Orphans and Vulnerable Children - CRIN

Guide to Mobilising and Strengthening Community-Led Care for Orphans and Vulnerable Children Unit 2, Module 1^135

Protecting Children

In this activity, you will:

 Engage the group in an exercise which will highlight child protection issues

Facilitator’s notes:

In this topic, there is much information about children’s rights and child abuse. Many adults will
understand the importance of protecting children on an intellectual level, but this activity will help
participants to focus on child protection issues by engaging them emotionally. Children differ from
adults in many ways. They have unique needs and they need protection and care. In this exercise,
participants will experience the sense of a child’s feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, fear and being
vulnerable in an adult world. The balloon game will help adults to relate to the children’s emotions and
help them to empathise with the children more directly.

For this activity you will need:

 Inflated balloons attached to pieces of string about 30 cm long

To facilitate this activity:

1 Divide participants into four groups. Each group will be given separate instructions, which the
other groups should not hear. Participants in group 1 will tie balloons to their ankles. Participants
in group 2 will each find a person with a balloon to protect so that their balloon is not popped.
They are instructed not to speak. Group 3 are instructed to pop all the balloons as quickly as
possible. Group 4 should simply observe the action.

2 When the groups are ready, start the game on your shout of ‘Go!’. It should only take a couple of
minutes before all the balloons are popped.

3 To debrief the game, get the participants back into their groups and ask the first three groups in turn
what they felt; and ask the fourth group what they saw. The first two groups probably felt under
attack from the third group, who most likely seemed more organised as a group. Ask the groups
what they needed to know so that they could have been more prepared. Likely responses from
group 1 are that they needed to know what they would be facing so that they could prepare
themselves. Likewise, group 2 probably felt that they needed to work together more.

4 Then tell the participants that group 1 represented children; group 2 represented the adults who
try to protect children; and group 3 represented adults who disregard the rights of children, and
abuse or exploit them. Group 4 represented the observers in a community who know and see that
children are being abused, but choose not to say or do anything about it out of fear or ignorance.
In the light of this information, let the participants discuss issues of child protection. Focus the
discussion on ways that the barriers of fear, guilt or ignorance can be broken so that the ‘observers’
in a community can also begin to engage in the process of protecting children.

Activity 5

40 minutes