Why it’s crucial that we integrate children in our CAPSEAH work

Everyone seems to be talking about CAPSEAH at the moment, but what exactly is it? CAPSEAH stands for the Common Approach to Protection from Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment. It was developed to help standardise the way organisations working in humanitarian, development and peace (HDP) settings prevent and respond to sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment (SEAH). It does this by setting out common principles and minimum actions.  

Why is it important to specifically include children in CAPSEAH work? 

As you can see CAPSEAH, while very relevant to child safeguarding, doesn’t go into detail about the specific risks to children or the actions that need to be in place to safeguard children. While most of the steps are exactly the same, such as the need for policies, accountable and committed leadership, prevention and response, CAPSEAH is limited to SEAH, including of children, and should therefore be seen as a starting point for organisations that come into contact with children. Whilst CAPSEAH takes us a lot of the way, we need to recognise that more is needed to fully safeguard children.   

We know that children globally are at high risk of all kinds of violencei, not just sexual violence and so it’s crucial that organisations attempt to prevent and respond to all violence against children. According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) children have a right to live free from all forms of violence including physical and emotional violence. Whilst it can be easy to focus on sexual violence against children it’s important to know that all violence experienced by children are human rights violations and are linked to worse health and wellbeing outcomes including later in life.ii  

So, what additional actions do we need to take to ensure children are sufficiently safeguarded as part of our CAPSEAH work? 

• Identify how staff working on your project/in your organisation will interact with children. This can be for example through specific activities with children or as part of wider community engagement which is not specifically aimed at children. This will help you understand the risk level of your project/organisation.  

• Check if all partners (and suppliers) have policies and procedures to safeguard children. These need to include a code of conduct setting out how to interact safely with children. This can could include scenarios like not being alone with a child, how personal care for children can be carried out, how to prevent grooming and specifically not allowing any forms of violence towards children, including corporal punishment. 

• Include child safeguarding in your CAPSEAH training for all project staff. Make sure that all aspects of safeguarding children are also included in regular CAPSEAH training. It will be useful to dig into the social norms of violence against children in the training as some forms of violence can be socially accepted in some contexts.  

• Mainstream child safeguarding into community engagement on CAPSEAH. Make sure communications activities include child safeguarding and that children are informed directly about your project’s commitment to their safety and how to report a concern.  

• Ensure the reporting and referral mechanisms have been designed to be suitable for children to use. This means that they must be accessible, children must know about them, there is specific expertise on how to support children reporting violence and referral paths are also child specific.   

• Ensure you have budgeted for and sourced child safeguarding expertise if you will be working directly with children. This is important in order to deal with local laws such as on mandatory reporting and principles such as best interest of the child.