Philip Jaffé: Protecting Children’s Rights Requires Not Only Promises, but Real Systemic Change
One of the keynote speakers at the “Connect to Protect” international conference in Athens was Professor Philip Jaffé, an international expert on children’s rights. In his speech he addressed global child protection challenges, gaps in state systems and the need to make children’s rights a reality in practice.
His central message was that the international community has already accumulated substantial knowledge, adopted important legal instruments and developed a range of mechanisms. Yet their existence does not mean that every child is actually protected.
A year ago, Professor Jaffé was with us at the CPN office, discussing the UN Committee’s response to Armenia’s national report. This year in Athens we heard his speech, and we share extensive excerpts from it below.
Fragmented child protection systems
The speaker paid particular attention to the gaps between state and professional systems.
Children’s lives are shaped simultaneously by the family, education, health care, social protection, justice and the digital environment. Yet services in these areas often operate independently of one another, following different procedures and priorities.
In such a situation, a child’s problems may come to the attention of several institutions, and still no comprehensive support is provided.
Philip Jaffé stressed the need to move beyond declarations of cooperation towards a genuinely interconnected system of services.
Each service needs to understand not only its own role, but also the need to work with other institutions and the shared goal of protecting the child.
Children’s rights must be reflected in state policies
Referring to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the speaker emphasised that taking on international obligations is only the first step towards protection.
Children’s rights must be reflected in state budgets, social programmes, health and education services, and in decision-making procedures.
He highlighted the importance of sustained investment in early prevention, family support, children’s mental health, tackling child poverty and protection from violence.
In his view, the realisation of children’s rights should be measured not only by laws adopted or activities carried out, but by real changes in children’s lives.
Interconnected crises and children’s growing vulnerability
Philip Jaffé spoke about the many challenges children face today.
Armed conflict, forced displacement, poverty, climate change, social inequality and online risks can affect a child’s life all at once.
He stressed that no single sector or organisation can respond effectively to such problems on its own.
Child protection systems must be able to assess different risks together and provide continuous support that matches the child’s needs.
Children’s participation must have real influence
One of the most important themes of the speech was children’s right to participate.
Philip Jaffé referred to Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, stressing that listening to children is not enough to ensure their genuine participation.
If children are given the opportunity to express their views, but those views have no influence on decisions, participation becomes a formality.
In his approach, adults must be ready to reconsider their own positions, the way services are organised and policy decisions on the basis of children’s views.
From knowledge to action
Philip Jaffé also emphasised accountability of systems and the need to respond genuinely to violations of children’s rights.
He stressed that child protection requires not only recognising problems, but also clear mechanisms to solve them, real oversight and long-term change.
Excerpts from Professor Jaffé’s speech
The risks affecting children are multiplying, interacting with one another and accelerating, while the institutions responsible for protecting children — families, schools, social services, courts, civil society, national governments and international organisations — are all under political, financial and moral pressure.
The times are darkening not because children have suddenly become more vulnerable. They are darkening because adult society is increasingly failing to provide the foresight, solidarity, restraint and protection on which children depend.
The idea of the late thinker Edgar Morin is striking. He died at the age of 104 and witnessed almost everything: wars, totalitarianism, decolonisation, technological transformation, the ecological crisis and the fragility of democracy.
Morin warned that the progress of knowledge has led to a regression of thinking.
This warning applies directly to children’s rights.
Today we know more than ever about child development, trauma, violence, mental health, climate change, online harms, inequality and effective social policy.
And yet our thinking often remains fragmented.
One ministry deals with education, another with health, another with housing, justice, migration, technology and so on.
So the challenge is to replace fragmentation with connection and cooperation, reaction with prevention, institutional comfort with an approach grounded in children’s real lives and experiences, and rhetorical commitments with accountability.
Morin’s warning is that when knowledge is divided into separate, isolated fields, children get lost between those fields.
And that is exactly why the history of children’s rights matters.
