CHAPTER ONE
Cherishing children: the antecedents and
definitions of child protection
Every culture in the world cherishes its children, yet we continue to
fail to protect them.5
Anthropologists have explored the early signs of the most savage
and tragic forms of child maltreatment in rituals of child sacrifice. The
Abrahamic religions view Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son as a
critical moment in the history of God's relationship with humans, as
James Carroll has described in his recent Jerusalem, Jerusalem.6 Alfred
Kahn also discussed infanticide as the ultimate form of child abuse in
history.7 More recently, Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of
Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, seeking to make the case that
violence has decreased in human history, included a lengthy section on
the decline of infanticide and the rise of children's rights.8
Plato, in The Republic, argued that children should be removed
from their parents and placed in state custody, to be raised in common,
less for their protection than as a means of producing the ideal rulers of
society without regard for differences in parenting. Rousseau argued that
children were
Sid Gardner lhe Future ofthe Fifth Child
born inherently good and are corrupted by the evils of society. However, unknowable in its ultimate sense. The spiritual life of children is the focus,
Rousseau sent all five of his children to orphanages. rather than the need to shelter children from abuse by adults-in some
cases in religious institutions.11 This literature does not appear to address
Although the first expression of child protection in international law harm to children as a theological concept. A review of a recent book on
and diplomatic pronouncements came in 1924 with the adoption by the children and theology, John Berryman's Children and the Theologians,
League of Nations of the Declaration on the Rights of the Child,9 long states that "in mainstream Christianity, children and childhood, as seen
before this statement, nations, religious organizations, and philosophers by one of its keenest contemporary historians, were marginal to the point
had articulated an obligation to care for innocent children who needed of invisibility."
protection from harm. Many religions and cultures have valued children
as innocents who must be nurtured and protected. But at times, religious Later, in Chapter Seven, we discuss the theological basis for the debates
motives have also led to treating children as mere property or objects of about adoption of children and their removal from their own cultural
blind revenge. These texts are reminders of how children have been exalted setting.
as the ultimate measures of a society's values-and how far from that
standard human history and religious practices have sometimes fallen: During the time while this book was being written, the following happened:
Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the • In Israel, an 8-year old girl was called "whore" and verbally abused
kingdom of heaven. Mark 10:14 by ultra-orthodox Jews for the way she dressed when she went to
school.
At midnight the LORD smote all thefirst-born in the land of • In Afghanistan, a IO-year old girl was kidnapped and beaten for
Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on his throne the misdeeds of her uncle. A 20-year old woman was beheaded by
to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon. her father for leaving an arranged marriage.
Exodus. 12:29. • In the U.S., an ongoing debate about birth control and the morality
of sexual behavior was spearheaded by a vastly wealthy religious
Afather gives his child nothing better than a good education. organization that has for decades shielded pedophile priests from
Hadith collected by Tirmidhi and Al-Bayhaqi. prosecution, while at the same time serving as an articulate and
powerful advocate for immigrants and poor children and families.
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for
ten years, plant trees. Ifyour plan is for one hundred years, 'In its essence, the work of child protection can be viewed as closing
educate children. Confucius. the gap between the ideals of nurturing children expressed by many
religious and cultural leaders and the continuing realities of harm
A feeling of intimacy toward all other sentient beings, done to more than one-fifth of all living children. Because some
including of course those who would harm us, is generated, parents, illicit businesses, and others in society are harming
which is likened in the literature to the love a mother hasfor children, child protection is needed. And because there are so many
her only child. 10 His Holiness The Dalai Lama different versions of harm being done to children, societies and
nations have organized to respond to these different categories of
A literature has emerged that addresses a "theology of childhood," but protection, seeking to reconcile our ideals about the lives of children
its emphasis is on children as revelations of divine intention which is with our practices in raising them.
