Partnership to Protect Children
Director: Dr. Aaron J. Miller, Director of the Lincoln Child Advocacy Center
Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, healthy environment, and it is the duty of every one of us, from every profession, to work together to make this come true. Child maltreatment – from sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect, to emotional abuse and slavery – causes significant trauma to children and can lead to long-term medical and mental health problems.
The roots of child maltreatment are many; however, when professionals from all sectors of society come together – medical, mental health, police, the courts, schools, government, and the community – they can form a partnership to protect children which is truly effective and reaps benefits not just for children, but for the society as a whole.
With support from the Jack Brewer Foundation, the Partnership to Protect Children, founded by Dr. Aaron Miller, is working to bring professionals from various agencies together to help improve how children are cared for when there is a concern of child maltreatment.
The first step of our program in Malawi will be to spend one week in The College of Medicine in Blantyre, where we will introduce a medical curriculum for child maltreatment. Dr. Miller will teach all the professors, doctors, nurses and medical students about physical examination, diagnosis, and treatment of all forms of child maltreatment. Most importantly, this curriculum can be used to help teach all future generations of Malawi medical students.
The full extent of the training will be decided by the medical school faculty. The Partnership to Protect Children (PPC) does not come into communities to impose its own values or beliefs, but rather to provide medical education, and to learn what areas of concern the community has, and how we might be able to learn from each other to improve how we care for children.
The second component of PPC Malawi will be to build key partnerships between police, prosecutors, the medical field, and social service agencies so that each of these groups can learn from each other key elements in how to investigate cases of alleged child maltreatment and find the common goals that they share in working to protect children.
Building these partnerships across agencies and across disciplines is a vital step to ensure that children do not continue getting lost in the mix of challenging times, but rather that they are found and are empowered to heal, to grow, and to achieve their full potential.