Keeping Children Safe and University of Reading have kicked off a new global initiative for organisations involved in UN peacekeeping missions to take urgent action to safeguard children from peacekeeper abuse. Despite the UN’s full commitment to a policy of zero-tolerance, cases of sexual exploitation and abuse of some of the world’s most vulnerable children continue to be reported in the context of peacekeeping missions.
Keeping Children Safe sets tough International Child Safeguarding Standards to ensure all organisations protect children from exploitation and abuse. Child safeguarding is the responsibility that organisations have to make sure their staff, operations, and programmes do no harm to children, that is that they do not expose children to the risk of harm and abuse, and that any concerns the organisation has about children’s safety within the communities in which they work, are reported to the appropriate authorities.
Refugee children from Srebrenica play ball with UN soldiers at Tuzla airbase. Image shot 07/1995. Exact date unknown.
UN Indian peacekeeper unit position in North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Image shot 2007. Exact date unknown.
A girl watches as United Nations peacekeepers fill buckets with drinking water in the semi-desert outside Gonaives, Haiti
Juba, Dec 2010: Southerners, just returned from the north to vote in the independence referendum, wait at a UNHCR transit camp. Image shot 12/2010. Exact date unknown.
Soldier of the ‘United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti’ on patrol encountering Haitian boy , Haiti, Grande Anse, Jeremie
Bundeswehr UNOSOM 2 – mission in Somalia
Boy sitting on fishing boat at Lake Tanganyika, Burundi, Makamba, Mvugo, Nyanza Lac
Boys looking at a United Nations UN vehicle, Dili, East Timor
Little boy standing in front of a car of the United Nations – Integrated Office of the United Nations in Burundi, Burundi, Bujumbura rural, Kabezi
Military parade in Nouadhibou, Mauritania, for the 55th anniversary of the independence, November 28, 2015, UN peacekeepers
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