15th UN Crime Congress: Committee I, Workshop 1 – 27 September 2026

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished delegates, colleagues. We will now continue with the discussion of workshop one, entitled Building Resilient Societies with a Focus on Protecting Women, Children and Youth, Fostering Engagement, Education and the Culture of Lawfulness. And our second panel will be moderated by Mrs. Alexandra Martins. Similarly to our conduct of the workshop yesterday, the moderator will also summarize at the end of the discussion the key and salient points of the debate. And I guess you noticed that we changed the setting a little bit in the room so that you can sit closer to the podium. And again, we will give some time at the end of the panels for an interactive discussion with the floor. And again, I'd like to invite the keynote speakers and the panelists to be so kind as to respect the time limits assigned to their respective presentations so as to allow enough time for questions from the audience at the end. With this, I give the floor to Mrs. Martins, you have the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning and welcome back to Workshop 1. My name is Alexandra Martins, and I lead the team at UNODC that works on preventing and responding to crime and violence, dealing with children, women, and communities. And it is my privilege to moderate this second session of Workshop 1. Yesterday afternoon, under the guidance of our colleagues from UNAFE, The workshop looked at how resilient societies are built, the evidence, the institutions, and the culture of lawfulness. This morning, we turn to the second-half, engagement, and the meaningful participation of women, children, and youth in building peaceful, just, and resilient societies. We have organized the morning into two parts. The first panel is about lived experiences. What happens when people who have been through the system we are discussing here today, or who have worked from within their own communities and institutions, turn that experience into change? Between the panels, two short recorded statements from survivor-led organizations carry us from experience to institutions. The second panel is about the institutions, how the participation of women, children and youth can be built into the way crime prevention and criminal justice systems work, from the design of a project to the drafting of a law. Let me give you a short word on the format. I'll be posing one question to each panelist, who will then have 10 minutes in total to respond. Should the responding conclude before this 10 minutes, I may ask a potential follow-up question, but each exchange will be for a maximum of 10 minutes only, and I kindly ask, dear panelists, your help in adhering to the time limit. After each panel, the chair will open the floor for around 20, 30 minutes of discussion. And with that in order, I'm pleased to turn to our first panel. So our first panel is entitled, "Lived Experiences to Agents of Transformative Change." Its question is, what happens when lived experience becomes the foundation for change? and what that teaches us about how crime prevention and criminal justice systems should be designed. Each of our contributors responds to that question from a different place. Mrs. Kaumba Kufo from Zambia has been through imprisonment and release herself and now works nationally and internationally on the participation of formerly incarcerated women in criminal justice. Commissioner Gatiti, we are expecting her to arrive. We hope she will arrive soon. She's from Kenya National Police Service and brings more than two decades of policing experience and a particular focus on gender-responsive and community policing. Professor Michael Salter, who has provided us a pre-recorded video statement from the University of New South Wales, is one of the leading researchers internationally on child sexual exploitation and abuse, and much of his work has been built with survivors. Mr. Adamo, a member of UNODC's Generation Justice Youth Network, works at point where young people's experience of conflict and displacement meets the institutions that make law and policy. Welcome to all of you. I will introduce each of them a little more fully as we go. Let me begin, please, with Ms. Akuffo. So, Ms. Akuffo, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. She is a criminal justice advocate for Zambia. She is the work teams coordinator of the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women, a co-founder of Tithen Dizin Comfort Homes, founder of the Zambia Network of People Who Use Drugs, and a member of the Global Group of Experts for Penal Reform International. Her work focuses on strengthening meaningful participation in criminal justice, particularly for women, young people, and marginalized communities. In 2025, she received the Jude Byrne Emerging Female Leader Award. She joins this panel as an expert by experience. And we're very grateful to you, Madam Akuffo, for your participation. Let me begin with you, please. You will have the floor. And my question is, drawing on the experience and expertise you choose to share, What forms of support make the greatest difference to women preparing for release and rebuilding their lives afterward?

Thank you so much. Good morning, distinguished guests. It is an honor to be here at the UN Crime Congress to speak about a subject that is very close to my heart. lived experience to agents of transformative change. When we talk about crime, punishment, prisons, and criminal justice, we often hear from policymakers, lawyers, academics, police officers, and other professionals. But there is one group whose voices have historically been missing from many of these conversations, the people who have actually lived through the system. People who have been arrested, people who have been imprisoned, people who have lost their children while incarcerated, people who have experienced poverty, discrimination, violence, stigma, and exclusion. People who have used drugs and been criminalized because of it. I am here to say that these experiences are not simply stories of suffering. They are also sources of knowledge. And when lived experience is combined with leadership, organizing, and opportunities to participate, people with lived experience can become powerful agents of transformative change. I want to share part of my story because I believe that when we talk about criminal justice reform, we must remember that behind every statistic is a human being. For more than 10 years, I struggled with drug addiction. For over a decade, I was living with a health and social challenge that needed support, treatment, compassion, and opportunities for recovery. But instead of being offered the help I needed, I was punished. I was incarcerated for six months because of my involvement with drugs. Six months may sound like a short period of time when we talk about statistics, but six months is very long when you are a mother. When I went to prison, I had to leave my children in the care of relatives. I did not only lose my freedom, my children lost their mother. My family had to carry the consequences of my incarceration. And I had to live with the reality that a situation that had been treated as a criminal justice issue had also become a family issue. Looking back, one of the questions I continue to ask is, what if, instead of prison, I had been offered the support I needed when I was struggling with addiction? What if someone had said, you need help, and we are going to help you get it? What if they had been accessible treatment, harm reduction services, psychosocial support, self-housing, and economic opportunities? Would my story have been different? These questions are not about avoiding accountability. They're about asking whether punishment was actually the most effective response to what I was experiencing. What happened to me is happening to many other people, particularly women who use drugs, women living in poverty, and women whose lives have been shaped by trauma and social exclusion. My six months in prison forced me to confront a difficult question. What happens when a system responds to a health and social challenge primarily through punishment? The question became a starting point of my transformation. Prison changed my life, but did not end my story. When I came out, I had a choice. I could carry my experience as something that happened to me, or I could use that experience to question why it happened and how we could prevent others from going through the same thing. I chose the second path. My experience became my education. My pain became my purpose. And my lived experience became the foundation of my advocacy. When I left prison, I did not know what my life would become. What I did know was that I wanted my experience to mean something beyond six months I had spent behind bars. I joined the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women, and through that network, I met my sisters from different parts of the world who had also experienced incarceration. Meeting these women changed the way I saw myself. I saw women who had been incarcerated becoming advocates, organizers, trainers, researchers, and leaders. I saw that there could be life after prison, not only life of surviving, but the life of purpose, leadership, and transformation. For the first time, I could see a different future for myself. I realized that my past could be part of my story without being the end of my story. Through the international network, I was also introduced to Penal Reform International and became part of its global group of experts by experience. This opened another door for me, the opportunity to bring lived experience into international conversations about criminal justice reform and penal policy. In 2025, I was given the opportunity to serve as work teams coordinator for the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women. In this role, I help coordinate and work with women across different continents, supporting meetings, working groups, collective campaigns, learning spaces, and opportunities for women with lived experiences to lead. This role has taught me something very important. Leadership does not mean standing in front of people and speaking for them. Sometimes leadership means creating a space for other women to speak, making sure the voices are heard, connecting people across borders, and helping turn collective ideas into collective action. My leadership journey also led me to co-found Titandisane Comfort Homes. an organization focused on supporting women affected by the criminal justice system with reintegration, economic empowerment, and pathways to rebuild their lives. And because drug use and incarceration are closely connected to my own history, I more recently founded the Zambia Network of People Who Use Drugs. I wanted people who use drugs to have a voice, dignity and meaningful participation in policies and services that affect them. At the same time, I'm studying law. For me, studying law is not separate from my lived experience. It's another tool for understanding the systems that once affected my life and for contributing more effectively to conversations about justice, rights, accountability, and reform. When I look at where I started and where I am today, the transformation is not simply that I survived incarceration. The transformation is that I became a leader with the opportunity to help other women see possibilities beyond incarceration too. When you have personally experienced addiction and incarceration, you begin to see behind the label. Words like drug user, offender, former prisoner. These labels can become more visible than human beings carrying them. I know what it feels like to be reduced to a label. That is why I decided that people who use drugs should not only be spoken about, they should be heard, represented and involved in designing the policies and services that affect their lives. This is what led me to establish the Zambia Network of People Who Use Drugs and to advocate for approaches grounded in health, dignity, human rights, and harm reduction. But my experience also taught me something else. Drug policy cannot be separated from women's lives. When a woman is incarcerated, the consequences do not stop at the prison gate. They reach her children, they reach her family, they affect her economic security, and they can follow her along long after she has served her sentence. This is why my journey naturally led me to work with formerly incarcerated women. I began to understand that my story was not an isolated story. It was part of a much larger story about women, poverty, stigma, substance use, incarceration, and inequality. My experience also shaped my work with the International Network of Formerly Incarcerated Women. As work teams coordinator, I work alongside women from different parts of the world who have experienced incarceration. Our experiences may be different, but there are common threads. poverty, stigma, family separation, gender inequality, substance use, lack of economic opportunities, and systems that often punish women without addressing the circumstances that brought them into contact with the criminal justice system. I believe with lived experience should not only be invited to tell their stories, we should be part of designing the solution. That is why our work focuses on leadership, advocacy, education, economic empowerment, storytelling, and changing the narrative around formerly incarcerated women. And this is where I believe we need to change the way we think about lived experience. For far too long, people with lived experience have been invited to rooms to tell their stories. We are thanked for our courage, people applaud. and then the meeting ends. But what happens after the applause? If our experiences are valuable enough to inform the conference, they should be valuable enough to inform policy. If our voices are important enough to be heard, they should be important enough to influence decisions. And if we are experts in what we have lived, then we should also have opportunities to become leaders in changing it. We must move from storytelling to shared power. This is why my work is no longer about what happened to me. It's about what we can change together. I want women who have experienced incarceration to see themselves not being defined by their past, but as people with knowledge, leadership and capacity to contribute to their communities. I want us to create pathways from incarceration to housing, employment, entrepreneurship, leadership and participation, because reintegration should mean more than simply walking out of a prison gate. Women leaving prison often face enormous barriers to employment, housing and economic independence. A record can become a lifelong barrier, so can stigma, so can poverty, so can the absence of safe housing. This is why we work to create opportunities for women affected by the criminal legal system, including entrepreneurship and income generating activities, and why we are working towards a transit home for women rebuilding their lives.

