Child Protection: An Absolute Priority
Adeline Puerta is responsible for two major key themes at SOS Children’s Villages: child protection and safeguarding, which focuses on ensuring children’s safety within projects, and the implementation of trauma-sensitive practices. The latter allows the daily care provided to be adapted based on the children’s experiences.
Why Trauma-Sensitive Practices?
Adeline’s interest in this approach is deeply personal. From her earliest professional experiences, she felt a strong connection to these practices, realizing they provided explanations for certain behaviors she observed in children, adults, and even in herself. This understanding allowed her to recognize how these practices could better support young people in difficulty. She even expresses a wish that such approaches had existed for herself when she was younger.
Training All Teams: A Daily Commitment
For the past four years, SOS Children’s Villages has been striving to integrate trauma-sensitive practices into all its projects. Adeline and her team organize training, awareness-raising actions, and work daily to ensure these principles are applied by all staff, including those who do not have direct contact with children, such as maintenance workers or gardeners.
A Consistent and Adapted Approach
One of Adeline’s greatest challenges is ensuring that all SOS projects follow a consistent approach, regardless of the children’s profiles. This requires ongoing training for teams so that they are capable of recognizing trauma-related behaviors and responding in an appropriate and empathetic manner. Adeline emphasizes the importance of this flexibility: two children with the same behavior may require completely different responses.
‘Trauma-Sensitive Glasses’
Adeline describes this approach as a pair of ‘trauma-sensitive glasses’ that allows teams to understand that some behaviors are not intentionally difficult but are rather reactions to children’s past experiences. By recognizing this, teams are better equipped to help young people navigate difficult moments with greater compassion and effectiveness.