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lhe Future ofthe Fifth Child
Sid Gardner
The gravity of child maltreatment in global settings is deepened by the In the U.S., safety is what child protection is most focused upon, for very
growing evidence that much of that maltreatment is not only doing good reasons.
deliberate harm to children-it is harm to children that is very often
culturally approved and legal, with remedies often blocked by governmental Internationally, childprotection has come to mean something different. Best
action and inaction. In a 2012 report, a coalition of non-governmental codified by UNICEF, child protection refers to sixteen specific conditions
agencies reviewed what were termed "harmful practices based on tradition, of maltreatment, categorized by type of abuse or neglect in some cases and
culture, religion, or superstition." In a foreword to that report, the head of by the setting of the offense in others, e.g. wartime or humanitarian crises.
a UN study on violence against children summed up: From UNICEF's website:
...governments in a majority of states across the world UNICEF uses the term 'child protection' to refer to
are still indulging in justification and compromise ... preventing and responding to violence, exploitation and abuse
the practices in this depressing but vital report from the against children, including commercial sexual exploitation,
international NGO Council is that they are generally trafficking, child labour and harmful traditional practices,
perpetrated by parents or others close to children in their such as female genital mutilation/cutting and child marriage.
communities and they are condoned or actively approved Violations of the child's right to protection take place in
on grounds of tradition, culture, religion, or superstition. 12 every country and are massive, under-recognized and under
reported barriers to child survival and development, m
Overc�ming the power of those traditions and superstitions is a major part addition to being human rights violations.
of what the work of child protection seeks to achieve. A portion of that
work is highly public, subject to international comparisons, feedback on UNICEF uses sixteen separate categories of child maltreatment to describe
whether national policies are actually being implemented and enforced, the targets of its work of child protection. Some of the most important of
and at times ending up in well-publicized legal action on behalf of children those include:
or seeking redress from those who victimize them. But a great portion
of that work aims at practices that are virtually invisible, occurring deep
• An estimated 223 million children-I0% of the world's children
w1thin a family and clan, involving secrets, stigma, and hidden trauma. have been sexually assaulted; this includes 150 million girls and
Thus child protection has both visible and invisible components, and 73 million boys
recognizing the power of both is critical to advancing the cause.
• More than 115 million children work in hazardous jobs; more
than 215 million children aged 5-17 work on a regular basis
• More than 67 million children of elementary school age do not
Defining the problem and the field
go to school; they are disproportionately girls; the ratio worsens
"Child protection" is a term used very differently in the U.S. and in the as students enter secondary school13
rest of the world. In the U.S., childprotective services is the front end of the
• More than 18 million children had parents who both died; more
ch�ld we?fare system, in which an immediate response is made to a report of than 16 million children lost one or both parents due to AIDS
• Only half of the children under 5 years of age in developing
child abuse or neglect. "Safety, permanency, and well-being" is how U.S.
legislation describes the three primary goals of the child welfare system. nations have their births registered
• Two million children are victims of sex trafficking or pornography14
4 5
The Future ofthe Fifth Child
Sid Gardner
protection, and can it encompass child labor, lack of birth
Each of these, combined with the other specific conditions monitored by registration, and other components of maltreatment and neglect that do
UNICEF and other organizations, are the focus of programs and funding not include violence as such?
streams aimed at these conditions. • If child well-being is used as a broader framework than child
protection, how can the organizational effects of this broader
A thoughtful perspective on child protection as a set of systems was
topic be handled, since well-being can include prenatal health,
commissioned by UNICEF in 2008. This monograph and a subsequent child development, child survival, education, and family income?The
paper were important correctives to previously fragmented efforts aimed
emphasis in the U.S. PL 109-95 legislation and the subsequent Action
at separate forms of maltreatment which were loosely coordinated under Plan on Children in Adversity defined well-being as including
the banner of child protection. 15 As we will see throughout this book, the early childhood, family care, and child protection. Above all, the
struggle to link different categorically defined efforts to improve child question is how can child well-being be framed to ensure that it
protection into an integrated system is a continuing challenge. encompasses family well-being?