Can I go?

That's a very concrete place for this panel to start. I would like to thank you, Ms. Acofor, for your words. for your braveness to share your story with us. And I think for us also to meditate about the fact that criminal justice systems end up dealing with the burden or the problems that very often do not belong to the system. Because the nature of the problems might be the result of inefficiency of other systems. So it's interesting to start the panel reflecting on the question. what led this person to be in contact with the justice system. We know that very often justice systems look at the tip of the iceberg. They need to deal with the crime that was committed, but not so often they go into the root causes of what led the individual to be in contact with the system. Let me now turn to our next panelist, Commissioner Gatiti. Commissioner Gatiti is a senior leader in Kenya's National Police Service with more than 23 years of experience in policing, crime prevention, strategic leadership, and institutional governance. She has held senior leadership, operational, and administrative positions within the service working on police accountability, gender-responsive policing, and leadership development. And she has collaborated extensively with the United Nations and regional partners on the prevention of and response to sexual and gender-based violence, community policing, and institutional reform. In 2026, she received the Asis International Women in Security Global Community Karen Marcus Honors. Commissioner, you bring the view from inside the institution. which is an important one on this panel. So my question to you is, what does gender responsive policing look like in daily practice rather than on paper? How has the National Police Service approached community policing in ways that build trust with women and young people? And what has your own path to senior leadership taught you about the barriers that remain? Thank you, you have the floor.

Thank you so very much. I appreciate being here. How does gender responsive policing look like on a daily basis, not just on paper, is a very difficult question. Because that is something that you must make a decision to address on a daily basis. Law enforcement is very volatile, it changes on a daily basis. So gender responsive policing means that you must always and be there to issues of accountability, inclusivity, gender sensitivity. You must always be there. You must uphold the rule of law. You must be there to protect the vulnerables, including their property and ensuring that in case they are looking for justice, you are there to ensure the rules of justice run. So on a daily basis, as a police officer, must make conscious decisions to uphold the rule of law, to observe human rights, and ensure that justice is delivered. Because you are just one of the many actors in the justice system. But our role is very important, because when somebody comes to the police station, that is the initial place that they will be received. That is where justice will start. So you lay the foundation of how this case will go or how the protecting of this person will be. So if this person does not feel safe at the police station, it becomes your responsibility. You are likely to make or break the case at the police station. So as a senior police officer, I have been involved in molding very many police officers, senior, junior, and counterparts in terms of training, in terms of instilling the right attitude, values of accountability, trust building, peace building, so that we produce police officers who are professional, efficient, transparent, and represent the will of the people. It is not an easy task. especially now that in 2010 we had to change our constitution and we came up with a new constitution whereby we had to retrain all the police officers again to align with the new constitution and we also changed from the force now to a service we have to bring issues of um a community Partnerships Community policing intelligence led policing dealing with the transnational organized crimes All these are happening simultaneously with protecting the communities that we serve. But what has happened is that initially we had a police force that was disintegrated. We had the administration police on its own and the Kenya police on its own. So in the 2010 constitution, all of us were brought under one inspector general and we were able to come up with a curriculum that unifies the police. That is one of the things that happened. Again, being a senior police officer, my journey has not been very sweet, neither has it been very sour. I've enjoyed the work, but with a lot of barriers, especially because law enforcement is practically a patriarchal kind of a club. It's called the old boys club. So entering as a woman, they will think that Maybe you are coming to their space and if you speak up, you are branded like a tomboy. So you have personally, I have to accept that this is a job that I love and I'll just do my work as a professional, irrespective of gender. I normally tell them that policing has nothing to do with gender and in any case, security sector benefits more when we have women on board. Women bring values and systems that are the other side of the coin. We bring in values of communication and nurturing, listening to people, and the caregiving in us helps us even to maneuver within the systems. so for a very long time uh issues to do with the community policy I've seen that in the National Police Service we are encouraging a lot of our um officers to come up with um with the strategies that can help if I may quote one we have A lady by the name Zipora Derito, she won the International Association of Women Policing Award in 2023 in New Zealand because she has come up with a one-stop kind of center in addressing sexual gender-based violence, whereby all the services are offered under one roof. Zipora was actually my student in 2010. We also have another lady called Caroline Njuguna, who has also a strategy of called the Building Bridges Initiative. She is a psychologist and she brings the youth to that center. Those people who go to the streets, she is able to rehabilitate them, bring them back to school. She mobilizes resources. Their mental wellness is taken care of. She has attracted international donors. And the police have celebrated these two women because they have gone beyond the call of duty to bring services and build trust within the communities that they serve so I can say the National Police Service has given us an Avenue to be had as women and um whenever you have something that can build the society and bring uh trust to the public the inspector general and the leadership is always there to assist us uh currently we are developing um we have developed a training guide on gender-responsive policing as East Africa police chiefs, and I was chair of that committee. We are going to Rwanda to train with the first training of trainers in East Africa on the same, and it will be rolled out in the region. So what I can say is that we have a space as women in the police department, but the barriers are many, and we live one day at a time, but our vision is always forward ever, backward never. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Commissioner Gatiti. During your presentation, the words of a very well-known psychiatrist from Canada came to my mind, and I thought about Gabor Mate, who says that safety is not the absence of threat, but it's the existence of connection. And Commissioner Gatiti brought to our attention the fact that trust is so important between the population and the first point of contact, police, but trust is not going to happen if human beings remain on the survivor mode. We've been working quite closely with neuroscientists to explain to us how do you build trust with communities and how do you fulfill also the needs of the police force so these two sides of the coin and the integration of mental health within the reform of justice systems is something that I would like to mention and perhaps as food for thought for the discussion later on. I would like to mention now that our third contributor could unfortunately not be here with us, not travel to Abu Dhabi, and he has recorded a statement for us. I'm referring to Professor Michael Salter, who is the director of the Childlight East Asia and Pacific Hub at the University of New South Wales. part of the Global Child Safety Institute, and one of the leading researchers internationally on child sexual exploitation and abuse. Much of his work has been built with survivors, and his statement looks at what the evidence tells us about the importance of their participation in prevention and response. Can we please have the video?

Thank you for the opportunity to speak today about survivors as agents of transformative change. My name is Professor Michael Salter from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. My research focuses on child sexual exploitation and abuse, including the experiences of those survivors whose abuse has been recorded and distributed. The central point that I want to make is this. Survivors are not simply witnesses to harm. They have unique and important knowledge about how our systems work, where they fail, and how we can better protect children and support victims. I have been conducting research with survivors for 20 years, and my experience is that at a fundamental level, survivor expertise changes how we understand and respond to online child sexual abuse. Child sexual abuse material is often treated institutionally as illegal content, something to detect, count, and use as evidence against an offender. But from a survivor's perspective, these are recordings of a real child's abuse and a continuing instrument of their victimization. Survivors tell us that every new viewing or distribution can renew their feelings of loss and the invasion of their privacy. Survivors have been identified, stalked, blackmailed, and contacted by offenders. For them, their childhood abuse cannot be left in the past while images and videos of that abuse remain in circulation online. This is knowledge that should change our priorities. Prevention must include stopping known child sexual abuse material from being repeatedly uploaded. And when it is online, we must ensure its rapid and sustained removal and hold online services responsible for reducing that distribution. Survivors who speak to us have also identified gaps in support and justice. They need mental health practitioners who understand the continuing nature of online abuse. They need information about investigations that involve their material. and where legal processes are occurring, they need specialist support, as well as meaningful access to compensation and redress. Otherwise, survivors can feel that their images are being treated as evidence in a system in which they themselves have been forgotten. We are now expanding on this work in Australia in partnership with a survivor who is currently navigating these systems herself. We are documenting her experiences, managing notification and restitution, while also trying to access compensation, care and support. We are interviewing her over time about her interactions with police, legal and support systems, and about the response of her school when her victimisation was discovered. Through her words, we hope to identify what helped, what harmed, where responsibility has been fragmented, and what a coordinated response should provide. This research recognises her not only as a person who has experienced harm, but as a rights bearer and a knowledge holder with insights that can improve responses to survivors across Australia and internationally. There are significant barriers to including survivors in research and advocacy. Survivors face real risks to their privacy and safety if their identities become known. Participation in advocacy and research can also carry emotional, financial, and practical costs. Survivors should never be pressured to speak publicly or repeatedly recount traumatic experiences. Meaningful engagement can take many forms. It may involve confidential interviews, advisory groups, written contributions, or participation through trusted survivor organisations. Survivors should be offered genuine choices, paid for their expertise, and provided with legal, therapeutic, and practical support. It is not the responsibility of survivors to fix those systems that have failed them. That responsibility remains with government, law enforcement agencies, service providers, and technology companies. But when survivors are able to contribute safely and with genuine influence, they change the questions we ask, the harms that we recognize, and the people to whom our systems are accountable. So that is the transformative potential of survivor expertise. enabling the knowledge of survivors to help build systems around the rights, safety, and dignity of the people they are meant to serve. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Professor Salter, for your words. I have been personally working with him and with a number of survivors, and I'm quite impressed about how ignorant I used to be before I interacted with survivors. One of the most important lessons I learned from them is that whenever the images of online child sexual or even as an adult's images continue to proliferate online, there is a continuum of harm that very often the criminal justice system is not able to address. So I think that online child sexual exploitation and abuse or the sexual exploitation and abuse of women overall and men give us a different perspective of, you know, the types of threats and challenges we have to deal with at the moment. And what is the role of the criminal justice system? So if we think about the issue of jurisdiction in addressing these crimes, If you think about the issue of governance of the internet, the algorithm business model, everything has to do with very often the lack of capacity of the criminal justice system in keeping up with the pace of technological development. So I think it makes us, it forces us to reflect that the justice system alone in isolation is not able to tackle these various new threats. many people were faced with. So it teaches us that the ecosystem is very complex and that we have the responsibility to rethink criminal justice systems to be able to serve the people we're here for. Survivors are indeed key. As Professor Michael Salter mentioned, they should be the experts in trying to reshape policy and criminal justice reform. but in a sustainable and institutionalized way, not in an instrumentalized way of bringing survivors to conferences where we tick the box that they were part of it. So our final contributor on this panel is Mr. Hashimu Adamu. Mr. Hashimu Adamu is a young Nigerian professional and a member of UNOJC's Generation Justice Youth Network. His service as senior technical assistance to the Secretary General of the Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Legislatures, and previously supported research policy and strategy on international cooperation in the presidency of Nigeria. His work focuses on meaningful youth participation in policy and decision making, particularly in justice, governance, and civic engagement. Mr. Adamo, you bring the perspective of young people. and of the institutions that make the law. So my question to you is, you work at the point where young people's experience of conflict and displacement meets the institutions that make law and policy. What have you learned about how that experience can move beyond consultation and really influence decision making?

