Considerations for child protection and practice: What is child protection now?

Abstract

Over the last 50 years, the global community has forged consensus on child rights and, thereby, laid the basis for defining child protection in terms of three cornerstones: (1) the protection from all forms of violence in all settings and contexts and for all children, without discrimination; (2) the provision of supports within governments, to families, and children for the promotion of child health when failures to child protection occurs; (3) and the participation of child and youth voices to value their lived experience and developmentally-based understanding of adult decisions impacting their rights. As such, child protection has historically been internationally focused, broad-based, with accountability structures within countries and internationally. When we survey some current contexts, the implementation of child rights seems to have been met with a blockage in realizing child protection, within child welfare system settings, but more graphically within conflict settings. This discussion serves as an introduction to the needed discourse on standards in responding to child rights violations, and the urgent need to formulate preventive, protective strategies to uphold the law-based consensus of global child rights and global child health goals. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and its Optional Protocols, continues to be the leading guidepost for country-level and international efforts to protect children and promote their well-being, and informs the Sustainable Development Goals integrating the protection from violence with child health, as benefiting the public health and global health targets. With seemingly shifting alliances among countries, the central focus on child rights as foundational and the driving force to child protection needs to remain as a cross-cutting, sustained commitment. Duty of care precedes the standards of care, and such standards are uppermost in need in our current socio-economic-political landscape.