COUNCIL OF EUROPE: Promoting Action to Combat Violence Against Children

[VIENNA, 21 May 2010] – Children's rights experts gathered in Vienna last week to share experiences and challenges in developing national strategies to combat violence against children.

The meeting was opened by Chirstine Marek, Secretary of State for Economy, Youth and Families of the government of Austria, who remarked that there were still forms of violence that were seen as permissible in Europe today. A priority, she explained, was to achieve a “Europe in which violence against children does not find tolerance anymore”.

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, Deputy Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, highlighted the Council's efforts on children's rights, in particular its effort to achieve a ban on all forms of corporal punishment, promoting positive parenting and raising awareness of children's rights in general.

The role of the Council of Europe is to develop legal instruments against specific forms of violence and assist States in putting these in place.

Aim of the meeting

Ms de Boer Buquicchio explained the objective of the meeting was to share initiatives with partners from around the world, look at what partners can do together, maintain momentum, define obstacles and ways to overcome them.

The Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children (SRSG), Marta Santos Pais, talked about the unheard voices of child victims of violence. She said it was often easy to blame children to calm social concerns, referring to the thousands of children deprived of their liberty, either in juvenile detention centres or in care institutions.

She said she hoped the Council of Europe could serve as a clearinghouse for information for Europe and beyond.

She introduced the three topics the meeting would focus on, namely:
 

1. National strategies: including collecting examples of countries' approaches to the strategies. 
2. Strong legislation: including encouraging positive discipline and legitimising the work of those who want to support children. 
3. Better data, information and research: the need to collect better and more consistent data, devise better monitoring tools and indicators and gather more information about how boys and girls are affected by violence, about invisible children and in the process, find out about children's views on violence.

Lioubov Samokhina explained what the Guidelines of the Council of Europe on Integrated National Strategies were and how these would support states in protecting children from violence.

Ms. Samokhina highlighted some pilot projects in Norway, Italy, Portugal and Romania on consultation and open debate to develop a model integrated strategy.

In the coming two years, the Council is planning a number of awareness raising activities. It will also invite more governments to pilot the guidelines and offer technical assistance. In addition, the Council will launch a new campaign against sexual violence in November this year.

Regina Jensdottir, Head of the Children's Programme at the Council of Europe, talked about the Council's work to create a child friendly Europe with current initiatives on justice, health and social services.

The common denominators in all these programmes, she explained, is the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the best interest of the child in all settings.

Finally, she mentioned that their recent consultation with children through questionnaires has received 4,000 replies from individual children and groups of children and is currently being evaluated.

Children's Commissioners' role

Shirin Aumeeruddy-Cziffra, Ombudswoman for Children of Mauritius said the South could also contribute ideas for combating violence. Her mandate, for instance, allows her to contribute to improving laws and policies on children as well as investigating individual complaints she receives from children.

She also said that children's commissioners are often in a good place to work across the board with everyone working on children's issues, including the government, civil society and others.

Dominique Versini, Children's Commissioner of France and current Chair of the European Network of Ombudspersons for Children (ENOC), talked about her current challenges, both in getting the public to see that banning smacking was not about being subversive and about the nature of the institution of ombudsman, which is currently under threat.

She also said her role as commissioner was rooted in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and not in serving the collective fears of the government.

Massimo Toschi, from the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency said his office was launching a survey on violence against women, which includes a section on girls. They are also considering a second survey on violence and discrimination against children.

Helmut Sax from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights in Vienna said it was important to have clear legal messages and sensitivity among the legal profession, there was a real need for training of legal professionals on children's rights. He said perhaps the children's rights movement could learn lessons from the women's rights movement to combat violence, while keeping in mind the special protection need children also have.

Progress on prohibiting all forms of violence

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Commissioner of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights and former Independent Expert of the UN Study on Violence Against Children talked about the urgent need for a full ban on all corporal punishment, in all settings. He commended the champions in Europe as well the recent commitments in the Americas and in the Middle East.

He insisted, however, that children should be involved in every step of the way: “if we are to devise effective ... services that are genuinely accessible and acceptable to children, we have to seek advice from children with relevant experiences – and seek feedback continuously from children who are the subjects of the services: did the process work for them? Did it serve their best interests? Were there unintended negative consequences? How could things have been better?”

Professor Pinheiro also expressed his concerns regarding the age of criminal responsibility. In some countries, it is as low as seven and there has been a recent wave of proposals and laws to lower the age or to increase sentences of juvenile offenders.

“We have to stop criminalising children, because it is a form of violence in itself and wholly counter-productive. … It is in all our interests to stop making children criminals. We should therefore treat them as children while they are still children and save the criminal justice system for adults”, he said. (read more).

Marko Karadzic, State Secretary, Ministry of Human Rights and Minority Rights in Serbia. highlighted the plight of particular groups of children whose rights are not respected. He said there was general consensus about the need to ensure the rights of children with disabilities, refugee children or children without parental care, but not when it comes to Roma children and LGBT children.

“We are unwilling to help them to stop the discrimination they face... there have been huge steps in Europe, but these children are still not allowed to live according to their identities. Yes”, he continued, “there are kids who are gay, lesbian and transgender”.

He explained how he was villified after daring to mention this in Serbia both by the media and some government officials and emphasised there was a need for mobilisation from everyone, including children, parents and teachers.

Elisabeth Tichy-Fisselberger of the Austrian Ministry of European and International Affairs described a project of her government on trafficking.

She explained it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between children who had been victims of trafficking and migrant and asylum seeking children. Children are often seen first and foremost as as criminals and they have been told to mistrust authorities.

Dominique Versini talked about forms of violence that take place in schools and are not even noticed by adults. Many adults have often said, for instance, that bullying was a part of growing up.

