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Individual Course

Child Protection: Children’s Rights in Theory and Practice

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Course Length

16 weeks

2-6 hours per week

Featuring faculty from:

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health LogoHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Learn how to protect children from violence, exploitation, and neglect through law, policy, and practice in a human rights framework.

Across the world, children are at riskfrom violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect. Conflict and natural disasters have forced millions to flee their homes and confront the dangers of migration and displacement. Commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, child labor, and child marriage are problems in many countries. At-risk children and adolescents need their rights enforcedif we are to protect them from harm and to ensure that they develop to their full potential.

Led by Jacqueline Bhabha, Research Director of the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, this course will teach you the causes and consequences of child protection failures. You will consider the strategies, international laws, standards, and resources required to protect all children. You will be able to link legal frameworks and child-rights approaches to the work of policymakers, lawyers, health workers, educators, law enforcement, and social workers. Learners will come to understand how they can ensure the protection of children and apply child protection strategies to their own work.

Join Harvard faculty, practitioners, and a global community of learners to master a child-centered systems approach to preventing and responding to violence, exploitation, and abuse against children.

Self-Guided

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Syllabus

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Faculty

Your Instructor

Jacqueline Bhabha

Jacqueline Bhabha is the Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is also the Director of Research at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer at Harvard Law School, and an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She received a first class honors degree and an MSc from Oxford University, and a JD from the College of Law in London. From 1997 to 2001 Bhabha founded and directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. She serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies.

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Ways to take this course

Audit or Pursue a Verified Certificate

A Verified Certificate costs $149 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate.

⁠Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums. Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.

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