Learn how to protect children from violence, exploitation, and neglect through law, policy, and practice in a human rights framework.

Harvard Online Course Highlights

28 weeks long
1-3 hours a week
FREE, Upgradable
Self-Paced
Taught by: Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights
View Course Syllabus

Online Course Details:

Across the world, children are at risk from violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect. Conflict and natural disasters have forced millions to flee their homes and confront the dangers of migration and displacement. Commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking, child labour, and child marriage are problems in many countries. At-risk children and adolescents need their rights enforced if we are to protect them from harm and to ensure that they develop to their full potential.

Led by Jacqueline Bhabha, Research Director of the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, this course will teach you the causes and consequences of child protection failures. You will consider the strategies, international laws, standards, and resources required to protect all children. You will be able to link legal frameworks and child-rights approaches to the work of policymakers, lawyers, health workers, educators, law enforcement, and social workers. Learners will come to understand how they can ensure the protection of children and apply child protection strategies to their own work.

Join Harvard faculty, practitioners, and a global community of learners to master a child-centered systems approach to preventing and responding to violence, exploitation, and abuse against children.

What you’ll learn

The origins of child protection in international human rights law
How to analyze global child protection issues and the diversity of actors involved in child protection
The impact of violence, exploitation, and abuse (VEA) on children’s emotional, social and physical development and strategies for preventing and responding to these harms
The standards of protection for children in conflict or in contact with the law
How to assess and strengthen a child protection system

Child Protection: Children's Rights in Theory and Practice