Abstract
This chapter examines Global North and South similarities in children and young people’s reactions to school-led child protection programmes. It considers key shifts in social policy that led to the introduction of child protection training in formal educational contexts. It discusses background to this practice in Zanzibar and the United Kingdom and explores some strengths and limitations of this approach. Our findings suggest that school-focused child protection programmes often either have limited influence outside the educational sphere or create unexpected outcomes, which exacerbate difficulties that some children and young people already manage without adult support. Our findings show that focusing on schools as key providers of child protection support can unintentionally create circumstances in which children and young people feel even greater vulnerability in the wider community. It highlights the need for child protection approaches that robustly acknowledge the separate spheres of school and family and which are sensitive to those differences.
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Notes
- 1.
During these 18 months of doctoral fieldwork in urban Zanzibar, Franziska Fay also served in other professional capacities, all further informing and shaping the research. With Save the Children Zanzibar she worked as a research associate on child protection and participation and as an independent consultant on Positive Discipline in Everyday Teaching. At Zanzibar University, Tunguu, she served as a visiting lecturer teaching the course on Child Rights-Based Approaches for the Diploma in Child Protection.
- 2.
Child protection interventions in mainland Tanzania are coordinated separately and work with other programmes than in Zanzibar, where the socio-cultural make-up of society is different.
- 3.
Positive Discipline builds on the principle for children to learn through cooperation and rewards, rather than through conflict and punishment and, in fact, opposes punishment for it suggests that children should suffer to understand their own mistakes and discourage them from repeating them. The Positive Discipline approach builds on the assumption that corporal punishment can damage the child’s development and the relationship between the parent and the child, while its own methods encourage parents to think about the long-term goals they want to achieve.
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Burr, R., Fay, F. (2019). Child Protection Across Worlds: Young People’s Challenges Within and Outside of Child Protection Programmes in UK and Zanzibar Schools. In: Twum-Danso Imoh, A., Bourdillon, M., Meichsner, S. (eds) Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95543-8_10
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