Children's Rights

1. CHILD RIGHTS AND JUVENILE JUSTICE

Guide Me Initiatives (G.M.I) views child rights as a top priority. Building on that foundation, we seek to empower children, families, communities and partners to prevent and respond to exploitation, neglect, abuse and other forms of violence affecting children, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable.

Child Protection programs targets government-level decision makers in order to ensure that the child care system in Tanzania significantly reduces reliance on large-scale institutions through the establishment of a network of community-based alternative social services. The program is designed through application of systems approach to child protection, helping to strengthen the protective environment around children, as well as the children themselves.

CHILDREN RIGHTS

• We recognize that children’s rights are human rights. They protect the child as a human being. As human rights, children’s rights are constituted by fundamental guarantees and essential human rights:

• We recognize and promote fundamental guarantees to all human beings: the right to life, the non-discrimination principle, the right to dignity through the protection of physical and mental integrity (protection against slavery, torture and bad treatments, etc.

• We promote civil and political rights, such as the right to identity, the right to a nationality, etc.

• We promote economic, social and cultural rights, such as the right to education, the right to a decent standard of living, the right to health, etc.

• We promote children rights include individual rights: the right to live with his or her parents, the right to education, the right to benefit from protection, etc.

• We are promoting children rights include collective rights: rights of refugee and disabled children, of minority children or from autochthonous groups.

Juvenile justice is a very specific sector under Child Protection. In many countries it concerns the well-being of a relatively low number of children, we considered it as a crucial theme, because it encompasses basic rights issues which are often linked to social exclusion and marginalization, and not only to crime. The core issue related to children in conflict with the law is the fact that due to their age and immaturity, children warrant separate and different treatment from their adult counterparts in criminal processes due to their vulnerability and limited capacity, as they are still in a formative stage of development.

• The organization is responsive to the child’s care and developmental needs in order to ensure that children are reintegrated back into their communities as law abiding citizens, giving priority to any action respecting the child’s best interests.

• We focus not only on the nature of the offence committed, but also on the root causes of the offending, on the individual circumstances of the child involved and on children victims and witnesses. The reasons why children come into conflict with the law are different: poverty, family unit break-up, lack of education, unemployment, migration, substance abuse, pressure exerted by peers or adults, lack of parental supervision, violence, abuse and exploitation, to name a few. In other words, situations in which the child has rarely taken the initiative or made a deliberate choice of getting into conflict with the law.

• We focus on successful innovations into social protection sphere of children as permanent reforms and to promote them from local to national level.  Among those suggestions are: quality services provided by the government across the continuum of child care, with clear standards, feasible plans and adequate funding, strong social protection mechanisms, including community-based social workers’ services, laws and policy solutions shaped at local context and child protection evidence, including children’s voices, the establishment of state paid community level specialists/social workers, etc.