rights as a result of capacity building of local authorities and programs that enhance parents’ psychosocial abilities as part of family strengthening whereby children benefit from quality care in their homes and all other alternative care settings.

Through our programme, families, community members and Child protection mandated institutions gain knowledge and understanding on new ways of caring for children - Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting and Positive Discipline in Everyday Teaching (PDEP and PDET). In addition, we work on increasing awareness and knowledge on psychosocial support and in bringing innovative approaches in order to influence substantial changes in children’s lives and advocate for the best interest of children in service provision for them and their families.  PDEP & PDET are being carried out and replicated to other local child protection mandated institutions and school staff, who is provided with a knowledge as facilitators and will apply new learning outside Save the Children Kosova/o projects. SCiK supports networks and coalitions of civil society – Coalition of NGO’s for Child Protection in Kosovo - in the spheres of family strengthening and alternative care, to contribute in enhancing legislative and regulatory frameworks, conducting research to inform policy solutions and offering recommendations to the development/amendments of laws and policies and advocate for their adoption.

PDEP was delivered to 40 kindergarten educators, primary school teachers and social workers, all becoming trained facilitators, which in turn delivered 4 sessions with parents, enabling reach of 61 parents from different municipalities, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and those following the program, 88.9% of the sample believed more strongly that parents should not use physical punishment, and 85.7% agreed that PDEP would help them to reduce their own use of it.  Delivery of PDEP via community professionals appears to be an effective method especially in the places where parent support infrastructure is lacking.

Through our Child Protection program, we work in enhancing the skills, knowledge & participation of children, families, and institutions (education, health, social departments), to promote and raise awareness on violence against children through targeted parental education programs (PDET, PDEP). Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting is a parent support program that helps parents gradually move away from physical and emotional punishment and toward solutions that nurture their children’s healthy development and learning. Positive discipline is about finding long-term solutions that help children develop their own self-discipline over time.

In addition we promote prevention of violence against children through child protection activities/trainings for children, modeling and promoting child/family/institution participation mechanisms and approaches such as joint School Student Councils, Child Led Assemblies (both local and national), peer to peer methodology /approach within schools, developing child participation guidelines and programs within schools and community (such as the codes of conduct and complaint boxes) while ensuring the establishment of child friendly feedback mechanisms and adequate systems within schools to report violence among children. 

We achieved to work with 4 new schools in 2 new municipalities on drafting codes of conduct and distributing awareness raising booklets, thus reaching a higher number of children through our programme.

Continuous advocacy with national authorities led to a successful improvements of the Draft Child Protection Law, ensuring the inclusion of an article on banning corporal punishment in all settings. Furthermore, we worked with primary schools and other institutions, including children and municipal child led groups, in setting and strengthening functioning protection mechanisms in 14 new schools, in improving prevention programs on violence, and overall, in raising awareness on elimination of all forms of  PHP, thus enabling the creation of safe and secure environment.

We ensure in having an overall a more effective child protection system, through creating space for children and in ensuring their voice is heard in decision making processes that affects them, (both at local and national level), including the voice of CSOs in acting as a ‘watchdog’.

Save the Children Kosova/o supports states parties with its expertise to take appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from deprivation, discrimination, exploitation and deprivation of its rights and ensures good education, quality health services, social and legal services and justice for children.

We have coordinated a regional research on Systematic Discrimination which reflects on RAE Migration covering 5 states (Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia and Romania).