Preventing Child Maltreatment in Los Pipitos

Abstract

Child maltreatment can lead to all sorts of short- and long-term consequences. Los Pipitos would like to minimise the risk of maltreatment in their organisation by developing and implementing a Child Protection Policy. In order to facilitate Los Pipitos’ development of this policy, the current study explores to what extent the situation of the local facilities of Los Pipitos are able to prevent child maltreatment. The Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) model has been used as a guide to analyse the local facilities. The main focus of this model is to decrease opportunities to commit crime by implementing four strategies: increasing effort, increasing risk, controlling prompts and reducing permissibility. Each strategy includes different techniques. The data has been collected through observations of seven local facilities and 13 interviews with staff members. The main results show that the local facilities of Los Pipitos only apply the strategy controlling prompts completely. The other three strategies are partly applied, because some techniques are still missing or are not applied sufficiently. The fact that all strategies are seen, indicates that Los Pipitos does prevent child maltreatment in the facilities to some extent. To ensure the full protection of children in the local facilities, improvements are needed.