Thank you very much, honorable chair, Madam moderator, your excellencies, distinguished guests. It's indeed an honor and a privilege to bring the youth perspective into the conversation in workshop one. Well, to answer your question, I would like to build my response on two pillars. The first pillar is trust, and the second pillar is mentorship and support. I grew up in Abaji. Abaji is a community that strategically shared a boundary with six states, including Niger, Nasarawa, and Kogi states. So what this means is when there is conflicts, when people are displaced for whatsoever reason, they are likely to seek refuge in Abaji. And if there is anything good, of course, they are also going to benefit in a way. But somehow our community has developed a form of protective mechanism that helps to integrate these people into the community and ensure that their voices are heard. like in some communities, it's not a rocket science. What you basically do is to ensure that we got their trust and involve them in the community-based associations, the faith groups, and even the traditional institutions. And Why this social entity are very important is because for us, this serve as an informal platform for dispute resolution to settle issues without necessarily using the criminal justice systems. And this is in no way saying that this should replace the former institutions, but it's just a way of using the local context to address issues that issues around dispute resolutions, around conflict resolutions and many other. And so for the first lesson for me is going to be that when we design some of this framework and initiative, It's important to look at the communities because for some communities, they have a form of existing governance system that support this crisis. So what we could do largely is to bridge the gap, then bring in a fresh perspective and kick in their own. So locally relevant initiative are very, very important. Thank you. And then my second response building on the second pillar, which is support and mentorship, is with regards to the work that we do at the Conference of Speakers and President of African Legislatures. And tying this down to meaningful youth engagement, we have a youth leadership program called the Legislative Mentorship Initiative. It was founded in 2022 by the then speaker of the 9th House of Representatives and shared by the Secretary General of COSPO, Ambassador Koye Wali. So this is a platform that equipped young people with the skills and capacity to influence the policies today. But more importantly, it's also enhancing their skills to be the policymakers tomorrow. In fact, applications just close. I think last month or so we had around 20,000 people who started the application and about 7,500 submitted the application. This is just to show the growing interest of young people. And while I feel like the model of Elma, it's very interesting. It goes beyond the consultation of asking young people, what do you think? It's giving them the platform. We bring them down to Abuja for a three weeks boot camp and then engage practically with diverse ministries, departments and agencies. And when they finish this boot camp, they're strategically placed across these MDAs. So what this means is while you are giving young people the platform to be seen, to be heard and influence the policies, you're also preparing the institutions to accept them when they come in. And then So my second lesson is going to be that consultations, I feel like they end mostly in sessions and workshop, but I would strongly recommend mentorship and technical support for young people. And finally, I would just want to add an issue around access. I think for your excellencies, distinguished guests, you may have seen that in different countries and young people are leading different initiatives, but one of the key challenges has really been access, access to institutions, access to people, access to opportunity. So if I am going to recommend, I will just mention these three things. One, trust. It's important to rebuild trust with young people. It's important to strengthen their capacity through support and mentorship, and finally give them the access. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Adamo, for your words. I think that we have been learning within UNODC through our experience with young leaders like you and also through our program the Youth Peace Champions in Nigeria that our role is really sometimes to create the platform for you to lead because the knowledge that exists with young people is really incredible and can influence a lot of reform. Young people vote, young people are the consumers of the future, young people are the ones who are able to teach us especially in the technological age. So thank you again Mr. Chair, that concludes the first round with our panelists. I would now hand back to you to open the floor for questions and comments from participants, and we have around 20 minutes.

Yeah, thank you very much. So we will now open the floor for discussion. Again, I'd like to remind you to stick to the time limit of three minutes of interventions and questions. And we will not be too formal with the procedures for this discussions, but of course, we stick to this rule that we start with the member states, international organizations, NGOs, and experts in this order. Yeah, so the floor is open. Whom could I give the floor first? I see the United States. You have the floor, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Good morning, moderator, panelists.

Thank you so much for the very interesting interventions. It struck me as I was listening that in many cases, the successes are a matter of motivated individuals or groups pushing affirmatively for access and to have their voices heard. And that can produce, as the title of the panel reflects, transformative change at times. Can you share instances where this has become institutionalized so that it isn't ad hoc, it isn't a matter of certain proactive, successful people opening up dialogue to share perspectives, but rather policy making processes or legislative processes or oversight processes incorporate as a matter of course avenues for this kind of input. Thank you.

Yeah, I give the floor back to the moderator.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, distinguished delegate from the United States of America. I would like to give the floor to each of you for a quick response. So I would start with Commissioner Katiti, please.

Thank you very much for that question. In the case of the National Police Service, especially the police care, it is institutionalized. We have the policy, we have the strategy, we have the SOPs, we also have the training guide and the syllabus. and it is one of the only curriculum that is competency based in the National Police Service which is under registration in fact when you look at the strategic plan of the Inspector General 2023-2027 Polycare is anchored in the National Police Service strategic plan so yes it is institution it is the road map on the way forward of the institutionalized gender responsive policing in the country thank you.

Thank you very much, Commissioner. Mr. Adamo, you have the floor.

Thank you very much, Madam Moderator, and thank you very much for your question. For LMI, the example I just recently shared, it was institutionalized in 2023. So what happens now, it's under the Conference of Speakers and President of African Legislatures. And the secretariat, of course, is in Abuja. What we do is these young people are deployed to different committees in the parliaments. So this supports the legislatures in terms of drafting bills and policies. And yeah, it's institutionalized and under the Conference of Speakers and President of African Legislatures. Thank you.

Thank you. Ms. Akuffo, you have the floor.

Thank you so much for your question. I would like to talk about some of the alternative to incarceration campaigns that we have done as a network. We like to advocate for alternatives to incarceration with reference to the bank or cruise. And one of the interesting examples I would like to give is one that our sisters in Colombia were able to achieve where they advocated for alternatives to incarceration for women of 80 and below sentences in Colombia for women with drug trafficking offenses. This was very, very amazing for the women. I was in Brazil last week, and I actually met one of the women who was incarcerated but released on community service. So you're able to serve five hours a week, and at least this maintains you being with your children. And this lady was pregnant, which was really impressive. We were also looking at setting up another campaign called No Justice Without Us. and looking at the different ways in which women can be helped while they are in society, when they are arrested, six months before release, after release and those that are released but still serving a sentence like on probation or community service. So when we collectively advocate for policies that help people who are incarcerated, I think now that we are moving from prison to correctional services, I think the idea should be more about how do we help you in a way that doesn't really harm you. So thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Ms. Akuffo. And since Professor Salter is not here, and I know what he would say, I can mention that the institutionalization of victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse has happened through the establishment of National Survivors Council. There are very few countries that have it. One example, one good example portrayed in various international forum like this one is Germany. So survivors nowadays have been advocating very hard for the establishment of National Survivors Council, where they work as experts, they are paid, and their voices are integrated into policy reform. Mr. Chair, you have, please, the floor.

Yeah, thank you. Next on the speakers list is Norway. You have the floor.

Thank you, Chair. I'm returning to the intervention by Ms. Kufu about the organization she joined with the International Organization for Incarcerated Women. Our experience in Norway is broad when it comes to groups who are representing the interests of people who have been incarcerated or have views on survivors of other crimes. We have seen through the years that The groups that are most successful are those who manage to forge a very specific aim, because in a group of people who have been incarcerated, for example, for drug offences, there will be very many views on which laws the country should have on drug use, and this often tends to create conflict also within the survivor groups. What we have seen is one very, very successful group following the murder of two children. The mother of one of the children established a big organization and demanded money from authorities to build a very, very powerful organization now that represents the interest of children and the survivors of child abuse and their relatives. So it offers counselling, it offers advice and it is very involved in legal initiatives. It has managed to create differences in the way in which we treat these cases. All those organisations are very broadly used in Norway in a structured way as part of our consultation system when new laws are made. We're a small country, so these groups also have easy access to political leaders in various parties and are, you know, very, very strong voice in the way we work. But it's taken time. Looking back some years, it's been quite some barriers before these groups found their strong position in the system that they are enjoying today. Thank you. I just wish you good luck. Thank you.

Thank you. Alexandra, are there any reactions to this comment?

Ms. Koufa, would you like to react?

Thank you so much for the encouraging words. I was saying earlier that every time we have come together to fight for the rights of people who are incarcerated, people who are living in correctional facilities, it really has a very positive effect. Thank you for your encouragement and I highly appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. And next on the list is the representative of RUENI. You have the floor, please. And maybe you introduce your institute shortly.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. I represent the European Institute for Crime Prevention and Control, affiliated with United Nations, one of the PNI institutes organizing these workshops here at the Congress. Thank you so much to all the speakers for your very interesting and insightful presentations.

I have a follow-up.

