How to protect children during COVID-19

Here, we’ll take you through adaptations for Safe Continuity of Awareness Raising in COVID-19 and other IDOs.

Work with key community members

This is to identify established and trusted approaches to raise awareness and engage the community — including children — in protecting children through phone, radio, internet or other means of communication.

Remember to:

• Strategise before you communicate. Consider developing a user-friendly communication and community engagement strategy that includes child protection and COVID-19 — or other IDO — messages that take age, gender, language, literacy and disability into consideration.
• Engage with other sectors — including health and education — through coordination mechanisms.
• Where needed, mainstream accurate and accessible messages into awareness-raising activities. ~
  For example, provide information on:

1. Modes of transmission and risks of infection.
2. Methods to prevent transmission, such as handwashing, social distancing and the use of masks or other protective equipment.
3. Ways to recognise signs and symptoms of the disease.
4. IDO-specific health referral pathways and hotline numbers.

Consider:

• Using posters, community bulletin boards or printed flyers and images at key locations, which can be regularly updated.
• Setting up fixed-site loudspeakers within the community for information dissemination when the use of portable public address systems is common.
• Using established and trusted networks to share information by phone, internet or local radio when courtyard meetings or group gatherings are common practice but are no longer possible.
• Ensuring content is produced in a low-resolution format that allows for sharing over the internet or SMS with the minimum file size.
• How to encourage discussion and feedback from the audience when using social media to disseminate messages.
• Involving children with a smartphone to make a short video or use TikTok to record their lives and experiences during an outbreak and share them with others.

Ensure that:

All workers are familiar with their organisation’s child safeguarding policy and the measures covering safe use of video, photography and other technology. Where a policy is not available, refer to available resources such as:

• Child Safeguarding PowerPoint Toolkit, Keeping Children Safe
• Safeguarding resources, Bond