This includes responding to allegations or suspicions of abuse, providing support and services to protect children, and holding those who have harmed them accountable.
[8][9][10] This means taking into account the social, economic, cultural, psychological, and environmental factors that can contribute to the risk of harm for individual children and their families.
[13] This includes providing a safe environment for children to grow and develop, protecting them from physical, emotional and sexual abuse, and ensuring they have access to education, healthcare, and resources to fulfill their basic needs.
At the level of prevention, their aim includes supporting and strengthening families to reduce social exclusion, and to lower the risk of separation, violence and exploitation.
One of the ways this can be enabled is through the provision of quality education, the fourth of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in addition to other child protection systems.
Child labor often happens in difficult conditions, which are dangerous and impairable to the education of future citizens, and increase vulnerability to adults.
[31][32][33] Infanticide can be carried out by parents, relatives, or strangers and is often seen as a form of gender-based violence, since female babies are more likely to be killed than male ones.
In some countries, like Iran or China, criminals can even be sentenced to capital punishment for crimes committed while they were children (the United States abandoned the practice in 2005).
[41][42] Infanticide today continues at a much higher rate in areas of extremely high poverty and overpopulation, such as parts of China and India.
In 1984 the Council of Europe, the body that supervises the European Convention on Human Rights, made Recommendation R(84) 4 on Parental Responsibilities.
[52] The long-term impact of abuse on victims often includes physical injury, psychological and behavioral harm, and can potentially be carried across generations.
[53][54] Caregiver maltreatment of children is a global problem that can occur in adoption programs, regardless of social status and in cases of discrimination and early or unwanted pregnancy.
The United Nations has addressed child abuse as a human rights issue, adding a section specifically to children in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding should be afforded the right to survival; to develop to the fullest; to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation; and to participate fully in family, cultural and social life.A key part of child protection work is assessment.
Professionals conducting assessments of families where neglect is taking place are said to sometimes make the following errors:[59] Media related to Child welfare at Wikimedia Commons