• Are children agents in child protection? A number of experts and
A somewhat different set of definitions resulted from the legislative
leaders in the field of child protection have described an evolution of
initiatives in the U.S. that led to Public Law 109-95, the Assistance for
the field from a perception of the child as object to the child as
Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children in Developing Countries Act of
subject, able to act on her own behal£ Dr. Yanghee Lee, ViceChair
2005. The initial impetus for this legislation was concern about children
of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, describes three
who were left orphans as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa, but the
stages of this evolution, from a child welfare perspective focused
defin_ition was widened to include other categories of" highly vulnerable"
on protecting the child, to child rights with the child as a
children, including some but not all of the UNICEF categories. The
rights-holder for the first time, and a third stage with children and
Action Plan on Children in Adversity issued in 2013 was consistent with
youth able to act on their own behal£16 Gerison Landsown has written
the UNICEF framework.
a powerful monograph on children's participation "from the village
development council at one end of the spectrum to the UN General
At present, the child protection field is undergoing continuing debates
Assembly at the other." 17
about its boundaries. The most important questions in this debate include
• We discuss this facet of child protection further in Chapter Seven.
How does child protection relate to child survival; is neglect of basic
health and nutritional needs, whether due to poverty, parental,
As we will see, these uncertain boundaries around child protection create
community, or national actions or
difficulties not only in defining the field, but in raising its priority and
UNICEF uses the term "child inactions, a concern that should be
protection" to refer to preventing and
expanding its resources.
included within the boundaries of
responding to violence, exploitation
child protection? At times, this
and abuse of all children in all
contexts. This also includes reaching has been framed as the obligation Definitions and data
children who are uniquely vulnerable to ensure that children can thrive
to these threats, such as those living as well as survive. A major limitation on child protection efforts is the weakness of many
without family care, in the street or of the data sources on which these statistics rest. Despite a significant
• Is violence prevention a more
in situations of conflict or natural
disaster. effective framing topic than child expansion of reports on child well-being, UNICEF's annual State of the
7
Sid Gardner
Ihe Future ofthe Fifth Child
Child publications (which began in 1979), and other materials, the data
Violence against Children Survey that has also improved data collection
bases for some of the major child protection indicators are scant.18 As one
on this component of child maltreatment.
source indicated, much of what we know about child development and
well-being has been collected from research focused on the 10% of the A significant expansion of child indicators work, led by the International
world's children who reside in the developed world.19 In a 2015 review of Society of Child Indicators, offers promise that national indices of child
the status of the Sustainable Development Goals that are to replace the nd administrative data that can regularly assess the impact of projects on
Millennium Development Goals, a former US official said that "SDGs national indicators, there is less risk that disconnected projects, each with
are what we can measure progress toward, and we can't even define che their own measures of effectiveness, will simply serve as a buffer to
indicators yet in child protection." Jody Hermann and her colleagues have system change at a national level.
written a broad assessment of children's futures in a global context, using
surveys and interview data from multiple sources. Yet her conclusion, in a A number of NGOs have been actively involved in using survey methods
book published in 2013, was chat while the laws protecting children from to assess child protection mechanisms at the community level. Relying
violence are a critical facet of children's futures, "We were unable to find upon work begun in Sierra Leone, refined in Indonesia, and extended to
systematic global sources of comparable data on chis topic."20 Uganda, researchers from Save the Children and the Child Protection
Network based at Columbia University prepared reports on each of these
The good news is that a great deal of progress in filling data gaps has been locations which are justifiably ranked as landmark publications in the
made in the last decade. An International Society for Child Indicators child protection field. New emphasis on surveys that focus on the
has been _formed, and has published numerous papers on child indicators. incidence of violence against children has included work begun in
The UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) have been Swaziland that has now spread to a total of ten countries with leadership
developed and refined to capture much more extensive data than was from UNICEF and the CDC.
