Commitment and Capacity Building for the European Barnahus Movement.

Main Objectives

When a child is exposed to harm, a number of different actors have a duty to safeguard his/her rights through an effective and child-friendly approach. Unless these actors work together, the child can be drawn into parallel investigations, moving between different agencies and disciplines potentially causing segmented, repetitious and intimidating experiences. This can lead to stress, hinder disclosure and cause re-traumatisation.

With the implementation of the PROMISE II project, “Hope for Children” CRC Policy Center and partners aim at promoting the Barnahus (Children’s House) model, which has been recognised by governments, practitioners, children and care-givers as a good practice in protecting child victims. The model embraces multi-disciplinary and interagency cooperation between social services, police, prosecutors, judges, paediatrics and child/adolescent psychiatry.

The project has the following specific objectives:

• Engaging key authorities, agencies and professionals through the development of strategic national exchange, roadmap and framework;
• Improving the staff competences through tailored training to Barnahus staff;
• Raising national and European awareness on the topic.

Expected results

The expected results of the project are:

• Multi-agency collaboration, standards and protocols among relevant sectors;
• Sustainable exchange, mutual learning, and practical cooperation routines on the national level;
• Barnahus staff is trained on the existing good practices;
• Promoted The PROMISE network and the communication tools as an advocacy instrument.

The activities of the project include:

• Promoting national roundtables and Dialogue;
• Drawing up national/regional roadmaps;
• Drawing up national frameworks and agreements;
• Promoting webinars, chats, judicial sector workshops and training for Barnahus staff;
• Developing a methodology for gathering the perspectives of children on the operation and impact of the services;
• Developing project communication tools;
• Facilitating the use of the PROMISE Standards and Tracking Tool.

For more information, please visit the project's website at https://www.childrenatrisk.eu/promise/

Funding Reference

The project is co-financed by the Rights, Equality & Citizenship Programme of the European Commission (Ref. REC-CHILD-AG-2016/REC-CHILD-AG-2016-01764236).