Marie: Tushinde’s in-country technical advisor was selected for a secondment to ECPAT where she coordinated and lead the Nairobi workshop. This sensitised 13 organisations and the government department, all of whom work with children in Nairobi.
ECPAT is an international organisation that aims to combat child sexual exploitation. It started in Thailand in the early 1990’s after researchers for a tourism consortium first identified the problem of child prostitution in South East Asia. It has since grown and has offices all around the world.
Tushinde was pleased to be involved in this as we have encountered many cases of child sexual abuse and also sense a real vulnerability in the children we work with for a multitude of reasons.
The main objective of the training was to reinforce the knowledge of community professionals on sexual violence against children. This is a major issue faced by children and their families in Kenya and worldwide, especially in densely populated, low-income areas. It trained the social workers in a ‘’self-protection’’ programme to share directly with children and their families.
The programme the trainees learnt to implement aims to help parents and guardians fulfil their protective roles. Of equal importance it also aims to increase awareness in both guardians and children of situations where a child could be at risk of sexual abuse.
Along with all the other social workers, child protection officers and community health professionals, Beth and Ann, Tushinde’s social workers, received training certificates and a set of materials such as training manuals, flash cards and brochures.
At Tushinde, we have several cases per year of children sexual abuse and we feel that prevention measures are very important. Our children in the community are vulnerable to sexual abuse for a multitude of reasons. We were very glad to be involved in such training and could see its importance. Our social workers also learned more on reaction mechanisms and how to react professionally to a case.
Beth and Anne shone in the training; not only were they enthusiastic and eager to learn, but they could also share some of their prior knowledge and experiences. It was a great opportunity for them to skill share and network with other professionals. This kind of training also helps raise Tushinde’s profile in our area of intervention and allows us to improve our networking at the local level.
Following the training, we implemented the programme with a first group of 15 children of Tushinde aged between 9 to 12; the sessions took place in Mathare North primary school on 2 days and both Beth and Ann demonstrated their ability to teach children those useful skills.
The evaluation showed that the children learned well and overall they were very participative. More groups of children and parents will be organised in 2014.
