You can make a difference! 

As you may know, Jelly Beanz, a South African non-profit organisation which supports children and their families who have experienced trauma, abuse and neglect, is hosting the 2019 African Regional Child Trauma conference. This event will take place at the Cape Town City Hall from the 18th to the 21st of August 2019. The conference takes place in a landmark year – marking the 30th Anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the event is designed to be a milestone in the African Regional calendar, accelerating and consolidating the child protection and prevention activities and programmes that are ongoing across the continent.

The conference will be focusing specifically on African routes to preventing and responding to child abuse, violence and neglect, a pertinent topic considering that, by the year 2050, UNICEF predicts Africa to be home to 40% of the world’s children. Currently, Africa has the highest child dependency ratio in the world, and life expectancy for African children has risen, but is still shorter than the global average. Three in ten of Africa’s children are currently living in fragile and conflict affected environments (UNICEF 2014), and this has a major influence on the death rate of children on the continent.

Protecting Africa’s children from all forms of violence, as well as providing therapeutic services to those who have experienced trauma, should be a major priority of every government in Africa. Therefore the conference aims to not only provide a platform for researchers, grassroots community members and child protection practitioners to network and share knowledge, but also to gather their combined expertise to create a charter on ending child violence which will help bring the subject of ending child violence to the forefront of discussions at national and regional levels on the African continent.

Nine issues underpin the charter and are the focus of The African Regional Child Trauma Conference:

1. Preventing violence against children in Africa – going back to our roots
2. The many faces of intergenerational trauma in Africa
3. Promoting positive discipline as a strategy to reduce corporal punishment in Africa
4. The shadow side of the online environment for children: the need to regulate and educate
5. Poverty and the layers of exploitation of children
6. African children and armed conflict: from war to gang violence
7. Prioritising the protection of children marginalised by disabilities
8. Children affected by sexual violence: interventions for children, families and communities
9. Multi-faceted approaches to dealing with children in conflict with the law

If you stand with those who are presenting this charter to the United Nations and agree that this issues need to be addressed in order to #EndChildViolence... 

THEN SIGN YOUR NAME NOW!