All projects
Managed by Save the Children Romania, one of the members of the European Council for Juvenile Justice, the Children’s Legal Education – Adapted Resources (aka CLEAR project) aims at developing and ensuring the effectiveness of a child-friendly Manual educating children about their rights and of an affiliated Tool Guide designed for professional practitioners such as teachers, educators, social and / or community workers, etc.
At first, the Manual and the Tool Guide will be developed in collaboration by the seven different partners involved in CLEAR; both will be reviewed several times thanks to e.g. the support of focus groups, online consultations, the involvement of Children’s Rights experts and children themselves. These two processes, the draft and review of the Manual and Tool Guide, will take approximately a year and a half whereas the last part of this project, the dissemination of the outputs, will be spread over the last six months that is to say at the end of 2014.
Giving its extensive network of collaborators, the International Juvenile Justice Observatory hopes to bring a European-wide perspective to this project and to actively contribute to its dissemination. As a matter of fact, the IJJO will first make sure that inspiring practices other than those developed and implemented within the six other European country partners will be taken into account before largely contributing to the dissemination at a EU-level of the Manual, of the Tool Guide, and of the different findings highlighted throughout the length of the project.
CO.S.Mi is an eight-month project funded by the Italian Department of Juvenile Justice that explores the impact of prejudice and discrimination on foreign minors, especially in relation to stereotypes linking them with crime, followed by an assessment of how social communication techniques are and can be used to increase awareness and reduce the level of prejudice and discrimination directed towards foreign minors. The focus on this topic is in part a response to repeated calls by the European Union for Member States to adopt policies that support the integration of immigrants and in part a recognition of the particularly difficult situation in which foreign minors find themselves. Evidence indicates that the current social context in many EU Member States tends to be increasingly intolerant of immigrants; within this context foreigners are frequently equated with crime and foreign minors may be particularly vulnerable to stereotypes, prejudice and various forms of discrimination both within the broader community and within the criminal and juvenile justice systems.
Social communication is seen as potentially powerful instrument for addressing and preventing prejudice and discrimination. This applies not only to altering media depictions of foreign minors (or foreigners in general) in relation to criminality, but also working on changing the attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs of individuals. At the same time, social communication can be applied within the juvenile justice system to prevent and reduce discriminatory behaviour and actions, whether individual or structural, to help guarantee equal treatment and the safeguarding of the best interests of the child for all minors that come into contact with the juvenile justice system.
In order to promote the paradigm of comprehensive protection of minors deprived of their liberty, through this initiative, we intend to improve the services and mechanisms of Juvenile Justice in Paraguay, mainly in the field of prevention and effective application of legislation. This project involves the creation of a multidisciplinary team which, on a rotating basis, follows a comprehensive approach with minors in the reform centers of the country, given the profound shortcomings in these institutions. This team is responsible for providing legal, medical-psychiatric and psychosocial aid to the minors, ensuring their rights and contributing to their harmonious development and social reintegration. Furthermore, this team is also responsible for providing care and training to workers and directors of the centers, thereby reinforcing the educational intervention practices. The centers involved in the project – two of reform and three of protection, are attached to the Ministry of Justice and Labor. The experience gained in the project will be revealed in an Ibero-American Conference on Juvenile Justice with the participation of experts from different countries, in which also will be announced the results and conclusions of the project.
The situation faced by unaccompanied minors throughout Europe is a growing concern for a great number of NGOs working with and for children. In this precise case, the Net for U project aims at improving the integration of unaccompanied foreign minors. To this extent, the diverse partners involved in this project are determined to define an effective multidimensional intervention Program.
The latter relies on the achievement of several objectives, which are the following: the elaboration of a knowledge-based intervention model to improve helpful practices both of ongoing special assessment and of family tracing procedures; the development and fostering of appropriate opportunities of training and education, of social and leisure activities, and of an active participation in cultural life for the children concerned; the creation of a permanent transnational cooperation within professionals, stakeholders, social workers and all other figures who work and are dedicated to the rights and well-being of unaccompanied foreign minors.
These objectives will concretely take the form of several outputs such as a Toolkit detailing the special procedures linked to assessment and family tracing; an Intervention Manual to help professionals create individualized programmes for the concerned minors; and Guidelines, which will act as the founding document of a permanent network (NET FORUm) fostering a cooperative strategy between organisations and stakeholders working at a local, national and international level.
The Project ITACA intends to study the particular type of crimes related to juvenile gangs, meaning observing and studying carefully the characteristics of this type of aggregation that tends to commit deviant acts with specific peculiarities and in particular to examine both the ways in which juvenile crime group starts to commit crimes and also the specific connotations that these actions assumes for society. The opening to other Countries gives the possibility to face a general problem really widespread, at different level, in many realities. As far as we are concerned, in Europe there are no many data gathering the extent and the features of the phenomenon of juvenile gangs at European level. Furthermore, the ITACA partners open a debate to establish the outline, characteristics and actual extent of the present issue in Europe. Firstly, an analysis of the phenomenon features will be done and secondly, it will be identified a comparison of prevention and treatment practices implemented in several European countries, in order to adopt new shared practices and intervention paths towards a strategic common answer concerning juvenile gangs.