Maria Roth, Imola Antal BABES-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY CLUJ-NAPOCA

1. Regional overview of child injuries
Joanne Vincenten
European Child Safety Alliance, EuroSafe
EURO Regional Consultation to discuss
the World Report on child and adolescent injury prevention
July 2-3, 2007
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
An initiative of the European Child Safety Alliance
Implementing policies on violence against
children across Europe – symposium on
findings from the PIECES project:
Assessment and Follow-up
procedures
Maria Roth, Imola Antal
BABES-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY
CLUJ-NAPOCA

2. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Grounding of PIECES 3 research
• The UN and EU recommendations for the
improvement of reporting and follow-up
services within the integrated child protection
systems, supported by adequate human and
financial resources and based on current
scientific knowledge.
• Council of Europe recommendation (2009) that
children should be actively engaged in their
protection and the state and other appropriate
actors should listen carefully to children’s
views
2

3. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Goals
Gathering expert views on reporting and follow-
up of cases of violence against children, in
order to identify:
• best practices that can be used in European
countries;
• gaps in the advancement to child friendly,
responsive, professionalized and evidence-
based services;
• needs for further common European research
to be funded by EU
3

4. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Questionnaire and respondents
Contains 50 questions grouped in 5 themes:
I. Reporting systems for violence against children.
II. Mandatory reporting and its consequences (what
is required to be reported and by whom);
III. Investigation, risk assessment;
IV. Follow-up for cases of violence against children;
V. Training of professionals working in referral and
follow-up services.
Respondents: PIECES purposive snowball
sampling involving volunteer experts from all
European countries
4

5. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Referral services as part of the
Integrated Child Protection System
• Referral services are regularly evaluated in six out of
the 17 countries providing a response (42.85%) (UK,
Spain, France, Romania, Denmark and Lithuania), and
not regularly evaluated in 8 countries.
• Evaluation reports are available in three countries out of
the six that responded (two from UK):
– UK: The Munro Review of Children Protection (three
separate reports), Davies and Ward (2012);
– UK: OFSTED inspections of services:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/ofsted-
inspections-of-local-authority-childrens-services;
– Spain:
http://www.fapmi.es/contenido1.asp?sec=16&pp=1;
– Denmark: www.siso.dk.

6. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Data. Existence of referral procedures
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7. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Is reporting mandatory?
• Reporting id mandatory for professionals in 15 of
the 18 (83.33%) countries – generally for child
protection workers, medical professionals,
teachers. Exceptions:
– In Poland not obligatory to report child labor,
– In Belgium and Luxemburg there is no
mandatory reporting for professionals.
– For professional categories like lawyers in
Slovakia and Greece, or psychologists in
Greece.
• Reporting is not mandatory for the public in more
than half of the countries (56%).

8. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Consequences for professionals
for not reporting
• For 9 countries respondents mention
consequences for not reporting known situations of
violence against children for all professional
categories in: UK, France, Spain, Croatia,
Hungary, Norway, Germany.
• Consequences only for some categories of
professionals: in Romania for medical personnel,
child protection staff, social workers and
psychologists; in Slovakia for health care
personnel and for the police.
• For the general public consequences rarely exist,
except France where consequences can be very
serious also for the public, if not reporting.

9. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Conclusions on referral systems
• In 90% of the respondent countries referral services
are there for children and others, in all localities.
• There are exceptions
– in Belgium and Spain, where reporting is possible
only in cities, not rural localities.
– in Spain children can make referrals on telephone
and in Austria neither children nor family members
can make referrals, only specialists.
• In 70% of the countries it is possible to report online.
• Children’s helplines exist and they are free of charge in
all of the countries.
• On-going promotion, awareness campaigns, or other
initiatives to promote referral services or helplines are
organised in 76.47% of the 17 countries.

10. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Investigation and risk
assessment
• Monitoring the process of investigation has
been reported in six countries (UK/England,
Slovakia, Croatia, Denmark, Luxemburg and
Norway);
• The reports are investigated by professionals
from child protection services
“Child protection units have been established in
all regions - cases of alleged child
maltreatment, sexual abuse and violence are
referred to specialist teams in the unit that
coordinate the investigation with police and
pediatric unit.“ (Denmark)

11. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Assessment and standardised
instruments
• These are reported to be circulated in: UK,
Slovakia, Spain, Croatia, Germany, and Lithuania,
Spain
• Slovakia: “There are standardized norms of action
of particular professionals in child protection
services”.
• The Polish expert mentions different categories of
tools used by different services as, for example, by
the Police and Interdisciplinary teams involved in
working with domestic violence.
• Specialists interviewing children are most often
social workers, but in some countries this task is
the responsibility of psychologists or police and of
the justice system (ex. Poland) (Figure 1).

12. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Follow-up procedures
• Reported to be used in
Spain, Romania,
Croatia, Denmark,
Germany and
Lithuania (35.3%).
• Guidelines and
monitoring procedures
for follow up are
reported in Spain,
Croatia, Denmark and
Lithuania (23.5%).
• The coordinators of
the follow-up service
are Social services or
Child protection
services.
•12

13. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Training
• Mandatory training for all professionals exists in
few countries - UK (England), Spain and
Denmark and except NGOs, in Norway.
• Lack of mandatory training in all types of referral
services is widely spread all around Europe,
and in all kind of services
• Limited mandatory training: in France
educators and day-care personnel, in Belgium
the police and legal personnel and in
Luxemburg to the police and NGOs are trained.
• Initial training: in Spain and Denmark for many
categories of specialists

14. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Conclusions related to training
• There are only a few countries which invest in
mandatory training for professionals working with
children (like England, Spain, Denmark and Norway
for all categories, France, Belgium, Luxemburg and
Slovakia for a few categories (teachers, police,
NGOs).
• The same countries invest in the training for those
services which receive.
• The high number of non-responses and No answers
to training (46%) shows low investment of a
significant part of the countries in developing
competences of the work-force, especially for public
social services / child protection, health personnel,
but also educators and police
• There is more training for the helplines, but even in
this area training does not cover each country.

15. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Personnel involved
• According to our results, social workers
represent the main professional category in
working with violence against children. In spite
of this well established career path, not all
countries offer them training programs to
improve their competencies.
• In spite of evidence on the benefits of involving
community nurses in reporting child abuse (K.
Browne, 2013), this inter-country research
shows a low involvement of health
professionals in reporting and managing child
related violence.
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16. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Disparities
• Many countries, including those recently accessed
the EU have developed policies according to high
requirements and adopted strong legal stands
• In spite of progress, the practical implementation
often falls behind the laws, principles and policies.
• In many countries, existing standards are not
applied because there are no consequences for
omitting them (FRA, 2014 explains this by the lack of
human resources and their heavy workload).
• Responses often show inconsistencies within the
countries, so that countries with high investment in
procedures or training fall behind on some other
issues, like the inexistence of child-friendly referral
systems.

17. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Recommendations: law enforcement
• We recommend the financing of collaborative European
research that would improve the evidence base of services.
• Professionalization of services should continue in the
direction of developing procedures, guidelines and forms
for referral and risk-assessment.
• Member States should invest more in the initial and
continuing education and training of staff, in order to
increase their capacity to use evidence based methods in
their work.
• Increase human capacities, support specialists..
• As for the non-application of existing national legislation on
issues like reporting and other procedures, more
monitoring is necessary, especially for Hungary, Romania
and Bulgaria, to require the application of the existing
laws.

18. An initiative of the
European Child
Safety Alliance
Co-funded by the
DAPHNE Programme
of the European Union
THANK YOU
Policy Investigation in Europe on Child Endangerment and Support