The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has trained police officers in Kaduna on standard operating procedures for handling children who conflict with the law.

At the opening of a two-day dissemination and orientation workshop for police officers on Monday, UNICEF child protection specialist in Kaduna, Wilfred Mamah, said the SOPs revolve around children in conflict with the law.

He said there is an overwhelming consensus across all relevant legal/normative frameworks that children should be treated differently when they have a brush with the law.

“This is because of the children’s level of maturity and potential for change,” he said.

Mr Mamah explained that the legal or normative consensus was that children who commit offences should not pass through the Adult Justice System but through what the law termed the ‘Child Justice System’.

According to him, in the Kaduna setting, the conversation on how police should handle children in such categories would surely benefit from a reflection on children’s vulnerability level in the localities and how social and family challenges increase their likelihood of committing offences.

Mr Mamah noted that in their recent work with the Ministry of Human Services on children in street situations, including almajirai and adolescent girls, they documented 121,669 almajirai and 108,755 out-of-school adolescent girls.

“These are just snapshots of the challenge of vulnerabilities that children confront. Many of these boys and girls lack parental support, access to basic existential needs, education, and skills. These deprivations often push them to criminality,” the UNICEF official added.

He, therefore, noted that it was important that, as police and other justice actors, they should develop strategies for handling cases of children and young persons in conflict with the law.

Speaking further, he said the child rights act, passed into law in 2018, was aimed at protecting children who come in contact with the law as victims or witnesses.

He, therefore, said the essence of the training was in recognition of the police being a cardinal institution for implementing the law (child rights).

“When children come in contact with the law, the first they come in contact with are the police, and the law stipulates that there should be a specialised unit for children,” said Mr Mamah.

He said the workshop would assist the police in coming up with SOPs that would help them implement the law, which would prevent children who commit crimes from unnecessarily going to prisons, but to be addressed within the provisions of the child rights law.

“If the police should see custody as the first response in addressing crime by children, it could be termed violence,” the UNICEF official noted.

According to Mr Mamah, the procedures are adopted at the national level and launched in Kaduna so that police officers, especially those in the gender unit, would know and have a common understanding of the children’s rights.

(NAN)