Question to the delegate from the United States concerning the cooperation in your countries between different actors. So do you have any informal or formal fora for cooperation between the authorities, but also with civil society and researchers? And the question I ask this is that in my own experience, It has been very important to have these fora for exchange of views and experiences between different actors to really influence policy and make a difference, so that it is not only dependent on single individuals who push for issues alone, but rather together. I have a second question, which is actually for Professor.

Michael Salter, but since he's not here, maybe I'll address them by e-mail. But I was very interested.

In knowing about whether this very important research that they do with one survivor is in a way generalizable if you only kind of talk to one person. So I'd be interested in hearing more about the methodology and the findings.

But thank you so much.

Thank you, Alexandra.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On your last question, I will not speak on behalf of Professor Salter, but I will definitely put you in contact with him and also provide you with the sources for the researchers he mentioned. I would like now to turn to the panellists and we follow the format as before that each of you has one minute to react. May I start with Commissioner Gatiti? The answer regarding coordination mechanisms within your country, so would you like to answer, and each of the panelists would have one minute to react.

Thank you for that question. I think in my country, we have the correctional service department that works closely with the formal and informal sector. And because I'm one of the com code users committee we meet in those meetings I can confirm that they have both formal and informal thank you very much.

Thank you very much well with regards to my submission um for the informal one we have um first the community base Association and then the faith group and then the traditional institutions and they have coordination meeting with the political institutions there. So they also serve as accountability, like watchdog to the institutions. A quick example is when the public officers are running for office, they run to this group to seek for the elections and all. And when they get into office, this group now run back to them, you know, you promise X, Y, Z. where is it? So it's more like an accountability, but it's a formal coordination mechanism. That's regards to one. And with regards to the second one, the LMI, that's a clear formal coordination mechanism. In fact, literally almost all the MDAs, the ministry department and agencies are in support because the initiative, it's under the office of the speaker of the parliament. So you know how the public institutions wants to get the buy-in and most of the facilitators engaging with the young people, they are public as public office holders. So you find parliamentarians, you find ministers, and engage with them so there is a clear form of communication. Thank you, Anova.

Thank you so much. So for us, our government has been engaging with civil society for the longest time, although honestly, we feel that more can be done. Looking at the progress that has been made in countries which are neighboring to us, like South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, we call on more alternatives to incarceration. I often give an example of a woman I was in prison with. She was pregnant and didn't have anyone visit her, and she was incarcerated because she stole a bottle of perfume. from the supermarket. I think these are minor offenses and can be dealt with alternatively, unlike deprive someone of liberty and cause their situation to get a whole lot worse. So we are actually trying to formulate an advocacy called Free Her to advocate for alternatives to incarceration. Another issue we also had challenges with was probation currently being offered in Zambia only three weeks prior to the end of your sentence. So there's a lot of coordination and formulation but I really feel like it's about time we get some of these issues in place. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yeah, thank you. And next on the list is the IGO. You have the floor, please.

Many thanks, Mr. Chair.

I represent the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or the largest regional security organization with 57 participating states. Many thanks to all panelists for very insightful discussions. A big focus of our programmatic work at the OSCE is to prevent youth recruitment by organized crime groups in Southeastern Europe and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. And what we've seen on the ground is that oftentimes mothers, community leaders, oftentimes see risk factors for recruitment at an early stage. So I was wondering if you could share any experience, any good practices on how to leverage more effectively the knowledge of mothers, of community leaders on warning signs for youth recruitment risks into organized crime. Many things.

So I would like to proceed the same way. Commissioner, get to you have the floor.

Thank you very much. In the National National Police Service, we have also established a station, the liaison office, whereby members of the youth come to the police station. We train our young officers to engage with these youth. And one of the thematic areas we deal with is things to do with countering violent extremism, recruitment. They also talk about issues to do with mental wellness. And when you remember in Kenya in 2024, we had the Gen. Z uprising, whereby they even forced the president to be on their space. So as a police service, we decided we must bring the youth on board so that we can be able to address issues together. In the last year, when they now are commemorating 2024, we saw that the youth actually were able to protect police stations. And they were able to say, these are our police stations. We have a good working relationship with the police. And nobody is going to burn them. So that is another approach that the police is working on. It is still in the initial stages, but we think it's a good idea. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Just to build on that, in addition to the youth offices, I think one of the things we do in our setting is to have youth representative, including the political parties. So you must have a youth leader or something that's easily going to connect with young people in the grassroots community. Well, one interesting recommendation I would like to give, especially in your setting, is to have more youth friendly messaging to them. You know, young people nowadays, you know, want more complex stuff. You know, you can make it a bit more youth friendly in messaging. I think it's going to go a long way. But in the community, it's very, very important to look around. Excuse me. to look around and rebuild interest, get them involved. When you involve young people, they take ownership and I think it's going to go a long way. Thank you.

Thank you so much. So for me, I think understanding why women commit crimes or why certain crime is committed is really important. I think This is where we realize that for most of the crimes committed, like in a country like Zambia, these are crimes due to poverty. And so we look at how can society then help people become more self-sufficient, more self-reliant, especially for women, as usually when you look at reports like Women Beyond Wars, report with criminalization due to poverty. It will tell us more about how women usually look for money because of the need to provide for their children. Again, we also look at the psychological aspect. For example, in my case, being addicted to drugs requires psychological support. There's so many very different types of crimes, but looking at cases like where a woman, for example, is arrested because she was fighting with her spouse and maybe she's always been beaten. Usually, like in Zambia, as well as many other places, women will fail to leave an abusive marriage because they don't really have anywhere to go, you know. So these are some of the issues that need to be looked into and dealt with. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I would like to thank the representatives from OSCE for the question, but I would like also to inform you all that the second round of presentations, one of our panelists will focus exclusively on the root causes of the recruitment of children and young people by armed and criminal groups, including terrorist groups, which is definitely one of the key challenges faced by a number of countries nowadays. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. I think we have time for one last question. I see Denmark, you have the floor, please.

Thank you, Chair. I represent the Danish National Police, and I have a question for Commissioner Gatiti. I'm very interested in the leadership challenges when it comes to creating an understanding and culture of gender responsiveness within your police service. So could you elaborate on the challenges that you as a leader of your organization have has met and what you do to overcome these challenges? Thank you.

Thank you very much for that question. The challenges are many. As I said, this is a patriarchal kind of an organization. And one of the most, the initial barrier is at the recruitment. You realize that the Constitution says clearly that not more than 2,000 would be of either gender. We have just witnessed passing out in the last two weeks in our police academies. And I can tell you, we are not even close to 15% of the women in recruitment. That says that the pipeline of making a police commander who is a female will take very long. because you are not able to recruit the numbers. We are not able to retain them because sometimes the barriers are so many, maybe because the chances that they are given for promotion are not there. The welfare may have issues. For example, if they fall pregnant and they are due for promotion, it is either they stay home because they cannot go to the academies when they are pregnant. So the barriers have been there. So for you to move away from the barriers because the barriers will always be there. You have now to scale up. So what I did when I joined, I joined as a police constable in 2003, and I made a conscious decision that the barriers that exist, I'm going to jump over them. One of the way was joining professional associations like the ASIS International, whereby I'm a triple certified. So you continuously make yourself visible by associating yourself with the right people. You get good mentors. And it is very important for a woman in such an organization to have male allies, because these are the people who will be in offices and in rooms that you cannot actually enter, but they will speak on your behalf. They will give you an opportunity to further your education, they will speak good about you when promotion opportunities come. so that is how we survive but it is not for everybody some are shy some do not even have an opportunity to get the mentors so you have to go overdrive as an individual but we have a way of bringing the women together we have Association we have professional associations whereby we are able to Mentor them formally and give them um a way forward and then do the right things so that at least they can be feasible otherwise the challenges are very very many, especially for the young women who join and they are having their children. Those are challenges that many, many women will get, including the uniforms, for example. You realize that the uniforms are genetically made for a male figure, and sometimes they are not fit for purpose, especially the anti-riot gear. They are not fit for women, for example, because of our breasts. And you realize that we may not even be in a position to sit in those command or in those leadership position where these decisions are being made. In Kenya, the last time we had a woman who was a serious commander is the DIG, that is the Deputy Inspector General, who was appointed in 2015. ever since we have never had another senior police commander in that level so you can imagine how much you have been losing and this is 2026 so yes the challenges are there but we focus on improving ourselves and overcoming those challenges thank you.

Yeah thank you very much and now it's time to move uh to the second round of this of uh panel discussions Alexandra give you the floor.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So that brings the first panel to a close. Please join me in thanking Ms. Akufo, Commissioner Gatiti, Mr. Adamo, as well as Professor Salter for their interventions. Round of applause. And with your permission, I will now introduce two video statements that takes us to our second panel. We have two more voices from colleagues who could not travel to Abu Dhabi, unfortunately. Both come from survivor-led work on child sexual abuse, and both speak to how the expertise of experience finds its way into professional practice and into law. Mrs. Rhiannon Fyfe-McDonald is the head of advocacy at the Mary Collins Foundation in the United Kingdom. which works with victims of online child sexual abuse and with the professionals who respond to them. Her statement takes us from what lived experience it teaches to how services and professionals take it in. Can we please have the video?

Child sexual abuse.

Over the past five.

