SYLVESTER OROMONI: IT IS SYSTEM OR NOTHING

There was a time when Child Protection issues were handled focusing on issues as they arose. It was called the need-based approach and its strength was in response.

The world was confronted with the reality of the fact that the negative impact of abuse of any type on our precious children was of an eternal value on their absorbent psyche. According to UNICEF, it takes four times the resources to respond to abuse than to prevent it.

Therefore, apart from the fact that the negative impact of abuse does not perish in a lifetime, it is less expensive to handle prevention than building our castle of child protection around the need-based approach, with response or cure as the sacrosanct inscription of intervention.

In view of the foregoing, child protection practitioners, state and non-state actors had a major crisis to deal with. The tide of need-based approach must be replaced with something more reassuring with PREVENTION as the cardinal principle of operations.

Eureka! We found it, Child Protection System. We call it, Securing A Friendly and Protective Environment for Children® System. It is a coordinated approach to protecting our precious children, where actors begin with an end in mind, known as goals or set of goals and who is responsible for what, thereby creating what we call balance.

The foundation of every intervention today in Child Protection is SYSTEM. Everywhere you see abuse, including the death of our children within and outside our schools, what is largely lacking is a system.

Every living and true society, (which I call the societies of the future because of their unalloyed commitment to their precious children) understands this reality and their child protection efforts are led by their governments, in providing a social and legal enabling environment, creating enlightenment, enforcement of standards and the rest. They will not remain on the Old Testament side of things, aimed at installing the solutions for child protection on the elaborate fantasy of bare rules, toothless regulations and empty motivation, which has a form of a sensation of solutions but denies the substance thereof, a form of political and social masturbation on the issue, leaving out the spirit of a SYSTEM

Today, our first point of advocacy under the #NOPROTECTIONNOSCHOOL Campaign is for the citizens to demand the protection of our precious children through a system as recognized by Section 2 of the Child’s Rights Act, 2003. The second point of advocacy is that parents of private and public schools must arise to demand from the schools in which their precious children are registered or about to be registered to show their Child Protection credentials; the mechanism they have in place to prevent children from being abuse, beginning from observing the principle of SAFER recruitment.

To gain CLARITY, please check out and share our campaign declaration here https://youtu.be/d3SR1ydXoac. Do have an INSPIRED day.

I am Taiwo AKINLAMI
S.A.F.E® for Children ETHICIST