Safeguarding, its everyone’s responsibility 

Safeguarding, its everyone’s responsibility 

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Yes, Parents / caregivers have the primary responsibility for building a protective and loving home but also Schools and communities are responsible for building a safe and child-friendly environment outside the child’s home.

What is Child protection / Safeguarding?

In a nutshell Safeguarding is the process of protecting the child from all kinds of harms that might include, violence, exploitation, neglect maltreatment or abuse.

No matter how each one of us tries to we make efforts in heir own circle, we still need support from the community.

You might be a good teacher, but the last reported incident was not handled with proper reporting from the school management. so, the kids would receive the proper help, another might be an understanding and loving parent but can’t help his neighbor’s son who is suffering from abuse from one of his care providers.

Child safeguarding is a comprehensive approach that requires all of us to work together proactively whether  care providers, schools, policy makers, internet service providers, medical providers, government authorities, name it.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of children out there who are not fully protected, According to SOS, Egypt has 1 million street children, 1.7 million orphaned children in addition to thousands of poor families with children that are suffering from malnutrition, violence, abuse, neglect, exploitation, exclusion and/or discrimination every day.

These kinds of violations limit their chances of developing and growing into healthy human beings. Care providers, Community and Authorities takes the responsibility for their protection as below:

• Every child has the right to have a home and a family/care provider to take care of them

• Children must be protected from all forms of violence and sexual/physical/mental abuse, and harmful practices such as child marriage and genital mutilation/cutting of girls.
• Children must be protected from any work that is hazardous.
• Children can risk sexual abuse and exploitation in their home, school, workplace or community. Preventive actions and proper response must be put into action
• The government, civil society and care providers are responsible to prevent or stop trafficking of children
• Protective processes must me followed to protect children who are witnesses of a crime, and Jailing or institutionalizing children must always be a last resort.
• All children have a right to age-appropriate information, to be heard and to participate in making decisions that concern them.

If you are concerned about a child, please call child help line on 16000