Years or so, a big part of my role has been around developing and working alongside our lived experience group, which is adult survivors using their experiences to help shape professional practice, services and policy. One message I would like to leave with you today, it would be that listening to survivors is important, but listening on its own is not meaningful participation. What matters is what changes because survivors were there and were involved. We often talk about giving survivors a voice, but they already have voices. It's our responsibility to create the conditions in which those voices can genuinely influence change. Because we as professionals can design systems which make perfect sense to us, organizationally, procedurally, technologically, but they feel very, very different to the person that's experiencing them. Processes that are intended to protect can remove sense of control, information to reassure can actually leave them confused. And a professional can do everything right. They can follow every procedure properly and still unintentionally cause further harm to the victim. And it's survivor expertise that helps us to see these gaps. For me, we see it in technology-assisted child sexual abuse very clearly. because the abuse doesn't end when the initial offending stops. Images continue to exist, to circulate, to be viewed. They might even be used within systems intended to identify other victims and other abuse that's happening. And it's survivors that ask the questions that the systems might otherwise overlook. Like, what do we know about what's happening to our images? Who's got access to them? What do I have choice and control over? And if I can't control something, why not? These might sound like simple questions, but they fundamentally change how systems are experienced by the person that they're intended to help. And organisationally, meaningful participation places responsibilities on us. We can't invite survivors into a room, ask them to share some of the most difficult experiences of their lives, say, thanks for your honesty, and then disappear. We need to be clear from the start about what people can influence and what they can't. We need appropriate safety and wellbeing measures in place. We need to recognise survivor expertise as expertise, including through appropriate payments, support and development. We also need to think about why are we asking for somebody's lived experience? because we should not be repeatedly asking people to retell traumatic experiences simply because we find them powerful or inspiring. And crucially, we need to close feedback loops, tell people what happened, what changed, and if something couldn't change, why. Because meaningful participation doesn't mean implementing every suggestion made by every survivor. They're not a single voice and there will be different opinions. It means treating their expertise just as seriously as we treat any other form of expertise around the table. So for those of you here today, I would ask you to think beyond the question, have we consulted survivors? And instead ask, what did survivors have the power to influence? What changed because they were involved? And would the people who gave us their time and expertise recognize their contribution in what we ultimately produced? Because if we can answer those questions honestly, survivor participation.

I am sorry. I must apologize. I think there was a problem with the video. We were reaching the end of the video in any case. And I think that Ms. McDonald leaves us with very important questions that we should ask ourselves in terms of survivor participation. Our second statement I will move on, comes from the Brave Movement, a global survivor-led movement to end child sexual violence. It is a statement by its co-founder, Ms. Rosalia Rivera, who speaks about what changes when survivors organize and take part in designing the laws and policies that concern them. Can we please have the second video?

Good afternoon, excellencies and distinguished delegates. I'd like to begin with a question. Think of the last law that your country passed to protect children from sexual violence, either online or offline. And then think of the protocol that your investigators followed when a child disclosed abuse, or the training that your prosecutors received on how trauma affects testimony. Now ask who was in the room when that law was drafted, when the protocol was written, when the training was designed. If your answer includes ministry officials, legal drafters, and technical experts, but no survivor, you're not alone. Almost no member state can yet answer that differently. It is the single largest reason that our laws and our services still fail the very people that they exist to protect. I'm here on behalf of the Brave Movement, a global survivor-led movement working to end child sexual violence. And I'm here to present evidence, not only an appeal. When survivors organize and take part in designing the laws and policies that concern them, those laws and policies work. not work better in theory, work better in practice, measured in convictions secured, in children protected, in trust rebuilt between citizens and the institutions meant to serve them. Let me explain what that means concretely. We know where systems break down because we have felt those fractures in our lives. We know what healing actually requires because we have fought for it inch by painful inch. We see the gaps in laws and services that remain invisible even to the most well-intentioned professionals because we ourselves have fallen through those gaps. When that expertise genuinely informs practice, professionals stop working from assumption and start working from evidence. And governments stop spending on interventions that feel right and start spending on interventions that survivors can confirm work. Germany's experience proves the model. In 2015, Germany established the world's first formal national survivor council. Survivors' recommendations directly shaped the country's 2021 act to combat sexualized violence against children and improved its victims' reparation law. That is what happens when survivor expertise sits inside the institution. Meaningful survivor participation is not a listening session. It is not a single consultation before a policy is finalized. It is not a survivor invited to share a story and then excused from the room before decisions are made. What institutions must avoid is tokenism, consultations that check a box but change nothing, panels convened for a photograph rather than a policy outcome. Token engagement is worse than no engagement because it teaches survivors and the public that participation is really just theater. In November 2024, 106 governments gathered in Bogota and committed to empower survivors to advise on legislation, policies, and programs through the establishment of survivor councils. That commitment now needs to become real. It needs to become infrastructure in every member state, not only the handful that have already begun. This is a matter of sound governance. It means that laws are drafted with accuracy that outside expertise alone cannot supply. It means that 151 million children who experience sexual violence each year are represented in the rooms where their future is decided by people who understand their reality because we have lived it. The Council of Europe's guidelines on survivor engagement, co-authored by Brave Movement co-founder, Professor Caroline S. Taylor, stated it plainly, "Nothing about us without us." That is not a slogan. It is a governance standard, and it is one every member state in this room has the capacity to meet. You have the opportunity and the responsibility to ensure that survivor participation in criminal justice and child protection policy is formal, funded, and structural, not voluntary, symbolic, or optional. Today, I ask you to carry that standard back to your governments. Thank you.

Thank you to Ms. Rivera for this excellent presentation. And just one thought, one word from the moderator. Countries are spending huge amounts of resources trying to tackle the threats of nowadays. And we think about organized crime, and we think about terrorism, and we think about corruption. The top-down approach is definitely very important, but what we are trying to do with this workshop is to basically leverage the bottom-up approach. In a way, giving voices to survivors, institutionalizing their participation in reforming laws and policies is a very key initiative to dismantle criminal networks, to dismantle organized crime, because it is instrumental towards strengthening the capacity of criminal justice systems in first understanding what the real threats are and at the same time responding effectively to prevent and respond to that. So thank you again to Ms. Rivera and to the Brave Movement for the excellent work they have been doing. I now continue with our second panel. Our second panel is on embedding meaningful participation in crime prevention and criminal justice to build resilient societies. And its overarching question asks how the participation of women, children and youth can be built into the way systems work, into how a project is designed, how a policy is consulted on, how a law is drafted, and how the people who took part are shown what changed as a result. Ms. Elsie Cheung coordinates the Forced Marriage Project at Anti-Slavery Australia and is a member of UNODC's Generation Justice Youth Network. Mr. Owen Ripley is a Senior Assistant Deputy Minister in the Policy Sector of the Department of Justice Canada. Executive Director May is Officer in Charge and Executive Director of the National Coordination Center Against Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children and Child Sexual Abuse or Exploitation Materials of the Philippines. and Ms. Gisela Baur de Albuquerque is Secretary for Strategic Actions at the Federal Public Defenders Office of Brazil. I would like to welcome you all. Let me begin with Mrs. Chung. Mrs. Chung is the forced marriage project coordinator at Anti-Slavery Australia, a legal centre working to end human trafficking and modern slavery in Australia. Her work on forced marriage prevention has strengthened access to justice and capacity building for diverse communities and for thousands of frontline professionals across Australia through evidence-based resource, cross-sector collaboration and education initiatives. She is an Asia-Pacific member of UNODC's Generation Justice Youth Network, with a background in law and international relations. Ms. Chung, you open the panel with the practitioners' view. And my question to you is, in your work on forced marriage, the people most affected are often the least visible in the response. How do you build a project around their perspectives while protecting their safety, privacy, and control over their participation?

Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here and also to share our learnings on behalf of my colleagues, especially those with lived expertise who have been invaluable to this project. When we talk about lived expertise and engagements, What we really are focusing on is embedding that strengths-based approach. So what this means is at every level and stage of a project, we need to, first of all, focus on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of people with lived experience. So this means that we need to help them strengthen and leverage these strengths so that they can create the solutions themselves. Second of all, we need to give back the very trust, respect, and agency that have often been taken away from these groups. The way we engage with people with lived experience is actually a chance in itself to model positive fellowships and also positive decision making. And for women and young people especially, this can be extremely powerful because it might even be the very first time they've experienced this. Finally, we need to create safe and inclusive participation avenues. So this requires us to understand what people actually need to meaningfully contribute. We need to proactively identify and address any barriers to participation, which might be around language, literacy, geographical distance, technology. We find it very important to actually ensure people with lived experience are financially remunerated and also provided with any ancillary supports that might be necessary for them to participate. So this might include childcare, transport costs, and also access to psychosocial supports. So to illustrate how this might look in practice, I would like to share a case study from Anti-Slavery Australia's forced marriage prevention work. So this is the My Blue Sky Community Advisors project, which we piloted over the first half of 2026. We recruited five community advisors from across Australia, each with very diverse lived community experience, cultural expertise, and also, more importantly, very strong connections with groups affected by forced marriage. Over six months, we worked with them to co-design and deliver forced marriage awareness raising engagements with their own communities. So this happened across four different states and one external Australian territory, engaging with 130 people, mostly women, who otherwise may not have had access to information about forced marriage, their rights around it or their support options, and also who we otherwise wouldn't have had access to either. So throughout this project, we've been working with an independent monitoring, evaluation and learning team who have helped us identify some key elements that have ensured meaningful participation, which anyone listening today can also apply to their own projects. So first of all, we established equitable working relationships with each advisor. where we proactively identified existing power imbalances and we shifted these by positioning ourselves as the learners rather than the authority. And also in the independent feedback, the advisors unanimously agreed that this was the case and that they felt they were recognised for their expertise and were also trusted and supported to lead their own activities. So this was actually very intentional. One of my colleagues who was the community engagement coordinator for this project we made sure that the project was designed to actually encourage the agency and confidence of each advisor. So one of the ways we did this was before any activities took place, we provided comprehensive training on various skills and knowledge that the advisors might require. So this included training on legal knowledge around forced marriage, which they could then transfer to their communities. We also provided other trainings, including on trauma, self-care, and how to facilitate sensitive conversations, and also ongoing support, such as financial resourcing, debriefs, and making sure that a member of our team from Anti-Slavery Australia was always on call during each community engagement. So basically, we were trying to show that we are not afraid of these hard conversations, that we're aware of these challenges, and we're ready to support each advisor in their work. There was also a lot of mutual learning as we gained a greater understanding of how forced marriage actually affected these communities. So the information exchange actually happened in this reciprocal, cyclical feedback loop, rather than in a top-down hierarchy. So the learnings from the project and from the communities themselves actually gave practical relevance and depth to all of the technical knowledge that we were sharing. Next, given the sensitive nature of forced marriage, we implemented layers of trauma-informed safeguards in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of each participant, and also especially to manage the risk of retraumatisation and any disclosures of harm. So first, we established clear protocols in the event of any disclosures of distress, either from the advisors or from the communities themselves. And we also developed the confidence of the advisors to be able to respond to these situations and also to navigate reporting pathways. We also ensured that the advisors' participation was always based on their consent. So they had control over how they wanted to engage and what they felt comfortable with. Something we were very intentional about was never requiring or asking the advisors to disclose any personal lived experience of forced marriage. even during the recruitment stage. So they only had to demonstrate a strong level of connection and community knowledge. So this was very intentional again because confidentiality is always a top priority for us, unless they were overridden by safety considerations. And that ties into our broader safety and privacy safeguards, which included ensuring safe and secure data collection, storage and access, de-identifying all of the information we collected and always obtaining permission prior to use of any direct images or quotes, which included the photos from the previous slide. And these safeguards actually carried over into how the advisors engaged with their own communities. So they themselves took a strengths-based approach with their communities, focusing on positive outcomes like being empowered to learn about their rights and to seek supports. And here the advisors lived community experience, and that they could tailor the sessions and achieve a level of safety for participants that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. And this safety was essential for the communities to actually engage with a topic that's so sensitive and loaded like forced marriage. An important part of this was the careful use of language. So the way we frame an issue actually shapes whether people feel safe engaging with it. So we made sure that forced marriage was always discussed in a very mindful and culturally tailored way, rather than something that was stigmatising or sensationalised. Finally, the advisors were given autonomy over how to tailor the content and the format of the activities, but they were also able to rely on our team to collaboratively address challenges and discuss ideas. So what this looked like was they had control and creativity in how they designed and implemented the project. One advisor used, for example, art-based techniques in order to facilitate conversations, and another used open dialogue techniques. We also implemented a participatory monitoring and evaluation process, which meant that the advisors were involved in collecting data and assessing the impact of the project themselves. So we moved beyond simply increasing or embedding their participation. We made sure that we actually were developing that confidence in order to meaningfully contribute for their communities. So There are many other learnings that I don't have time to share today, but we are planning to publish a project report and we also have a lot of free resources available based on evidence-based good practices with input from people with lived experience. So you're very welcome to access those links and e-mail us if you would like to learn more. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ms. Cheung. Let me now turn to Mr. Ripley for the view from inside a Ministry of Justice. Mr. Owen Ripley is Senior Assistant Deputy Minister and leads the policy sector at the Department of Justice Canada. The sector works to support the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada in relation to criminal law, victims, federal family law, youth criminal justice, Indigenous justice, international development, and access to justice. Prior to joining the Department of Justice, Mr. Ripley worked for over 12 years at the Department of Canadian Heritage. Significant achievements included the passage of the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act, as well as developing a legislative framework related to online safety, the proposed Online Harms Act. Mr. Ripley has common law and civil law degrees, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in history and political science from McGill University. Mr. Ripley, thank you for joining us today. You have the floor. My question will be Canada has built consultations into justice policy development in a fairly deliberate way. What does it take inside a government department to move from consulting people to ensuring that their perspective is meaningfully influenced policy?