available in 1995 when the first cycle of MICS surveys was begun in 60
countries. The MICS 4 cycle took place during 2009-2011 and is now The development of a "child protection index," as described by some
being analyzed. 21 Twenty of the items from the MICS data were used to NGOs, has not yet emerged in a definitive form from these beginnings,
track the progress toward the Millennium Development Goals end point in but these country-specific first approximations are important steps in
2015. The International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and that direction. Their dissemination will depend upon the external and
Neglect hosts a Working Group on Child Maltreatment Data Collection internal funding to build up trend data over time from the original
that includes academics and practitioners from many countries who are baseline surveys that have been done. They will also depend significantly
adding to the capacity of their nations and universities to compile and on the responses of host governments when both improvements and
analyze data on maltreatment. 22 The Child Protection Monitoring and indicators that are not improving are spotlighted. That political process is
Evaluation Reference Group (CP MERG) was launched in 2010 and is still uncertain.
co-/ chaired by UNICEF and Save the Children. Its goal is to "strengthen
the quality of monitoring and evaluation, research and data collection, The challenge remains not just collecting this data, but us_ng it to
through the development of standards, ethical guidelines, 23 tools and measure impact and making it visible enough to guide policy. Soll)i' of
methodologies which are relevant to realities in the field." The Centers for the data, such as girl infanticide, is both difficult to collect and loaded
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US government has with emotional content. Some, such as child labor and trafficking data,
sponsored a must be collected
8
Sid Gardner The Future ofthe Fifth Child
from individuals and firms that know they are technically violating the UNICEF Innocenti Center is publishing report cards on
law if they report accurately. And supporting ongoing data collection children well-being (see www.unicef-irc.org/research/) as
and analysis is time-consuming and dependent on an assured source of do various other international bodies.
funding that makes compilation of trend data possible. In Chapter 7 we
Survey data, while very useful for the majority of children and families,
will explore other innovations in data collection and evaluation that affect
sometimes omits all children who live outside families-which include
child protection efforts.
some of the most maltreated children and children at risk of maltreatment.
T hree barriers to the collection of accurate data are obvious:
A final challenge to data is the tendency to rely on aggregate data and the
• To compile accurate statistics in rural and conflict-affected areas difficulty of disaggregating data to include excluded groups. Race, caste,
where government agencies do not operate in ways that permit gender, religion-all these are variables that sometimes become invisible in
uniform data collection is very difficult; for one critical item aggregate data. Yet many nations have large blind spots- "lesser" children
births not registered-the key data point is how widely the data who are not seen as equally deserving of protection or a data spotlight:
simply does not exist; the Uighurs, the "backward classes" as they are defined in India, the
• There are important disincentives for compiling data that has a Palestinians, the Roma. As in the U.S., once outcomes are disaggregated by
great deal of stigma attached-both for the parents and caretakers race, geography, national origin, religion, and gender, some abused
of children and for the host government-in documenting the children become visible in ways that generalized indicators can conceal.
extent to which children are abused; data collection can also raise
challenging issues of privacy; Is an overview of child protection possible?
• To launch studies rather than responding to the urgency of dealing
more directly with undeniable needs can be seen as misdirection To some extent, constructing an overview of the "field" of child protection
of scarce resources. systems is a nearly impossible task. �cause of the__ciregorical orient�_
much child protection_�qrk..i.n--whieh-singleccmciiti0n--such..as._child Jabor
In a detailed review of the status of children's indicators, Asher Ben-Arieh or sexuaTviolen��--i; �he focus, characferizing progr_ess_and--Setb-<!-fk��£!!:)SS
does not focus explicitly on child protection, but notes several trends over all_sizt-een oftfa! diild pr()t��ti��-��nditiOI)S is veo1:_�iffic_1Jk, .The task is-
the past 20 years that affect the usefulness of this data: f�rther complicated by th� �omplexity of monitoring activitie_s__aimed at
these separately defined conditions in �clreds of countries as well as
• A greater emphasis on the subjective view of the child herself; A ethnic/geographic subdivisions within them, in many cases. When the
• wider focus than survival data alone; critical role of NGOs is added to the picture, the complications multiply
• A balanced emphasis on positive as well as negative indicators. 25 further. A 1999 study by the UN Development Program estimated that
there were more than 50,000 NGOs active at that time.26
Ben-Arieh summarizes the most important ongoing current efforts:
And yet the ce���_i� redu��ng the harm done to children,-and
The multi-national project on Measuring and Monitoring the reality i�hat there are many different forms of harm, from which
Children's Well-Being developed a database of indicators flow the categories of child protection and the organizations which seek to
including their age appropriateness and data availability (see
http://mulcinational-indicators.chapinhall.org).