“Work combating such forms of violence cannot be effective without consulting with children”, she said, “Children are the experts of their own lives.”

Yoshie Noguchi, from the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), talked about the ILO's work on the worst forms of child labour and other areas of work where children face violence.

She defined which forms of labour are classified as 'worst', such as slavery, forced, trafficking, including forced recruitment into armed conflict), prostitution and pornography, children in hazardous work are violent by nature but children can also face violence while working legally, for instance because they are inexperienced and young.

“Simple prohibition is not enough, we need to raise awareness, address root causes and change people's attitudes”, she said.

Jean-Claude Legrand, Regional Advisor for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, UNICEF talked about the new campaign for universal ratification of the two Optional Protocols under the UN CRC; the aim is to get all States to ratify both within three years.

Mmantsetsa Marope from UNESCO talked about the importance of human rights education in preventing violence. “Inequality in society is a key factor for violence to occur. Opportunities lead to greater equality”, she said.

Data, research and children's voices

Ms Idalia Moniz, Secretary of State for Disability, Portugal explained how her government had banned all forms of violence, including corporal punishment in the home in 2007. She said this was made possible thanks to the UN Study on Violence Against Children which set the framework reform.

Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said EU action was needed. He referred to the Stockholm programme which called to develop a strategy on the rights of the child, to protect and promote children's rights especially those in particularly vulnerable situations, such as unaccompanied children, asylum seeking children and children who are victims of sexual abuse.

He highlighted the importance of rights indicators, as opposed to wellbeing indicators. Rights indicators look at the interaction between children, governments and society, taking into account the capacity of children to claim their rights, and duty bearers to fulfill their obligations (read more).

Joan Van Niekerk from Child Helpline South Africa highlighted some of the work they are doing on data collection. They are now using the data they collect to improve their work and services. In 2008, for instance, 14.1 million children around the world contacted them, 21 per cent of whom were calling about violence.

“Data is essential for external advocacy, but also useful for making improvements to our services,” she explained. “It helps understand what skills a counsellor might need, whether they are overloaded, what the emotional impact might be on them, but also of course, the volume of calls and the types of calls”, she continued.

She explained that they had recorded a 200 per cent increase of calls relating to physical abuse. She said this could be because children are more aware of the existence of the free phoneline, but in unpacking this information, they found that most of the calls related to coporal punishment, both from children but also from parents who were calling about their own behaviours towards their children.

This information is what provoked Child Helpline to join the regional movement to ban corporal punishment, but also to produce publications on positive parenting materials, both for literate and not so literate groups of people.

Peter Newell, Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, said it was important to remember that statistics on reporting violence or conviction rates said nothing about the true prevalence of violence. “This can only be done through confidential reporting, including with parents and carers on behalf of babies, who are probably the most victimised. This is how you get a real measure of violence and progress towards its elimination. We have to encourage all countries to carry out such studies”, he said.

He referred to the goal of the Council of Europe to achieve universal prohibition of corporal punishment: “we must face the fact that most countries are not making progress on this issue, including my own, and are resisting reform. We need to consider how to maximise the pressure on those (20) countries by both looking at all existing mechanisms, including the United Nations and the Council of Europe, but also looking at the possibility of legal and quasi legal action”, he continued.

Marta Santos Pais said there was an urgent need to pull together existing information from a range of sources, such as the WHO, ombudspersons, child helplines and figure out what is needed and what can be done.

Professor Pinheiro said child participation was often discussed, but not practised enough. “We keep talking about democracy but we never include children in these discussions. We must give them a voice but also include them in decision making processes. We can implement the 11 recommendations of the Violence Study, but without the one on participation, all changes will be far too slow”, he said.

Conclusions

Conclusions of the meeting were compiled and presented by Dr Ursula Kilkelly, University College Cork, Ireland. As preliminary conclusions, she highlighted some of the central themes of the meeting, which included: celebrating ongoing efforts and identifying where progress has been made.

Some general observations included:

• There was an awareness of continuing challenges, such as the need to coordinate and integrate plans of action, work with civil society, gather political support, improve the quality of data, be more creative and practical in the use of data.
• Law is very important but it is only part of the process of changing behaviour of everybody. Changing laws aw alone is not enough.
• There is a need for wider and deeper children's participation
• National Human Rights Institutions for children in Europe are on the increase. They can play a key role at national level in linking civil society and governments.

Recommendations

1. At national level:

• Prohibit all forms of violence

• Develop, integrate and implement national strategies

• Promote participation – involve children in the design, implementation and evaluation of initiatives

• Work in partnership with civil society and academia

• Promote access to information, advocacy, independent complaints mechanisms and courts

• Collect data and carry out research, evaluations and share knowledge

• Provide leadership

2. At international level:

• Continue cooperation and mutual support

• Promote existing international law and standards; they apply to all governments, they cannot be applied by some and ignored by others

• Disseminate experiences of regional efforts to eliminate violence against children through networking seminars and workshops

• Ratify the Optional Protocols to the CRC and ensure children have access to international remedies

3. At regional level:

• Promote the Council of Europe's campaign on corporal punishment (and others)

• Use all means to promote ratification implementation and awareness of all instruments

• Promote the platform on the rights of the child – an important pan European forum for sharing information and best practice and mobilising supporting

• Lear from success: the strongest law, the most effective policy/programme and celebrate and replicate achievements.

• Strengthen evidence base across Europe: advice on best models for data collection, research impact of violence against children, develop indicators and generate understanding on application in various jurisdiction.

• Develop training and awareness raising at national and international levels including EctHR

• Engage with children and young people

• Continue bringing people together, widen circle (train legal profesion, lawyers and judges) engage reluctant

pdf: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=22577&flag=event