MAPChiPP is a European project developing trainings for qualifying practitioners in child protection. The DIJuF carries out the project in cooperation with experienced partners from Estonia, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Hungary. The trainings developed will be tested in all partner countries as well as in another three European countries (Finland, Portugal and Romania). MAPChiPP is supported by the Rights, Equality and Citizenship (REC) Programme of the European Union and has a run-time of two years.

The project addresses two essential factors for effective child protection. First, it aims at facilitating cooperation and communication among actors in child protection. Various services or institutions – such as youth welfare office, social workers, health professionals or family court – often come to differing appraisals regarding the questions whether children are endangered and if so how to counteract the danger. Thus, a multi-disciplinary collaboration of professional in cases of child protection is considered to be very important. Second, the project seeks to enhance the participation and involvement of children in the assessment of endangerment as well as in help-planning. Involving children often faces problems in practice: Imminent danger, escalating conflicts between parents, missing skills and experience in communicating with children – especially burdened children – or uncertainty regarding the necessity of repeated enquiry may stand in professionals’ way in turning to children’s perceptions and wishes. As it is crucial for any change for the better in child protection that children are willing to make use of the help offered participating children is a sine qua non for intervening effectively in cases of child endangerment.

The project aims at developing training modules as well as a toolbox for imparting and enhancing knowledge, skills and attitude for multi-disciplinary collaboration and participating children in the assessment and help-planning in cases of child endangerment. To this end, a unitised train the trainer program will be developed. Using the program trainers shall be qualified to train practitioners from diverse professions in child protection. Additionally, the project intends to set up a multi-disciplinary network to facilitate trainers exchanging experiences for further capacity building.

The following European countries cooperate in the project:

• Estonian Union for Child Welfare (Estland)
• Netherlands Youth Institute (Niederlande)
• Family, Child, Youth Association (Ungarn)
• Child and Family Training & Refocus on Practice (England)
• Central Union for Child Welfare (Finnland)
• Instituto de Apoio à Criança (Portugal)
• Hope and Homes for Children România (Rumänien)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827.
The project CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN INTERVENTIONS AGAINST VIOLENCE is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.

Final Progress Report 2013-2016

September 2013 to August 2016

One of CEINAV’s main goals was to develop a transnational foundation for ethical practice in intervention, taking a holistic view of the forms of violence we have studied, while attending to differences. The paper “Transnational Foundations for Ethical Practice in Interventions Against Violence Against Women and Child Abuse” results from in-depth discussions in the four-country team. It was written by Liz Kelly and Thomas Meysen with an approach that speaks directly to practitioners and the challenges they face.

We make this paper available in the four languages of our project, and invite others to translate into further languages (but please let us know if you do so!)

• German version
• Slovenian version
• Portugese version

International Comparison of Child Protection Systems

After exploring the legal-organisational frameworks as well as the socio-cultural backgrounds in each country and form of violence two multidisciplinary workshops with professionals were held in all four countries. The same phased story was discussed in all workshops across countries to find out about the frames and dilemmas the professionals are experiencing. An international comparison on the professionals‘ practical and ethical dilemmas in the child protection workshops as well as working papers for each form of violence and country:

Meysen, T. & Kelly, L. (2017). Child Protection Systems: Between Professional Cooperation and Trustful Relationships. A comparison of professionals’ practical and ethical dilemmas in England/Wales, Germany, Portugal and Slovenia. In: Child & Family Social Work. Article ID: CFS12403

Anthology “Experiences of intervention against violence"

The five CEINAV teams sought to hear the voices of women and young people with a minority or migration background who had travelled through a history of violence and intervention. From these interviews an anthology of stories was created, in which the Women and young people were interviewed and describe when and how intervention helped them or failed to help. They also tell us, what they think could be done better. From these interviews an anthology “Experiences of intervention against violence” has been drawn up. All stories were translated into English next to the original language as an invitation to think about how experiences may differ or be similar in different countries of Europe.