Thanks very much for that question and good morning, colleagues. Canada believes that policy making and program design must be informed by strong partnerships and engagement with those who have a vested interest in the outcomes. In Canada, this includes our provinces and territories, our Indigenous partners and governments, civil society organizations, and people with lived experience, among others. Doing this meaningfully is not a checkbox exercise, and we've already heard that. It means that, as government, we must be prepared to actively listen and adapt our course of action. Transparency is also an integral part of meaningful public participation, including through the timely provision of information and reporting back out on results. It does no good when input goes into a black box and stakeholders are left wondering what's going on. So today I want to share three Canadian initiatives that were heavily informed by meaningful engagement with relevant stakeholders. The first is the Protecting Victims Act, recent criminal law reform to address gender-based violence, child sexual exploitation, and to better protect victims. The second will be Canada's Black Justice Strategy, and the third, Canada's Indigenous Justice Strategy. So, turning to the first example, the Minister of Justice introduced the Protecting Victims Act in December 2025, so just last year, and the legislation received royal assent shortly before the summer. The Act strengthens criminal law responses to gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence, femicide, coercive control, and forms of online sexual exploitation, such as sexually explicit deepfakes. According to an UNODC report from 2024, an average of 137 women and girls worldwide lost their lives every day at the hands of their partner or close relative. In Canada, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every two days. This extreme form of violence is both devastating and disturbingly prevalent. In response, the Protecting Victims Act amended the Criminal Code to ensure that murders occurring in certain aggravating circumstances are treated as first-degree murder, including murders of intimate partners that occur in the context of a pattern of coercive or controlling conduct, murders that occur in the context of sexual violence or exploitation, and murders motivated by hate, including hate based on gender. Importantly, where the victim of one of these murders is female, the murder is defined as femicide, recognizing and acknowledging that women and girls are disproportionately the victim of these forms of homicide and reflecting victims' lived realities. The Act also created a new offence targeting patterns of coercive or controlling conduct towards an intimate partner. This responds to growing recognition that intimate partner violence often extends beyond physical abuse and includes behaviors such as isolation, surveillance, financial control, and threats, which frequently precede more severe violence. In addition, the act addressed a significant gap in the law by criminalizing the non-consensual distribution of sexual deepfakes, by ensuring that sexual deepfakes depicting identifiable individuals without their consent are treated in the same manner as real intimate images. It also criminalized threats to distribute these intimate images, including deepfakes, to address issues around extortion and intimidation. The Act also amended the Canadian Bill of Rights to highlight the importance of trauma-informed and victim-centered practices in the criminal justice system. Other reforms to the Bill of Rights include a new right for victims to be treated with respect, courtesy, compassion, and fairness, as well as recognizing their interest in a timely trial or timely resolution of matters. The Act also enhanced victims' rights to information, including about restorative justice processes, and made important clarifications about who is responsible for providing victims with the information they are entitled to. The reforms themselves are important, but equally important is how they were developed. These reforms were shaped through extensive engagement with stakeholders and partners, including victims' advocates, Indigenous partners, legal experts, and provincial and territorial governments. For example, in 2023, so in the lead-up to the legislation, the Department of Justice organized an engagement process with stakeholders to discuss the creation of a potential coercive control offence in the context of intimate relationships. This feedback helped improve the policy, for example, addressing risks around dual charging and stressing that the rollout of any coercive control offence must be accompanied by training for police and other front-line justice system professionals. Otherwise, it risks harming those it is designed to protect. During the fall of 2025, the Minister of Justice and his parliamentary secretary hosted roundtables with stakeholders, including a dedicated session with Indigenous partners, to seek views and perspectives on measures to strengthen the Criminal Code in response to gender-based violence, including intimate partner violence, and to keep children safe. During the roundtable discussions, participants raised the importance of addressing and naming femicide explicitly in the Criminal Code, the need for better data, including distinctions-based data, and increased funding and investments in victim support services. Departmental officials also engaged with partners from provinces and territories, including on the criminalization of the non-consensual distribution of sexual deepfakes and coercive control. Their expertise and lived experiences helped shape and improve the final legislation. A second example we wish to highlight is Canada's Black Justice Strategy. The key objective of the strategy is to address anti-Black racism and systemic discrimination that has contributed to the overrepresentation of Black people in Canada's criminal justice system. including as victims and survivors of crime, and to ensure that all Canadians have access to equal treatment before and under the law. To reflect the voices, expertise, and lived experience of Black persons, the Government of Canada established an external steering group comprised of nine experts and leaders from Black communities across the country with diverse backgrounds and knowledge of Canada's justice system. The steering group guided extensive consultations and engagements with Black-led, community-based organizations nationwide. An online survey was also made available to ensure broad participation. The outcome of these engagements informed the development of 114 recommendations contained in the steering group's final report. and in 2025, the Government of Canada released its response to that final report, called Towards Transformative Change: An Implementation Plan for Canada's Black Justice Strategy, which sets out how the government plans to move this work forward. But perhaps most importantly, the government continues to support the steering group and meets with it regularly. This acts as an important accountability mechanism in sustaining this work. The last example I will highlight is the Indigenous Justice Strategy, which reflects the voices of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis people. Over the years, multiple inquiries, commissions, and studies have consistently shown that colonial laws, policies, and institutional practices contribute to the overrepresentation of First Nations, Inuit, and Metis people in Canada's justice system, again, as both offenders and victims. In 2021, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada was mandated to develop an Indigenous justice strategy to address this issue of overrepresentation. Rather than being a policy written by government, the strategy was built through a multi-year collaborative process. From 2021 to 2024, Canada worked with First Nations, Inuit and Metis communities, representative organizations and governments alongside provinces and territories to develop the strategy. This included the department providing $11 million in funding to 38 Indigenous organization, governments and communities so they could design and conduct their own engagement processes so that the final product would reflect diverse voices and lived experiences. Based on the feedback from those engagement dialogues and Indigenous-led processes, a consultation draft was developed, focusing on revitalizing Indigenous laws and legal orders and on reforming the existing Canadian justice system. In the spring/summer of 2024, the consultation draft was made publicly available for comment and validation. This, again, included targeted consultations with First Nations, Inuit, and Metis communities, Indigenous justice experts, Indigenous justice program and service providers, frontline workers, Indigenous people who are incarcerated, Indigenous academics, and provincial and territorial governments. At the same time, Canada worked with First Nations, Inuit, and Metis partners to develop distinction-based chapters tailored to their unique principles and priorities. The Indigenous Justice Strategy was released in March 2025 and outlines a suite of priority actions for transformative reforms throughout the criminal justice system. Canada is at an early stage of implementation and is working through existing collaborative federal, provincial, territorial, Indigenous mechanisms to identify short, medium and long-term priorities for implementation. While the strategy will not, on its own, eliminate the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in the justice system, its focus on addressing systemic discrimination, the root causes of injustice, and supporting Indigenous-led and culturally grounded approaches to justice can contribute to lasting, transformative change for future generations. So in conclusion, building resilient societies requires ensuring that those most affected by crime, victimization and systemic inequities have a meaningful voice in shaping solutions. Canada's recent justice initiatives show that inclusive participation can lead to more responsive laws, more equitable outcomes and hopefully greater trust in public institutions. Thank you so much.

