engleski

Protection of Children's Rights in Family Mediation

Family mediation in Croatia is still taking place mainly in Agencies for Social Welfare focusing on issues of divorce. Family law is describing the purpose of mediation as exploration of reasons and causes of marital problems and making efforts to save the marriage. It is obligatory process (lasting often just for one or two meetings) focusing on living and contacts arrangements for children. Children are almost never participating in the sessions of divorce mediation. In some after- divorce mediation sessions over problematic contacts, older adolescents sometimes are invited, but as a part of Social welfare intervention. Another specific is that financial issues cannot be the subject of negotiations. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of family mediation in practice is very low and perceived as quite useless by parties as well as by the professionals who mediate. In most cases, these are experienced social workers or psychologists but with no education in any sort of mediation. The majority of mediation participants continue having further conflicts over applying agreement in reality. So, although the elements of transformative mediation can be found at least as intention in laws and procedures, Croatian practice is still much more focused on evaluative mediation (as in giving advice to the court concerning children’s issues). The aim of this workshop is to discuss who and in what ways protects the children’s rights in mediation process. The main themes will be around the role, responsibilities and limits of family mediator, parental responsibilities and children themselves. The workshop will be organized in the following way. In the beginning, short presentation will take place with results of the short survey of professional’s perspective on this topic, for example - how they see their role in protection of children’s rights, what right’s are in particular in their focus, how they take and presents the children’s right on participation and expression of opinion, how they stop parental manipulation with children’s issues over other divorce themes, the importance of certain rights in regard to age of the children and their developmental stages (e.g. the right to stabile home for younger children), the assessment of risks of agreements failures, prevention of child abductions, etc. The presentation will be followed by group discussion. Then, the group will be divided into three subgroups where participants will create the directions for mediators, parents and children concerning following topics from particular perspective: a) which rights from Convention of children’s rights are in their particular responsibility, b) what are the ways (which skills, procedures, issues) of protections the particular rights in practical settings and c) what are the possible obstacles and how to minimize or overcome them, d) specifics of transformative mediation. The workshop will finish with presentation of group ideas and possible directions for improving the children’s participation and ensuring protection of children’s rights not only during the mediation process but in regard to all issues regarding it as well as.

children rights ; family mediation

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