Child protection challenges in an evolving world
Child protection challenges in an evolving world
An illustration of a boy with a busy mind

Thanks to our collaboration with specialists in a wide range of fields related to child protection, we can share their expertise and knowledge with our global school community as they navigate child protection and safeguarding responsibilities.

These valuable collaborations help us continuously evolve the themes and content of our well-established child protection workshops to ensure they meet the needs of our changing world.

To gauge where we are right now, we asked Susie March and Emily Meadows—speakers at our Child Protection Foundation Workshop in Frankfurt in May 2023—about the challenges facing our community related to child protection and safeguarding and what our workshops can do to help.

 

What are the main challenges that the child protection and safeguarding community are facing?

Susie March Affiliated Consultant



Susie March, CIS Affiliated Consultant and specialist Comprehensive Sexuality Education consultant for international schools

 

I see the challenges in four key areas:

  1. The increasing influence of and ever-diversifying, online social media world in opinion-forming and decision-making for young people.
  2. Covid isolation has inhibited social skills development in a large proportion of young people, causing problematic behaviour as we start to emerge from lockdown scenarios.  
  3. With increased exposure to adult material from a young age, schools are expected to navigate evolving problematic behaviours amongst the student body within this ever-changing landscape.
  4. Staff recruitment, training, and retention. In a transient international community, it can be difficult to ensure consistent messaging and that training and development does not simply leave when a person leaves an organisation. A whole school approach that uses policy, training and regular information sharing, induction and staff briefings can be useful. 

 



Dr Emily Meadows, CIS Affiliated Consultant and LGBTQ+ consultant

 

Students experiencing harm related to their identities (i.e. race, religion, sexual and gender identity) are unsure of what rights and protections are in place to support them.

While students may receive the message from their school that "all students should be treated with respect", they are not always told what they can do if they are disrespected or targeted because of their identity.

Further, reporting identity-based harm may trigger backlashes, and potentially create an even more hostile environment, which can lead to silencing and, therefore, a reduced ability for the school to understand, prevent, and respond to identity-based harm. 

 

What can participants expect to take away from your workshop sessions to help with these challenges?

Emily:

  • They’ll gain a better understanding of identity-based harm and how it relates to child safeguarding.
  • I’ll invite participants to consider how identity-based harm may be operating within their own schools and be better positioned to interrupt it.
  • They’ll take away a policy template they can use to strengthen their school's safeguarding measures. 

Susie:

  • They’ll learn how to harness stakeholder power. We’ll be looking at tools and tactics to win support from culturally-diverse parents, faculty, and the broader school community.
  • Frameworks, frameworks, frameworks! They’ll receive advice on how to select the right global frameworks to support comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in their context.
  • Even if willing, not everyone is suitable to facilitate CSE so we’ll look at how to approach that discussion respectfully and effectively.
  • We’ll also scope out the requirements for their school to meet CIS accreditation standards.

 

 


 

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Child protection challenges in an evolving world