Child reunification workshop

A three-day, child-focused workshop on issues surrounding family reunification took place last week in the Liberian capital Monrovia, Save the Children (UK) reported.

The workshop was in preparation for the cross-border reunification of 51 Liberian and Sierra Leonean refugee children whose families have been traced through a Sub-regional Family Tracing Network that operates in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

It aimed to discover whether enough was being done to ensure that children and families were adequately informed about each other’s situations before agreeing to reunification and whether the current process for preparing both parties was contributing to sustainable family reunification. Workshop delegates included separated and reunified children aged 9-18 years, parents, representatives of UNHCR, ICRC and the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia and family-tracing agencies from those two countries.

Internal and cross-border displacement in Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has resulted in an estimated 15,000 separated children, many of whom may have experienced forced military recruitment, physical and mental abuse and other forms of exploitation. The long-term effects of such traumas can adversely affect the reintegration process: families may find that their children have become virtual strangers during their absence while children may find that they have exchanged one bad situation for another and leave their families to return to their country of asylum.

Children participating in the 6-8 August workshop said existing family-tracing practice did not allow them meaningful input and that in order to make informed decisions about reunification they needed to be given more facts. They wanted specific information, negative and positive, about their families’ situation, the security situation in their areas of origin and protection measures in place upon their return. They also wanted to be consulted on the type of information to be given to their families by social workers concerning their experiences during separation.

Family poverty would not deter them from returning home, but they expressed concern over lack of educational opportunities, particularly if they have been attending school in their asylum countries. “Children who are not occupied with school have too much time to do bad things. We cannot be tomorrow’s leaders if we are not educated,” SCF reported participants as saying.

The workshop concluded that there should be increased involvement of families, communities and particularly children in planning and preparing for family reunification. Collaboration and coordination between agencies who carry out cross-border family tracing activities needed to be improved, participants concluded.

SCF (UK), a non-governmental organisation, manages family-tracing programmes in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone and, through its sub-regional Separated Children’s Programme, provides capacity-building support to agencies and ministries.