Guide
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Chapter 1. The Limits of Top-Down Approaches to Community-Based Child Protection Mechanisms
The global Child Protection Minimum Standards define child protection as “the prevention of and response to abuse, neglect, exploitation, and violence against children.”[1] Most child protection workers agree on the importance of top-down steps, which are initiated and guided by authorities, in the strengthening of comprehensive child protection systems.
Child protection systems typically stand on a foundation of child rights instruments, laws, and policies that prohibit violations against children, such as rape and other forms of sexual abuse, early marriage, assault and bullying, trafficking, dangerous labor, and recruitment into armed forces and armed groups, among many others.
The value of such prohibitions derives in no small part from the fact that they are imposed by authorities. In fact, laws and policies that aim to protect children lose their value if authorities do not enforce them in a uniform and fair manner. At the community level, too, top-down approaches have their value and place.
The purpose of this chapter is to help readers step back from current practice, in which top-down approaches are dominant, and reflect on the limits of such approaches. The objectives are to:
- show the value of top-down, expert-led approaches in particular settings; and
- to increase understanding of how these approaches are limited.
The latter point includes how top-down approaches evoke low levels of community ownership, increase dependency, do too little on prevention, and do not help local people to develop their own sustainable solutions to problems of child protection and well-being.
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Key Question for Practitioners Is my agency’s way of working too top-down, and what could I do to help strengthen its community engagement and ownership? |
[1] Child Protection Working Group (2012). Minimum standards for child protection in humanitarian action. Geneva, CH: Author.
Chapter 2. Community-Led Approaches to Child Protection
As the name implies, community-led approaches are those that are led not by a non-governmental organization (NGO) or other outsiders but by a collective, community process. Community-led approaches are grounded in the idea of “people power”; that is, the ability of ordinary people, even under difficult circumstances, to organize themselves, define their main problems or challenges, and collectively address those problems.
This view of people’s power reflects the thinking of writers such as Paulo Freire,[1] who has emphasized the dignity, agency, and voice of even the poorest, most oppressed people. It also resonates with work in the tradition of liberation theology,[2] Robert Chambers’ work on participatory rural appraisal,[3] Mary Anderson’s Listening Project,[4] and the global wealth of participatory action research,[5] among others.
In this respect, community-led approaches are not new, and they reflect development principles that have been known for many years. Still, highly participatory approaches have so far had a marginal presence in international child protection work and deserve much wider attention. Community-led approaches reflect the fact that communities have been taking steps themselves down through the centuries to protect vulnerable children, although they have never named this work “child protection.”
The purpose of this chapter is to help readers to understand what is meant by a community-led approach. Its objectives are to:
- increase awareness of how communities already take action that helps to protect children;
- boost understanding of what a community-led approach is;
- outline key principles that underlie a community-led approach; and
- stimulate critical thinking about community-led approaches.
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Key Question for Practitioners Should there be more room for more community-led approaches in the setting in which you currently work? |
[1] Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Herder & Herder.
[2] Guttierrez, G. (1988). A theology of liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
[3] Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953–969.
[4] Anderson, M., Brown, D., & Jean, I. (2012). Time to listen: Hearing people on the receiving end of international aid. Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects.
[5] Chevalier, J., & Buckles, D. (2013). Participatory action research: Theory and methods for engaged inquiry. London, UK: Routledge UK; Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2008). The Sage handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Pretty, J., Guijt, I., Thompson, J., & Scoones, I. (1995). Participatory Learning and Action: A trainer’s guide. IIED Participatory Methodology Series. London, UK: International Institute for Environment and Development.
Chapter 3. Transforming Our Approach from Program to Community Process
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls repeatedly for transformed approaches to humanitarian work. Taking a community-led approach is a vital step toward implementing a transformational process that supports high levels of sustainability.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the transformational process involved in doing community-led work. Its objectives are to:
- increase awareness of how we as child protection practitioners need to change our own roles and ways of thinking;
- describe how agencies who work on child protection need to reorient themselves;
- reflect on the importance of creating an open, inclusive space within which communities act and make key decisions; and
- emphasize the importance of flexibility, since community-led work does not follow a recipe.
