A/HRC/19/35 35. Specialized interventions offer children who develop street connections the personalized support they need to access their rights. In line with a rights-based, holistic approach, these specialized interventions should take a child-centred approach; accompany each child over time to build a relationship, consider effects of multiple deprivations and understand his or her street connections; ensure he or she can have full access to basic services; offer and/or refer the child to specialized services (psycho-social counselling, support for drug abuse, trauma therapies, empowerment through sports, complaint and reporting mechanisms, support services) that can help the child to (re)connect positively with family and local community services. Such interventions do not necessarily imply that a child should renounce his or her street connections, but rather than his or her access to rights should be fully guaranteed. 36. Evidence suggests that specialized interventions that are tailor-made and personalized are better managed by small groups close to the ground, whose size allow flexibility and whose expertise is in local street connections. These interventions should be firmly linked to a national CPS to be able to coordinate children‟s access to the range of basic services. When States are unable, in the short-term, to provide necessary resources and support, the private sector, academia and the international community might be engaged as partners to ensure that specialized interventions by delegated duty bearers have the means and capacity to fulfil the rights of children who have developed strong connections to the street. V. Criteria for good practices 37. There are many examples in all regions of initiatives developed by States and nonState entities that seek to address rights violations experienced by children in street situations. These include: • Local policies: designed in close consultation with civil society, academia and community groups, for example in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, around railway stations in India and as part of Canada‟s Homelessness Partnering Strategy to make a range of services available to young persons with street connections; • Training for law-enforcement officers on child rights and child protection: initiated by some States, for example in 2008-2009, the Consortium for Street Children partnered with Ethiopia‟s Police University College and UNICEF to train police trainers, who have since, in turn, trained 36,000 police officers throughout the country; • Outreach support on the street by social street workers trained in child-centred approaches: increasingly used as a participatory approach to building relationships with children over time in their own spaces in cities as diverse as Kinshasa, Mexico City, New Delhi and Brussels; • Support for families: the focus of organizations in a number of countries, for example, Safe Families Safe Children Coalition is a group of organizations working together across the globe to strengthen family relationships to create home environments where street-connected children can gain sustainable access to their rights. 38. The above examples illustrate the broad agreement that identifying and sharing good practices contribute to safeguarding children‟s rights. There has, however, been little research into what “good practice” means in relation to children with street connections. And there is no agreement about what constitutes good practice in arenas as diverse as procedures for reporting violations of children‟s rights; public-private-NGO partnerships; 10

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