Chişinău, February 5th, 2014
About 120 national and local decision-makers, professionals, specialists, and children from all the country gathered in Chisinau to participate in a conference dedicated to the development at the local level of systems of child protection from abuse, neglect, and exploitation.
According to Minister Valentina Buliga, the Government of the Republic of Moldova clearly assumed the engagement to reform the existing child protection system. This engagement was reflected in the Law of special protection of children at risk and children separated from their parents – that came into effect on January 1st this year; the draft instruction on the application of the inter-sector mechanism of cooperation for the identification, evaluation, referral, assistance, and monitoring of children – victims and potential victims of violence, neglect, and exploitation; the Regulation of Family Support Service, etc.
Stela Grigoras, Director of Partnerships for Every Child, believes that the inter-sector approach, with clearly defined and divided responsibilities, based on the rights and supreme interest of the child, models of primary and secondary prevention, such as: local Child’s Helpline Service, psycho-social group activities for parents and children, inter-sector Mechanism of cooperation, became possible due to full awareness of the usefulness of this approach. Our intention was to develop skills, produce and test models and mechanisms of child protection, for the purpose of their integration into the local child protection system that would inform policies and, accordingly, be disseminated at the country level, and I think that we achieved this, said Mrs. Grigoras.
26 children, members of the Advisory Boards of Children from Ungheni and Falesti raions participated at the event. During two years of their activity, ABCs actively participated in decision-making processes in the mentioned two raions, including in the evaluation of the professionals’ perceptions of child abuse and in the monitoring of social services protecting children from this phenomenon. The members of the ABCs expressed the opinions of the children from their raions, suggesting a set of solutions that adults could produce in order to improve educational, social, health-care, and public order services.
The event was organized by Partnerships for Every Child, in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour, Social Protection, and Family, and the Moldovan branch of the Swiss Foundation Terre des Homes, within the project “Creating at local level of systems to protect children from abuse, neglect, and exploitation in the Republic of Moldova”, implemented with the financial support of the Oak Foundation.