ISLAMABAD: The government has finalised a policy for the protection of children who are at the risk of being separated from their families in emergencies.

According to National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), one of the major realisations emerging from the 2010 floods was that women and children face particular challenges and that disaster response mechanisms are not equipped to deal with these challenges.

This realisation prompted NDMA to establish a separate section within its premises, the Gender and Child Cell, to focus on the needs of vulnerable groups in disasters both at policy and operational levels.

NDMA says the overall response to emergencies in Pakistan does not have a child protection focus and it has become essential in view of complexities and the magnitude of child protection violations in the country. Disasters not only increase the pre-existing vulnerability of children, but subject more children to abusive and exploitative situations.

According to newly adopted Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), all social welfare departments, child protection units and NGOs working in displacement sites should be involved in the process of community mobilisation around child protection issues.

Helplines such as 1121 and 1122 should be functionalised and information regarding separated or unaccompanied children should be disseminated to the community or other self-made services managed by the community and such a mechanism should be interlinked with the district management.

With such a system in place, the community members will be able to identify separated and unaccompanied children and other children in need of protection, as particularly vulnerable and requiring special attention within the community, NDMA says.

According to the policy, children who should be considered as separated or unaccompanied are: children separated before emergency, children living in spontaneous care arrangements with unrelated adults, children living together with other related or unrelated children, children living on the streets, and unaccompanied children living in hospitals who are ready to leave.

Caseworkers and other mobilisation facilitators should help the community to identify appropriate and feasible solutions for these children, such as identification and monitoring, support for family tracing and reunification, and community support to address their care and protection needs.

Organisations like Edhi Foundation have been rendering a valuable support to this cause, it is important, therefore, to involve them in coordination mechanisms developed to address the issues of child protection in disasters.

A large number of children in Pakistan have no birth certificate or any other documentation. In emergencies, it is very difficult to register those children and later on trace their families.

A central database for uniformly recording the cases of separated and unaccompanied children would be established where all cases can be recorded with the whole background information and tracked. Linkage should be developed with Nadra for the times of crisis and community should be sensitised on the importance of documentation and registration with national database.

According to NDMA, one of the findings observed during the field monitoring visits was that the issue of missing children is on a large scale and not just during times of emergency. In 2010, in Karachi alone 3,029 cases of missing children were reported to police.

NGO ‘Roshni’ says the number of missing children during the early stages of the emergency was quite high due to lack of coordination and capacity of workers to deal with the issue.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2014