Established in Chile in 1996, Paicabi promotes and defends children’s rights. We have developed models for working with children who have been abused and provide psycho-therapeutic support for families and legal support and social education to families and communities.
After almost 10 years of working with children who had experienced sexual abuse, we noticed that, in some cases, violence against children was being carried out by other children. We created a pilot project to better understand the issue, providing therapy to help 10–12 children move away from their harmful sexual behaviours. After several years of development the pilot project became an established model.
Our model is called the 3D Intervention Model as it works on three different dimensions to address the issue of children displaying problematic or harmful sexual behaviours.
- Individual dimension: we provide individual and group therapy to the children who have demonstrated problematic or harmful sexual behaviours.
- Collective dimension: engaging the child’s family, school and community as well as other agencies and institutions to ensure that the issue is understood and the child is supported throughout the therapeutic process.
- Macro dimension: addressing the political and societal conditions to improve the response to these acts and ultimately change behaviours to reduce the number of children demonstrating harmful sexual behaviour.
The lack of funding for this work and the lack of specialised professionals to work on the highly complex issue make it challenging. We strive to create alliances of other experts working with children in order to provide the best possible services.
“This is prevention work. Every time we decide to work with children who display problematic or harmful sexual behaviours, we are protecting the lives of these children and other children. If we don’t work properly, there is a chance that these children will replicate their behaviour as adults.”
Our model is now supported by the Chilean government with public funds and has been incorporated into a national policy. In 98 per cent of cases there is no repeat offence and the children do not come back into our programme.
To learn more about our model and how its implemented, download the Practitioner Guidance Paper below.
Since 2019 we have been working with three other Family for Every Child members in Latin America on the issue of sexual violence affecting children. As part of this working group, we shared our model on supporting children with problematic and harmful sexual behaviours and delivered specialist training on the topic for CONACMI (Guatemala), JUCONI (Mexico) and Taller de Vida (Colombia).
Download the Practitioner Guidance paper below to find out how each member has adapted the learning so far.
Do you have any comments to share relating to our work, or learnings about how your organisation has approached the issue of problematic and harmful sexual baheviours in children? Please share, or post any follow-up questions for us at Paicabi below - we'd love to hear from you.
The attached resources are part of the How We Care series, an innovative space for those working with children and families to share practice. By practitioners, for practitioners. Learnings from 2 other Family for Every Child members, on this theme, have been shared here.
