The project for protecting children from sexual exploitation holds a training meeting for school counsellors in Gaza

Gaza, Media Unit:

The project for protecting children from sexual exploitation at the Conflict Resolution Center held a training meeting entitled "The role of school counsellors in protecting children from sexual exploitation" at the Centre's main premises in Gaza City, with the participation of a number of department heads and counsellors from the Ministry of Education and a number of specialists in the psychological field of child protection.

During the meeting, Najat Al-Jubairi, coordinator of the project for protecting children from sexual exploitation, noted that the phenomenon of sexual exploitation requires increased awareness of its dangers and the alerting of school counsellors to its dangers and its negative effects on pupils. She added: "The counsellor must learn the main ways and mechanisms that need to be followed if cases of exploitation against pupils are discovered at school, especially as the pupil spends half the day inside the school."

For his part, Professor Samir Qouta, a lecturer in the psychology department at the Islamic University, addressed the dimensions of the phenomenon of sexual exploitation and its negative effects on children at the emotional, mental and social levels. He set out the mechanisms for identifying and assessing the cases of children exposed to harassment, the prevention methods at their three levels, and the appropriate intervention methods.

At the end of the meeting, the participants offered a set of recommendations, the most important of them the need to circulate the findings of the studies devoted to the phenomenon of sexual exploitation, to increase the number of educational workshops and seminars for pupils at schools, to seek to activate the child protection network, and to bring perpetrators and those accused in exploitation cases before the courts to receive the appropriate punishment.