11
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The Future ofthe Fifth Child
Sid Gardner means aid intended to promote longer-term, non-emergency projects.
respon d. Those resp onses often focus on to a single typ e of harm, ignoring
And both categories can indupe child protection activities.
other typ es that may be clearly linked and may affect ma ny more children .
It is not only that there is no inventory across agencies and �GOs for
A further ba rrier to defi ning the fi eld is t he difficult y of d etermining
child protection efforts overall; it is also that there is little information on
wha t is bei ng spent on child protection activiti es. There is no current tot al
the level of resource& being devoted to the different components within
or worki ng i nventor y of child protection activities by NGOs worldwide .
the child pr�tectiori agenda. "The :budget is the policy" is an old public
A 2006 repo r t on a ll fo rms of huma nitaria n assistance thro ugh NGOs,
administration adage, but, not knowing the aggregate budgets for re
updated i n 2008, fou nd tha t 114 NGOs, including all of the largest ones,
integration of child soldiers vs prevention of trafficking vs birth registration
sp ent $4.2 billion compa red with $7.3 billion in huma nita ria n a ssista nce
campaigns makes it even harder to get a sense of what the real priorities are�.
from governmental sources.27 An assessment in 2011 concluded tha t
to the extent that those priorities are revealed by spending. Some agencies,
including UNICEF, have detailed totals of their own spending on child
The USAID website alone lists 671 registered U.S. a nd protection, but others, including many national governments, do not break
interna tiona l NGOs with total sp ending of al most $27 their budgets out based on this category.
billion in 2007; and the top "vendors" (NGOs receiving
USAID funding) were allotted a total of $4.9 billion in
Finally, the challenge of defining the field is also handicapped by tension
that sa me year by the U.S. government.28
between efforts defined by the symptoms of child maltreatment and those
that address deeper causes. The lists of causes in this report set forth in
A rep ort u nder the auspices of Save the Child ren so ught to track all Chapter Five are no more definitive tha� oth�r lists in other sources but a
fu nding in 2007-09 fo r child p rotec tion p roj ects under the br o ader deeper review of the causes in all these sources 'w�uld·lead, in our view, to
heading of huma n itar_ia n proj ects tracked by the Fina ncial Tracking better efforts to target resources.-If res�urces are aimed only at symptoms,
Ser vice (FTS). The FTS, ma n aged by the UN Office for the Coordination underlying causes may not be affected in the same way that they might be
of Huma ni ta ria n Affairs (OCHA), is a global , onli ne, rea l- time da taba se
if efforts were made to change those driving forces.
