Child Protection: Children's Rights in Theory and Practice
Learn to protect children.
Learn how to protect children from violence, exploitation, and neglect through law, policy, and practice in a human rights framework.
2-6 hours per week
What You'll Learn
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.
The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will learn:
- The origins of child protection in international human rights law
- How to analyze global child protection issues and the diversity of actors involved in child protection
- The impact of violence, exploitation, and abuse (VEA) on children’s emotional, social and physical development and strategies for preventing and responding to these harms
- The standards of protection for children in conflict or in contact with the law
- How to assess and strengthen a child protection system
Your Instructor
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.
Syllabus
- The Legal Foundation of Child Protection
- Defining and Measuring Child Protection
- Causes and Consequences of Violence
- Strategies for Preventing and Addressing Violence
- Examples of Preventing and Addressing Violence
- Children in Conflict with the Law
- Children in Contact with the Law
- Migrant Children and the Law
- Components of a Child Protection System
- Identifying Problems in Child Protection System
- Global and Local Action to Strengthen Child Protection Systems
Ways to take this course
When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.
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.