Daily Star - Volunteers complete regional child abuse awareness training

By Simona Sikimic

BEIRUT: The first group of national volunteers specially-educated to deal with the sensitive subject of child sexual abuse finished their training on Tuesday as part of a regional initiative to bring the all-too-often ignored issue to light.

The collection of over 25 social workers, teachers and NGO workers received eight days worth of training and were awarded a working manual detailing how to teach children about sexual awareness, how to spot abuse and how to react when mistreatment is exposed.

The training is the first of its kind in the Middle East and has been provided by Lebanese NGO, KAFA: Enough Violence and Exploitation and Save the Children Sweden, with support from the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs. It will now be rolled out to Yemen and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and its scope in Lebanon will be expanded over the coming years.

The issue is understandably a very sensitive one and does not receive enough attention in schools, is rarely brought up with students or is talked about in a confusing and alienating way, KAFA found during the compilation of its manual.

The support system for victims is also fragmented, with few organizations providing the full-range of services such as legal representation and psychological and sometimes medical help, which are necessary in pedophilia cases. While KAFA is equipped to deal with all associated issues and has promised to support new trainers, calls for additional back up and greater integration of services, including those provided by the government, was called upon on mass by the trainees.

“Only through this training did I realize how incomplete my previous training had been,” said Mayada Ghosn, training coordinator for reproductive health with the Ministry of Social Affairs. “This prepares you for the many obstacles you will face in real life situations when dealing with the children, the teachers and the parents.”

Ghosn helps train people to discuss health issues in schools. In the past her trainees have come across cases where they sense a child may be being abused, but, because of inadequate training they have been unsure of how to approach the child or pursue the issue.

“It’s very important to give people more training like this and I hope that [it will] be integrated into the system where it will help a lot more people benefit from the combined and improved approach,” she said.

Training, however, is only the first step. It will require months, if not years, of real-life experience for the new recruits to be fully prepared to deal with the complicated situations that will surely arise when dealing with this issue.

The training and working manual are culturally sensitive and were compiled with the help of real life test cases and extensive psychological and legal consultations, but, while parents and teachers tend to react positively to the sexual abuse awareness-raising, it is necessary to get their permission and engage them in the process to ensure they properly understand the need, event organizers said.

“Referral of cases is extremely difficult, while the child should stay with the family whenever possible, sometimes it is necessary to take them away for their own protection,” said Save the Children Sweden country director Ruba Khoury Al-Zoghbi. “But the guidelines and framework for when and how to do so do not really exist and need to be clarified.”

The legal framework for dealing with the issue is largely lacking in Lebanon.

When prosecuting child molestation cases, judges are often forced to borrow from other laws and then choose which ones to apply, which means protection is inadequate and ad hoc, said Zoghbi.