of humani taria n fundi ng needs a nd i nternational c ontributions. Whil e
t his tracki ng effort is a laudable begi nning, t he overall a mo unt i nvolved
· Child protection as a "wicked problem"
in the most recen t year covered, 2009, was only $40.8 million across 215
proj ects.29
Child protection meets the criteria set forth in recent organizational
The categories within these bro ad fu nding totals, as estimated by se veral literature for "wicked problems" arising in complex, open systems that
different so u rces using different methods, a re themselves s ubj ec t to operate in multiple environments.30 These labels make clear that the multi
i nterpretation. "Huma nitaria n aid" can mea n fo od a ssistance, disaster reli e£ problem nature of child protection as a field creates many challenges that
militar y action to protect civilian p opulations, or a ny of several other forms do not occur in narrower fields of organizational practice. Calling for
of a ssista nce related to emergenci es . From year to year, cha nges i n milita r y greater collaboration in resolving such tangled problems is futile without
conflicts a nd na tural disasters shift the geographic focus of assista nce a dear design for problem definition and consensus-building. Agency
programs , a nd this ca n also affect child p rotection efforts. "D evelopment and NGO proliferation and the go-it-alone nature of much advocacy for
assistance," a nother term used in describi ng foreign assista nce, usually children's programs compounds the problems caused by rhetorical calls
13
12
Ihe Future ofthe Fifth Child
Sid Gardner
for c ollaboration t ha t collide w ith t he r eality of separate initiatives and the equation between resources and results. But the resources side of that
separate funding. equation is missing an overview in the form of a collaborative effort to
inventory total child protection spending. Developing shared priorities in
The use of the term wicked can have dual meanings in the child protection allocating funds to the many components of child protection is impossible
field, referring both to the presence of evil in harm done to children and without such an overview. That overview is critical to the task of enabling
to the factors that make the problem horribly complicated, rooted deeply networks of child protection agencies to measure themselves against the
in culture, addictions, and perversions of religious doctrine. Responses to wicked problems of child maltreatment.
the problem are also complicated and weakened by narrowed definitions of
many different organizations operating primarily within their own spheres Some interviewees noted that progress has been made in recent years in
of influence, without regard for the widespread overlap of those spheres countering this fragmentation in two ways: by a stronger emphasis on violence
with those of other organizations. as an overarching concept in the child protection field and by efforts,
especially humanitarian settings, to work through clusters of child protection
Weber and Khademian emphasize the mindset of collaboration problem agencies and in the efforts of the Child Protection Working group described
solvers, as well as the need for government actors to work as equals in in Chapter 6.
governance networks with non-governmental parties.31 They call f�; new
A final critical feature of policy a ffecting child protection is that it
forms of knowledge sharing when wicked problems are the focus of
attempts to respond to behavior that is often illegal (whether or not the law
networks of public and non-public stakeholders, and suggest that
is enforced) or buried so deeply within family, cla n, and tribal roots that
relationships of trust that make up the "soft side" of networking around
outsiders find it very difficult to access. The "hiddenness" of some___
wicked problems are critical ingredients required for genuine progress. maltreatment behaviors keeps them protectec from outside influence.- -
The coalitions that work under the umbrellas of UNICEF and USAID, as 'fhus civffs��i�ty that f��ctions·within a culture is at times the only way t�
well as those in other developed nations, include stakeholders who are very ;���ss· harmful behavior with any hope of changing it. The harm done by
familiar with each others' programs and purposes. But in the absence of an hurting, isolating, and selling children will never be as visible as it should be,
overview that allows a fuller inventory of those efforts arrayed against the because of its tangled environment of illegality, guilt and shame. The worst
problems of child maltreatment, each organization inevitably works more effects of the maltreatment are often located in invisible neurodevelopmental
circuits, not in courtrooms or the media. That means that policy, for all its
within its own span of control than outside of it. Action is often unilateral
importance, can be weakened by lax enforcement, and enforcement can be
rather than multilateral, as the perceived urgency of each organization's
undermined by still-powerful norms in the
own efforts overwhelms the need for consultation, and what consultation
communide�--i�-�hi�h-�h����hildr��J[v��We will look further at these
exists becomes more proforma than substantive. Agencies do what they do
C�n��ctio�� 1·11 -disct1ssi�g �h�--�auses of child maltreatment in Chapter 5.
best, and the field becomes that much more fragmented.
The basis for this generalization is not only our interviews with NGOs
and other actors in the field of child protection, but also the definite lack
of information that cuts across the field to aggregate efforts and holds
them up against the magnitude of the problems. Better indicators of
progress, as discussed above, are a major step toward improving what is
known about
14
