With new manuals developed within their REEC project, aiming to provide educators with a handful of age-appropriate activities that can be applied to children of ages 4 to 11 years old, Terre des hommes, Comune di Milano and IRC want to ensure that children become aware of their rights, of means to practice their rights, of safeguarding mechanisms in place to protect themselves and how to access them.
Child maltreatment is an umbrella term encompassing all forms of abuse and neglect that may be inflicted on a child; namely, all forms of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, and neglect. Child maltreatment is very difficult to measure, and many countries still lack robust and consolidated data on the number of children who are victims of violence. The WHO reports (2020) that nearly 3 in 4 children aged 2-4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence inflicted by their parents and caregivers, while retrospective studies have shown that 1 in 5 women and 1 in 13 men have been sexually abused as a child. As research shows, most children are victims of violence in the contexts where they live, learn, and play, and the perpetrators are usually members of their family, extended family, and community.
Educators of all educational levels come daily in contact with children. Educators create bonds of trust and respect with their students, and jointly with their students develop creative spaces for learning and growth. For this reason, if trained, educators can contribute to the prevention of child maltreatment and to the fight against this phenomenon, through empowering and supporting children’s active participation in their self-protection and in establishing child-safe environments.
This Manual has been developed to provide to educators a handful of age-appropriate activities that can be applied to children of ages 4 to 11 years old, to ensure that they become aware of their rights, of means to practice their rights, of safeguarding mechanisms in place to protect themselves and how to access them.
The Manual has been developed within the framework of the REEC project (Reinforce Educators, Empower Children), in partnership with IRC and Comune di Milano, under the auspices of the Municipality of Athens. REEC is co-funded by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship Program of the European Union. For more information, please click here.
This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union