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Children's Aid Center

We run child Support centers-institutions where children affected by crime receive specialized, multidisciplinary and free care under one roof.

Direct assistance in institutions

The Children’s Aid Center is an institution where we comprehensively help children who have suffered from crimes, as well as their insincere guardians.

At CPD, we provide psychological, legal, and medical (psychiatric and pediatric) support to children affected by violence, including sexual violence.

Multidisciplinary care means that the case of a child under the care of the Center is managed by a group of experienced specialists and specialists. At interdisciplinary team meetings, they decide together what support the child and their caregivers need.

Help strategies implement m.in. psychologists and psychologists, doctors and doctors, social workers and employees, lawyers and lawyers.

The FDDS also coordinates a network of Child Care Centers in Poland. For more information, please visit: centrapomocydzieciom.fdds.pl

Need other support?

Enter the centrapomocydzieciom.fdds.pl and learn more.

Child support before listening

At the Children’s Aid Center, we prepare children and their insincere guardians to participate in the interrogation-we tell them in detail what will happen and where, who the child will meet and for what purpose. The information provided to the child is tailored to the child’s development opportunities, with a particular focus on their rights.

Each of the centers has a friendly interrogation room, i.e. a place where the judge can interrogate the child in the presence of an expert psychologist or an expert psychologist and in conditions where the child feels safe.

The child’s testimony is recorded only once, thus eliminating circumstances that may lead to repeated interrogations of the child. This greatly minimizes injury.

Most often, the court decides on the location of the child’s interview, but you can apply for an interview in a friendly interview room located in one of our child support centers.

Dozens of specialists from different fields, several hundred families supported every year.

Child support centers are places where children end up at a very difficult time in their lives – after sexual abuse, abuse, or during court proceedings. Working with such clients and their loved ones is a huge challenge, but when placed within the framework of transparent standards and evaluation systems and trusted by professionals with great passion, it can produce remarkable results.

Child Care Centers They work in Warsaw, Gdansk, Starogard Gdansk, Glogow, Bialystok, Lublin, Sosnowiec, Wroclaw, Lodz, Poznan, Krakow and Rzeszow, and their network is coordinated and developed by our foundation. The principles of operation of these establishments are based on the international Barnahus standards used in the Scandinavian countries since the late 1990s. (on the contrary, the predecessor of the Barnahus model is considered to be a network of child protection centers established in the United States in the mid-1980s.). The essence of the Barnachus system is that a child experiencing violence should receive comprehensive, multidisciplinary and professional care in one place that is friendly and suitable for this — under one roof, as we say.

Support in the center

The idea of having help available in one place is very important, because in Polish conditions, a child who has suffered violence is dealt with by many institutions and services that operate largely independently of each other – the courts, the prosecutor’s office, the police, the OPS, medical institutions, etc. If there is no cooperation between them, they are subject to repeated repetition their testimony, huge stress and, as a result, secondary victimization. To save children from repeated injuries and provide them with the most effective support, in our centers, each minor client and their next of kin is led from start to finish by one team of specialists representing various fields.

Theestimated majority of the centers ‘ clients are children with a history of adult sexual abuse. Such experiences not only have a negative impact on their development and physical, emotional, and social functioning, but can also affect their later life. Research shows that people who have experienced sexual abuse in childhood, in adulthood, are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior or be abused again. Our goal is to provide them with the most effective assistance to prevent this from happening.

We offer both individual therapy for children and a support group for their parents. .Our therapists represent a variety of therapeutic approaches, some of which have more than 20 years of experience working with children who have been sexually abused.

The promise of efficiency

Our foundation is one of the founders and representative in Poland of the PROMISE network, which unites European institutions working according to Barnahus standards. These standards, the Decalogue of Effective Care, have been set out in clear dots, and in the case of Polish centers, they are further divided into a number of very specific recommendations, so that employees of these institutions (as well as independent organizations that would like to open a new center with us) can be sure that they fully comply with the guidelines of the Barnahus model and your own tasks.

For example, a completely fundamental thing, that is, the child’s right to express his or her opinion and receive information that is part of the first of the standards, is realized when children and their insincere parents (guardians) influence decisions about the adoption of treatment and therapy, and minor wards receive information adapted to their stage of development. In addition, the center’s staff should be trained to communicate with children of different ages and with different needs (if necessary, communication is carried out with the participation of an interpreter). However, these are just some of the long list of recommendations that guarantee the implementation of the first of the ten standards.

Standards are the foundation of the functioning of our institutions, but they should be seen as an aid tool, not, for example, some bureaucratic procedure. This is our attempt to adapt the Barnahus model to Polish conditions. If any of the centers encounter difficulties in implementing any of the standards, we discuss this at repeated meetings of the coordinators and try to work out a solution together.

Cooperation and cooperation again

In Poland, unlike in many European countries, there is no single institution or broad-based organization whose sole task is to protect children from the consequences of violence experienced and to support them in court proceedings. This is exactly the role that child care centers have taken on in their local settings. The key to their work is the support of local self-government bodies and good cooperation with representatives of local institutions, services and organizations-public assistance, police, prosecutor’s office, court, health and education system.

How to achieve this difficult goal? Ways to do this have been worked out. Therefore, the first and most important step before opening a new center is to establish an agreement with the local government and try to convince it that CPD can become an important component of the child protection system. After establishing good relations with local authorities, representatives of the Center will introduce their offer to local aid institutions, organize conferences and trainings for them, and try to include them in the process of creating a child protection system and improve their joint work by signing industry agreements. Interinstitutional cooperation initiated by CPD in ten Polish cities is increasingly developing.

Analytical Center for Children's Issues

The defining feature of Barnahus institutions – that is, the (gratuitous) provision of comprehensive care in one place specially prepared for children-in Polish is realized due to the fact that the centers help children they hire specialists from different fields. There are therapists and psychiatrists for both children and adults, pediatricians, social workers, lawyers, primary contact persons and, of course, coordinators. Each new ward, as well as, as a rule, its family members (with the exception of a criminal or rapist), are under the care of a specially created group of center employees with various competencies and specializations. This team meets regularly to develop a support strategy and then assess progress in its implementation together. If necessary, specialists from other institutions that care for a particular child are also invited to attend meetings-a family assistant, a school teacher, etc.