It is, among other things, a history of learning — of understanding that survival, development, protection and participation cannot be considered separately from one another.
Almost a century ago, Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children and author of the 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, formulated an exceptional moral principle:
“Mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give.”
Today’s Convention on the Rights of the Child turned that moral conviction into a legal obligation.
Children are rights holders, entitled to protection, health, identity, education, family life, play, equality and, in essence, all fundamental rights.
The Convention has changed laws, institutions and society’s expectations. We have made progress.
But we must not confuse ratification with real protection, or the adoption of legal norms with their practical implementation.
A child feels the impact of the Convention only when:
- they are believed after speaking about violence,
- they receive mental health support before the situation becomes a crisis,
- the family receives support before poverty becomes grounds for intervention,
- a child in care understands what is happening to them and has a real opportunity to express their views and influence decisions,
- a child with a disability is included,
- a child with a migration background is protected rather than punished,
- and when a child can learn, play and imagine their future without fear.
This is another reason why this conference’s title, “Connect to Protect”, reflects a shift in how we understand protection.
When UNICEF was created in 1946, after the devastation of the Second World War, protection meant very simple things: food, medicine and emergency aid.
That understanding then expanded to include health, nutrition, education and development.
With the adoption of the Convention came another important step forward: children began to be seen not only as beneficiaries of adult charity, but as rights holders.
In the early years, child protection work focused mainly on specific violations: child soldiers, trafficking, violence, children separated from their families or placed in institutions.
But it gradually became clear that separate responses to separate problems were — and remain — insufficient.
A child protected from one type of harm remains vulnerable if the family cannot access the support it needs, the school is not safe, mental health services are out of reach, or institutions do not coordinate their work.
Prevention and accountability, taken together, must prevent harm, enable early response and provide mechanisms for redress and remedy.
This is why many organisations today have moved to a systems approach.
Child protection is no longer only about rescuing a child after harm has occurred. It means building laws, services, budgets, professional capacity, safeguards and accountability systems that prevent harm, detect it early, respond effectively and enable children to receive appropriate support and recovery.
This is intellectual and ethical progress.
But, I believe, it also makes our task more complex and demanding.
Child protection must be embedded in the everyday, core systems of society: family support, health care, social protection, justice, housing policy, migration, climate policy and technology governance.
And here, I think, we have to face an uncomfortable truth: the very idea of protection has been eroded.
We keep refining procedural rights, standards and child-sensitive systems — and all of this matters.
But no procedural refinement can replace a child’s real safety: when walking to school, going online, crossing a border or living in a besieged city.
Being protected is important, but it does not in itself replace real safety.
And yet, despite all this darkness, there is no lack of commitment and energy.
We see serious work to prevent violence, strengthen families, develop multidisciplinary responses, improve schools, make participation possible and build more effective child protection systems.
And these efforts matter.
But we still have to ask the harder question:
after all the declarations, reports, summits, conferences, action plans, campaigns and, as you mentioned, national strategies — what has changed in the culture of power?
Have we made prevention a political priority?
We need a new social contract, in which the situation of children is measured not by declarations, but by decisions taken.
And this means investment in prevention, social protection, family support, early childhood services, public health, mental health services, fighting poverty and more. And so on. I do not want to repeat everything else.
It must also mean child protection and justice systems that children can turn to without fear: systems that coordinate their work around the child, minimise re-traumatisation, respect family ties when it is safe to do so, and provide real and effective remedies when rights are violated.
Perhaps “the sky has truly darkened”, but darkness has one moral advantage: it makes every remaining source of light more visible.
The ultimate question is not whether children will judge us from the future.
The question is whether they will see that, when the sky darkened, adults chose unity and connection over fragmentation, care over indifference, accountability over evasion of responsibility, and courage over delay.
If you would like to receive the full text of the speech, please write to us and we will be happy to share it.
These approaches are also important for developing Armenia’s child protection system, strengthening inter-agency cooperation and designing child rights-based policies.