II. Overview of Activities
The activities that have been conducted through this reporting period has comprised of the following four main training programs:
1. Child Safe Organization Training
This program seeks to support organizations to transition into adopting an organizational culture that seeks to provide a safe environment for children.
2. Child Safe Training targeted for children
This program, entitled “3-3-5”, provides education and learning opportunities for children to empower themselves in the prevention of harm, particularly with regards to sexual abuse. The training equips children to understand that they are made in God’s image and therefore special, and how to protect both themselves and their friends from potential exploitation. In addition, it also helps to engender the confidence necessary to report any cases of abuse to the people they trust and to local authorities.
3. Positive Parenting Training
This program seeks to encourage parents to develop closer relationships with their
children and support them in positive discipline. In addition, this training aims to help parents to provide a good and safe environment for their children.
4. Internet Safety
This program seeks to inform users of social media and networking services, particularly, young people, of the threats to personal safety that exist when interacting with these services and provides constructive steps in minimizing its associated risks.
These activities, exception of “1. Child Safe Organization Training”, appear at first, to be a step removed from this project’s objectives as previously specified. However, the team has identified throughout its experience, that generally there is much work to be done initially to lay a foundation of constructive attitudes, values and knowledge within the family construct towards child protection issues, before a receptive response can be developed in organizations that have children under its care. As a result, there has been much focus on these family centric training courses with the intent of building on this foundation to encourage a strong sense of commitment and ownership when parents and children take part in how communities such as schools and churches should consider issues in child protection. This approach has 5
been taken in contrast to previous attempts to initially encourage communities to develop a child protection policy, where the team has found that the level of commitmentand ownership has not been sufficient to drive organizational change towards a child safe environment.