Child Trafficking in South-Eastern Europe: The Development of Good Practices to Protect Albanian Children
- Document number
- 1211
- Date
- 2004
- Title
- Child Trafficking in South-Eastern Europe: The Development of Good Practices to Protect Albanian Children
- Author/publisher
- Terre des hommes, Ndihmë Për Fëmijët
- Availability
- View/save PDF version of this document
- Document type(s)
- Guidelines/Recommendations,
- Keywords
- Albania, Best Interests Principle, Child Victims of Trafficking, Separated Migrant Children, Unaccompanied minors, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Child protection systems, Family reunification, Guardian, Family Tracing, Age Assessment, Freedom from Detention, Interim Care, Integration, Adoption,
- Summary
- Contribution by Terre des hommes Foundation and the Albanian Foundation Ndihmë Për Fëmijët in sharing best practices in the fight against child trafficking. For years, during tourist seasons and religious holidays, Albanian children have been taken to Greece to beg and to be exploited by their so-called bosses. Today, after four years of common efforts to counter this plague, the organizations Terre des hommes and Ndihmë Për Fëmijët can affirm: Child trafficking is not an inevitability! Twenty social workers, teachers and community animators from both organizations have shared their experiences to extract solutions from their daily practices and from their successful partnership. This reflection is today launched as Child Trafficking in South-Eastern Europe:"The Development of Good Practices to Protect Albanian Children". If some of the points raised in this document are specifically related to the Albanian context, most of the parts of this model of action are adaptable to different situations in South-Eastern Europe. Already, NGO partners in Greece, Romania and Moldova are using the model of action described in the document to implement their counter-child trafficking activities on the field. This transnational model of action is based on the principle of "strategic parallelism" (The project intervention follows and directly counters the strategies of traffickers): 1. To understand the reason "Why" children are victims of trafficking, Terre des hommes analyses the path of former trafficked children according to the Children in Street Situation (CSS) systemic approach. This system allows social and educational staff to find appropriate solutions on a case by case basis. 2. To know "What" to do to help children facing this scourge, Terre des hommes, together with its partners in the field, is at the origin of an integrated model of intervention, divided in five main fields: Prevention, Protection, Assisted Voluntary Return, Reintegration and Coordination. Today, this model of action has been integrated into the Albanian National Strategy Against Child Trafficking (adopted 11 FEB 2005) and is adapted to the Romanian and Moldovan contexts. 3. "How" to approach children, be they victims or at-risk of trafficking, and their families is one of the main concerns of Terre des hommes and its partners. Good practices have been extracted from field experiences in order to determine the nature and the evolution of the trust relationships between project actors with children and their direct environment. These good practices are published in the framework of TACT Project: Transnational Action against Child Trafficking. Donors include the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Oak Foundation, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), and the National Albanian American Council (NAAC).
- Related documents