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Key Question for Practitioners Are there changes that we as practitioners need to undergo in order to strengthen our work with communities and enable a community-led approach? |
Chapter 4. The Facilitator and a Slow, Dialogue-Oriented Process of Facilitation
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the facilitator and the facilitation process involved in community-led work. Its objectives are to:
- increase understanding of the role and activities of facilitators in a community-led approach;
- deepen understanding of how facilitation in a community-led approach differs from facilitation in mostly top-down approaches; and
- help readers to think through how to identify, select, prepare, and support facilitators of a community-led approach.
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Key Question for Practitioners What are the advantages of taking the slow, dialogue-oriented approach that is inherent in a community-led approach? Could the skills of facilitation presented in this section strengthen my organization’s work with communities? |
Chapter 5. The Learning Phase
How we first enter into and engage with a community can set mutual expectations about the respective roles of the outsiders and the community and about who holds the power.
Most often, child protection workers from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) visit communities, establish a modicum of rapport, explain their purpose, and then conduct an assessment of the child protection issues in the community. Typically, the assessment focuses more on risks and deficits than on community strengths. Based on the findings, the NGO workers design an appropriate program and invite the communities to partner on its implementation. This top-down approach concentrates power in the hands of the NGO, does little to build collective agency and resilience, and quietly casts the community into a position of dependency.
A useful way of turning this around and creating a foundation for community-led work is to enter the community in a more respectful manner that focuses on deeper learning about community resilience, views, and strengths as well as risks to children.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the initial learning phase that sets the stage for community-led work. Its objectives are to:
- outline an approach that builds trust, positive relationships, and community agency right from the initial engagement;
- show how an open, grounded approach to learning goes deeper than most rapid child protection assessments and helps enable a community-led approach; and
- emphasize the importance of feeding findings back to the community in a way that prompts reflection about what local people can do to help address the harms to children.
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Key Question for Practitioners In working with communities on child protection, what is potentially lost by asking mostly pre-packaged questions, and what do we potentially gain by asking more open-ended questions? |
Chapter 6. Supporting the Community Planning Process
Following the learning phase, communities will have a heightened awareness of various harms to children that need to be addressed.
This awareness, however, may not translate into inclusive action, as community elites may guide discussions and plans for action. An inclusive process is needed in order to unlock the greatest potential for change and to bring forward the views of girls, boys, marginalized people, and others who are not usually at the center of power.
Also, community action alone may not be enough to address harms that require collaboration between communities and formal actors in the child protection system. In this context, outside agencies may contribute to children’s well-being by playing a facilitative role.
The purpose of this chapter is to increase understanding of how to support an inclusive community planning process in which communities decide which harm(s) to children they want to address and how they will do so. Its objectives are to:
- emphasize the importance of deep engagement and relationship with communities in enabling community decisions to work with an agency (or agencies) and its facilitator;
- outline how to support contextualized processes wherein communities engage in inclusive dialogue and decision-making to select which harm(s) to children they want to address through community-led action; and
- explore different models wherein communities decide which actions or steps they will take to address the harm(s) to children that they have selected and how they can collaborate with government actors and service providers.
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Key Question for Practitioners How can we co-create with communities a process in which communities decide which harm(s) to children they want to address and which actions they will take to address those harms? |
Chapter 7. The Community-Led Action
The community-led action process is in many respects an organic extension of the community planning process. As communities discuss and prioritize which harm(s) to children to address, the level of community concern about particular harms to children may increase, thereby boosting the motivation of community members to take action to address those harms. Similarly, discussions of how to address particular harm(s) may increase community members’ desire to move into action now.
Naturally, some of the people who were most animated by and engaged with the community planning process may come forward to help lead the community action to address the selected harm(s) to children. The community-led action may also overlap with community planning—since as the community acts, it learns from its initial steps. As it reflects on its progress and challenges, it may plan for and make adjustments.
In these respects, there are not two entirely separate phases of community-led planning followed by community-led action, but continuous, partially overlapping cycles of community-led planning and action. For the purposes of focus, however, it is useful to examine community-led action as if it were a separate phase.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore community action processes that enable communities to their self-selected harm(s) to children. Its objectives are to:
- outline the processes through which communities take steps to address the selected harm(s) to children and manage their action;
- explore how communities can monitor and evaluate their actions to address the harm(s) to children; and
- examine how to increase the community ownership and sustainability of the community-led action to address the harm(s) to children.
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Key Question for Practitioners How can we help communities to own, manage, and run their own, community-led, sustainable actions on behalf of vulnerable children? |