In January a group of experts in child protection from New York spent 2 weeks in Malawi helping us to examine the (many!) gaps in the existing system. Below is a photo of us all meeting with the UNICEF country representative. Malawi has no functional child protection system as we would recognise it in the West. But the need is enormous. We see at least 10 girls a month coming to us because they have been raped. It’s estimated that one in four of all girls in Malawi have unwanted sex by the age of 16.
Over the last year we’ve started a multi-disciplinary team in Blantyre, linking social workers, police and medics together to support the children we see. During the visit of the team, we met with colleagues in Lilongwe and Zomba to encourage them to start doing the same thing. The problems to solve are legion – not enough fuel for social workers to visit a home, not enough phone credit for regular communication between the agencies, inadequate laws, magistrates and prosecutors who don’t understand the typical pattern of sexual abuse, doctors who don’t know how to interpret medical evidence correctly etc etc.
But the team’s visit was a good reminder of just how far we’ve come. I now know Dominic (the director of social services in Blantyre) and Emmanuel (the Police victim support officer) and Edward (the Supreme Court judge) as colleagues. We’ve had great support from UNICEF. We talk to each other, plan services for victims together and little by little, things change.
God calls us to be salt and light in a rotten and dark world – pray we’d be faithful to that calling!
