The disconnect between community-based child protection mechanisms and the formal child protection system in rural Sierra Leone: Challenges to building an effective national child protection system

Efforts to strengthen national child protection systems often encounter problems of low utilization rates by local people. A rapid ethnographic study in two districts of Sierra Leone documented local views of harms to children and which mechanisms people used in responding to and preventing the harms. Key harms included teenage pregnancy out of wedlock, out of school children, heavy labor, and maltreatment of children who do not live with their biological parents. Overwhelmingly, people used traditional family and community mechanisms in responding to these harms. Even in regard to criminal offenses, they very seldom used formal child protection mechanisms such as the Child Welfare Committees, and the police and government social workers as mandated under the 2007 Child Rights Act. This disconnect between the local mechanisms that people actually use and the government-led aspects of the national child protection system owes partly to problems of access but also to cultural and social norms and negative perceptions of the formal system. Additional research, including on community-driven interventions for linking communities and formal mechanisms, is needed to identify the effective means for addressing these obstacles and enabling the alignment of the endogenous and formal mechanisms.