Child Advocacy Centre-for child survivors of crime

Child Protection Force lauched our First ever Child Advocacy Center in Sri Lanka in September 2022. The concept behind this project was to create a victim centred holistic justice system. Currently in Sri Lanka when a child survivor of crime is subject to a gruellig process to access justice where he/she is subject to secondary victimization, where a child is forced to reiterate their traumatic incident to a number of individuals and institutions such as the police, lawyers, Judicial Medical Officers, Probation Officers, psychologists and so on.

Therefore the Child Advocacy Centre aims to bring all the idividuals who are responsible to protect and provide justice for the child survivor of crime under one roof. This cocept is known as a multi-dispciplinary team where all the individuals work together as a team to ensure that the best interests of the child are upheld at all times. 

The reason Kurungela was selected is due to the fact that Kuruegala has the third highest rates of Child Sexual abuse in Sri Lanka. Due to the political crisis that ensued in Sri Lanka we were unable to start operations at the Advocacy Centre due to the lack of resources owing to the iflation rates. However our four lawyers and Clinical Psycholgist have been working remotely with our clients and visits the Advocacy Center once a week on a roster basis. We are curretly hadling up to 9 cases with regard to child survivors of crime ad 6 cases of survivors of domestic violence.

Though this operation has not been launched successfully within the year 2022 we are hoping to launch our full scale operatios in January 2023 where we hope to handle more cases with regard to child survivors of crime and provide them the necessary healing they require to go forward with their lives, once we achieve our full funding.