Thank you very much. Mr. Ripley. for bringing the initiatives of Canada towards building resilient society. Let me now turn to Executive Director May for experiences from the Philippines. Executive Director May serves as Officer in Charge, Executive Director of the Philippine Department of Justice National Coordination Center against online sexual abuse or exploitation of children and child sexual abuse or exploitation materials. She leads the Philippines national coordination efforts to strengthen policy enforcement, regulatory and institutional responses to online child sexual exploitation and abuse. As senior prosecutor, she has extensive experience in human trafficking, child protection and technology facilitated crime. She works across government, law enforcement, industry, civil society, and international partners to advance legislative reform, cross-border cooperation, and stronger national systems for preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting crimes against children. Executive Director, may you bring us an example of children and young people taking part in drafting of national policy? Could you please explain how children were involved in drafting the strategic action plan and share one concrete example of how their contribution influenced the final document? We would be very interested in learning what safeguards and institutional arrangements were needed to make their participation safe and meaningful.

Thank you, Alexandra, for that question. First of all, on behalf of the Philippines Department of Justice, we would like to thank the UNODC and all the organizers for giving us this opportunity to present what we did for our first ever strategic action plan against online sexual abuse or exploitation of children. So when we set out to develop the Philippines Strategic Action Plan against OSAEC and CSAM, so we have two non-negotiables. One is that we have to listen beyond the national offices in the capital city. And second, that we have to also listen to the voices of children whose lives the Strategic Action Plan is meant to protect. So because of those two non-negotiables. What we did is we set out four island-wide consultations across the country because we recognize that the challenges as well as the ability to respond would differ across the country. And we consulted, we particularly went to the three major island groups in the Philippines, which is Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, as well as the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. And we were able to gather around 120 children, ages 12 to 17 years old. And in all these consultations, one of the most powerful messages that we received from children is that, yes, they acknowledge that they are vulnerable, and they also recognize that they can be empowered children. That we also have to rec that as adults, we also have to recognize that they have their agency, that although they know that the risk that they are facing online, they are also capable of protecting themselves and also their peers as long as they are given the right information as well as the sufficient amount of support. and to translate those message in the strategic action plan, we actually included the word empowered in our mission statement. So our mission, part of our mission statement states that to protect, safeguard and empower all children against OSAIC and CISA. And also included in our strategic action plan is to train children on the establishment of youth peer support groups, and also to conduct child-led advocacy and awareness trainings. So these particular activities in the strategic action plan is a recognition of the ability of children to help not just themselves, but also their peers. Another message that the children wanted us to know is they want to make help easier to reach. and they wanted adults, especially teachers, to be able to respond appropriately when a report is made to them. And they also want online platforms to have accessible and responsive reporting mechanisms. So those messages were also embedded in our strategic action plan. The strategic action plan calls for a social and behavioral change communication plan to understand why there is a low reporting from the community as well as from the children, and at the same time, encourage self-help seeking behavior among the youth. Also included in the strategic action plan is a training for adults, specifically for teachers and community leaders, on how to receive and respond to disclosures coming from children. It also calls for annual review of reporting channels, how effective these reporting channels are, and if they are really being used by the community and by the children. The children would really want to be to have continuous involvement in policy making as well as in the implementations of programs and and projects. So the strategic action plan also called for involving children in creating advocacy materials, specifically those advocacy materials that are targeted for children. The strategic action plan also calls for the establishment of a children's advisory group. And this will ensure that they will have continued participation in the implementation of the strategic action plan. Now, how did we go about the consultations of the children? So what we did to safeguard the children in all these consultations is that we engage with local civil society organizations as well as with UNICEF in the identification of children who will become participants of these consultations. So they were able to gather children coming from different backgrounds, including children with disabilities and children coming from indigenous communities. And when we were doing the consultation, the initial period would be consultation with adults from government agencies, civil society organizations, as well as other stakeholders. And then we reserve a full two days for children alone. And in those two days, we made sure that it's scheduled on a weekend so we will not disrupt classes. We also made sure that the children were accompanied by adults, either their parents or guardians. Even the hotel was briefed on how to safeguard the children while they are in the hotel. And we also allowed the children the space to respond in their own way. So it's just not providing them with questions, asking them to make presentations. They're free to choose how they want to express their ideas. We also provided them with several art materials. So some children decided to do some clay art, some children decided to do some presentations, just the normal regular presentations, while others also had videotape dramatic scenes as presentation. And as part of the safeguarding environment, we also provided guidelines or ground rules to the children that they have to commit to. So those are just some of the safeguarding and institutional arrangements we did in order to ensure a safe participation of children during the consultations. Now, what I realized during all these four consultations, because I was present in all these consultations, is that how much wisdom the children have these days. I realize they have so much more wisdom than I did at their age. And being digital natives, they are so way ahead of us adults in understanding and navigating the online world. So engaging with children specifically on OSAIC is not just important, it's really a necessity for us. And how do we intend to move forward with this Activity. And then we intend to continue engaging children in policy making, in creating materials, and in seeking feedback on reporting. And one of the concrete next steps that we want to do is to establish a sustainable children's advisory group, because this advisory group would ensure that their participation would be meaningful and continuous. For us, because they help shape the plan, they help plant the seeds, they should also help us in judging the progress and also help us in evaluating whether or not the activities we have embedded in the strategic action plan were actually being implemented. So engaging with children is not really a very easy task. It takes a lot of commitment, it takes a lot of creativity, takes a considerable amount of resources but because of this experience we believe that we need to continue engaging with children and as our commitment from the National Coordination Center against and CCI that is one of the activities that we will continue to do and in fact when we proposed for a legislation on revising our current anti-OSAC and CISA and law. We also embedded some of their outputs in that proposed bill. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Executive Director May. You basically shed light on the fact that in the digital age, we are forced to partner with the digital natives. and the example of the Philippines is very inspiring. Thank you very much for your intervention. Our final panelist joining us online this morning is Ms. Gisela Baur. She is a Brazilian federal public defender and currently serves as secretary for strategic actions at the federal public defender's office. She's a member of Brazil's National Human Rights Council and has extensive experience in human rights advocacy. She previously served as secretary for prison system and as deputy regional human rights defender in the state of Para, Brazil. She also served as a public defender in Bahia, working in criminal justice, prison enforcement, and children's and youth rights. She holds a master's in contemporary legal theories and is pursuing a PhD in human rights and citizenship at the University of Brasilia. Ms. Bauer, you bring us to the question of prevention and to the children and communities most directly affected. Much of your work has examined why children and young people in Brazil are recruited by organized crime and by criminal groups. and what can prevent it? What do children, families, and affected communities understand about child recruitment that justice institutions may be missing? From your experience, how can their knowledge and participation shape more effective prevention efforts? You have the floor, Ms. Bauer.

Good morning, everyone. I'd like to greet the Chair, His Excellency, the Ambassador of Germany, the moderator, Dr. Alexandra Martins, my fellow panelists, the distinguished representatives of member states, and the representatives of international organizations and civil society here today. It is an honor to represent Brazil's Federal Public Defender's Office in this space. Before answering the question, I need to share a few numbers because without them, we risk speaking about children recruited by criminal groups as if this was a statistical accident, and it is not. In Brazil, in 2025, more than 2,000 children and adolescents were victims of intentional violent deaths, nearly six lives a day. Today, Almost 12,000 adolescents are in contact with the juvenile justice system in the country. Drug trafficking was the second largest cause, 28%, one of the worst forms of child labor. 89% of them are under the most severe measure our law provides, closed facility detention. 73% are black or mixed raced. 94% are boys. These numbers have a color, and the same data show this with precision on another front. In 2025, Brazil recorded the highest number of deaths from police intervention, almost 7,000 people, most related to the war on drugs. Black people face a 3.5 times greater risk of dying in these operations than white people do. In the prison system, the picture is similar over time. This is not a statistical coincidence. It is the system working exactly as designed. To understand why this happens, I turn briefly to idea of colonialism and racist, naming the elephant in the room. As Abdias do Nascimento, one of Brazil's greatest intellectuals, taught us, racism is not a misunderstanding or individual prejudice. It is a state policy, a political, economic, legal, and cultural structure created and maintained by whiteness. In Brazil and other countries around the world, the collective trauma of colonization never ended. It renews itself today as coloniality. the lasting structure of colonial rule, producing dehumanization whose effects remain very much alive. The child recruited by criminal groups in Brazil today is a direct product of this structure, not because he or she was born for it, but because the system was built more than 500 years ago, still decides every day who gets to dream of a future and who is treated as a threat before committing any act at all. It is on this foundation that I want to answer this panel's question. In Brazil, rather than addressing the root causes of recruitment process by criminal groups, we focus solely on the commission of the crime of the adolescent, treating the adolescent as the problem. With that, we are looking at the tip of the iceberg and missing the opportunity to tackle the roots of the problem, understanding what led the adolescent to become involved with criminal groups and, at times, to infringe penal law. The justice system usually is responsible for addressing the result of this process, lacks both a common understanding of its roots, cause, and the tools to understand why the adolescent came into contact with it. The justice system addresses the cause, the case, the arrest, the hearing, the commission of a crime, and that's the end of the story. Instead, children, families, and communities affected by the threat of child recruitment are first-hand experts in the root cause of the problem. They are the ones who know well what are the risk and protective factors, and they know how to name with precision what we in the justice systems cannot see. I'd like to recall the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child, as well as Brazil's constitution and legislation, recognize the child's peculiar condition as a person in development, the principle of integral protection and the best interest of the child. So every child under the age of 18 is a subject of rights entitled to integral protection and to this think with treatment because of their incomplete maturity. Precisely because their development is still incomplete, children carry a natural vulnerability that demands high attention against abuse, exploitation, and negligence. Based on data, on my own experience as a public defender, the children who enter the justice system after committing a crime face an aggravated vulnerability. This vulnerability, it is not only from the peculiar condition as a person in development, but also from the extremely vulnerable backgrounds marked by poverty, trauma, state violence, discrimination, social exclusion, a lack of opportunities, and no real prospects for the future. This is precisely what makes them easy targets. The central lesson is understanding the trajectory of recruitment, the approach, the promise, the bond, the coercion happens long before it ever reached the justice system. In our office, accumulated experience shows something fundamental. A recruited child's status as a victim cannot be erased by the fact that they were instrumentalized and used and exploited to commit an unlawful act. If we treat the child only as an alleged offender, we lose exactly the information that they, their family, and their community hold about why and how the recruitment happened. and we lose the chance to prevent the next child from being the next victim. So the design of the strategies and measures must always include protocols, mechanisms, actions, and to capture the information that those most affected children and women have. Women in affected communities recognize the risk of recruitment before any institution does. And this too has a structural explanation. It is not a coincidence. In Brazil, more than half of the households are now headed by women. And the country today has more than 11 million mothers raising their children alone. Data shows that these mothers face a double penalty in the labor market. They earn less and have access to lower quality jobs. precisely because they alone carry both the household's income and the care of their children. This is what we call feminization of poverty, and it's precisely on this terrain that recruitment finds room to grow. This brings me to a warning I consider central. There is a real risk of turning listening to women into making women responsible. If the state has historically failed to reach a given territory, no quality schools, no protection, no opportunity, and then holds the mother accountable for the outcome, the state itself should have delivered, we're not protecting anyone. We're simply passing the bill to whoever has the least power to pay it. Cases of recruitment of children by criminal organizations call for an approach grounded in qualified listening and coordinated network procedures. In this regard, we can draw on the experience of protocols and projects already developed in Brazil in partnership with the United Nations, such as PAT-P and the Fair Play project. Building on those experiences, One proposal is to create a reporting channel with a specific procedure for listening and intervention. Within the juvenile justice system, the first step is to recognize the children as a victim of recruitment. From there, a listening procedure should be applied with a dual purpose, to protect the child and map the recruitment. This information that should shape the response and determine which service institutions need to be engaged. I like to remember that is well known in Brazil that responding to child recruitment is a key initiative to dismantle transnational organized crime. Above all, prevention means guaranteeing adequate conditions for children development and future and mapping the forms of recruitment used by criminal groups. It also requires detecting and disrupting illicit financial flows, especially those linked to crimes against children. To the United Nations, to member states, and to the institutions present here, I leave this invitation that the prevention of a child recruitment by criminal groups start being dealt exclusively as a security-related issue and start being treated treat it as what it truly is, a historical debt that is still unpaid. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Ms. Bauer, for shedding light on the fact that preventing and responding to child recruitment is a key initiative to dismantle transnational organized crime. Thank you for shedding light on the need of evidence-based also in relation to how to tackle this phenomenon and give voices to those that are the real experts, the first-hand experts in relation to this. Mr. Chair, that concludes the presentations from our second panel. I would hand back to you to open the floor. We have about 20 minutes.

Thank you very much. And with this, we open the floor for the interactive part of this session. Whom can I give the floor? I cannot recognize the plate.

Hi. Thank you very much.

My name is Arely Perez.

I am the medical director of Medical Impact, an international organization working with vulnerable communities through health and peacebuilding.

From our experience working with.

Women and vulnerable communities, we have learned that prevention begins long before a person enters the justice systems. Very often, the first point of contact is a health service or a community organization. That is why We believe that strengthening the connection between health communities and justice is essential to identify violence and other vulnerabilities early, reduce risk, and connect people with protection and support. And as we have heard today, these responses must be built with communities, not only for them. From our experience, health service and community organization are often the first point of contact for women and vulnerable communities. How can we formally integrate these actors into prevention and justice strategies while ensuring meaningful community participation?

Thank you very much.

Thank you for this. And I see another There is a hand raised in the rear part of the room that I cannot read. Would you take the floor, please?

Thailand, please.

Thailand, you have the floor, please.

Thanks, Chair. My name is Pol. Captain Piyaratkoon. I am Director General of the Department of Probation of Thailand. Thailand will come to focus on this workshop on tailored support and community participation. In Thailand, the Department of Probation apply an individualized approach through our Jai Prom program. We assess the need and circumstance of each person under probation and use this information to develop and individualized rehabilitation plan and provide appropriate support. Community participation is also an important part of our approach. For 40 years, we have developed a nationwide network of volunteer probation officers who work with the probation officer to support rehabilitation and reintegration within community. Our experience shows that individualised support and community participation should go hand in hand. We believe this is a perfect people-centred approach to justice. Understanding the needs of each person while working with community to support rehabilitation and reopening. Thank you.

Thank you. I don't see any further requests for the floor, so I give the floor back to the moderator for possible reactions.

I would like to invite our panellists to any reaction. you may have in relation to the two comments we heard. Mr. Ripley, you have the floor.

Thanks very much. If I understood the first kind of intervention and question, it was about how we can strengthen the integration of the health system with the justice system. I might give an example of the Canadian context where we with a few of our provinces are working on funding community justice centers and so in our province of Ontario for example the way that that is working is by co-locating certain services wraparound services health services mental health services addiction services in the courthouse and so the way that this is working is When an accused in certain contexts is basically, you know, summoned to court, they have the ability to kind of choose which path they want to go on. So they can kind of go on the traditional justice path. go through that process if they so wish or, with the approval of the court, basically divert into the wraparound services that are made available in that courthouse. So I think that is a good example of the way that we are seeking to really integrate some of those health and mental health services in the traditional justice system. again, recognizing the value of diversion in certain types of cases.

Thank you, Mr. Ripley. Yes, Executive Director May.

So to answer the question, so in the Philippines, the way we integrate committee participation, there are actually several ways. One is we have local councils, and these local councils against violence local councils for violence against women and children is that these local councils are composed of different sectors coming from different government agencies as well as participation of civil society organizations and the local government units. So these local councils also come up with their localized plans and programs in protecting women and children. Second, we also have now the revised protocol on the case management of children that are neglected or abused. And this case management protocol calls for a multidisciplinary approach in handling cases involving children. And we are currently also, the Department of Justice is also currently rolling out this revised protocol in the different parts of the country. And another thing is the establishment of one-stop shop centers, which also calls for a multidisciplinary approach in handling cases involving children. We also have what we call the Women and Children Protection Units located in hospitals, in different hospitals across the country. So it's also a multidisciplinary approach in handling cases involving children whenever they are brought to hospitals. for checkups or for medical legal cases. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Chung, would you like to intervene?

Thank you. I can also offer a civil society approach to that. So one of our other programs is called the Speak Now Learning Partner Program, where we provide capacity building to service providers and frontline workers, such as health workers and services, in order to be able to, first of all, have an accurate understanding of, in our context, forced marriage and what the law says and what the referral pathways are. and also to build their skills in terms of actually having these conversations with their organisation, with other health workers, and also with the communities they service. So the intention behind this model is it's more of a train the trainer model. So we recognise that we are just one organisation and we can't possibly reach all the communities that need this support and this information. And we also recognise that a lot of community organisations and also on the ground services have existing trust and rapport with these communities and these can be leveraged in order to advance education and to also connect people with support. So potentially something similar could be adapted to different local contexts.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yeah, thank you. And next on the speakers list is the United States. You have the floor, please.

Thank you again, Mr. Chair.

I had a question either for Commissioner May or for any of the panelists, but as you were describing the interesting work to engage and consult children in different groups in regions around the Philippines or in other experiences that have been described engaging children, Has there been much resistance or concern by the parents or family members? Is there a process or good practices in terms of engaging them so that they're comfortable with and clear the way for the children's participation in those exercises?

Thank you for the question. So we did not really encounter any resistance or problem with the parents. probably mainly because we also involve the local civil society organizations who have been continuously engaging with these children. So they were the ones who selected who the children participants will be. And also because during those consultations, the children were accompanied either by their parents or by their guardians. So the I guess the parents felt comfortable allowing the children to participate in the consultations.

Thank you. Are there any further requests for the floor? I'd also like to encourage individual experts to participate. Now I see Ghana, you have the floor.

Thanks for the opportunity. What I see cuts across most of the programs has always been funding. Through all the beautiful papers that we present all the time, one major inhibiting factor has always been funding. How do we collectively get the message across to the stakeholders to prioritize this? Because it is very, very serious.

May I suggest that each of the panelists deliver a one to two-minute intervention to answer this very critical question? Mr. Ripley, please.

Sorry, could I just, it was prioritization of.

Funding.

So, prioritization of funding in the sense of participation for access to participate in justice processes.

Working as effectively as possible.

So I think certainly what we see in Canada is general recognition increasingly of the types of interventions that are working in particular regions or communities, and that often is by community-based organizations, whether it's working with children. We've talked a lot about children. And so, for example, in the Canadian context, there is a whole network of child and youth advocacy centers that are specifically designed to work with children and their families who may have experienced abuse and exploitation. We increasingly have community-based organizations working with the Black community, for example, who, again, have heightened contact with the justice system. We have Indigenous community-based organizations based in various Indigenous communities throughout Canada. you know, their biggest challenge remains accessing kind of sustained operational funding. And so, you know, one of the challenges they face is from different levels of government, it is often still project-based funding. And so, again, I think we certainly hear from stakeholders in the Canadian context the importance of you know, making operational funding available to those kinds of community-based initiatives on a go-forward basis, if, you know, prevention and restorative justice processes are to be, you know, as effective as they can be. And I think, again, we increasingly understand that that part of the justice system is important in addition to kind of the more traditional aspects of incarceration and police, et cetera.

So I can only speak from my experience as the recipient of funding through our organization. So all of our forced marriage projects are funded through the Australian government grants. But what we've learned from that experience is it really does define how long term we can plan for a project, because if we are only receiving funding for a year, then we can only measure our impact and plan for impact that can only occur within 12 months, which in the grand scheme of trying to prevent an embedded crime like forced marriage, that's really not much for us to actually create an impact in the long term. So I think we do have to be quite flexible with how we use the funding we do have. So maybe looking at what can realistically be achieved within a shorter timeframe. So instead of trying to prevent a crime from ever happening, from trying to change an entire community's perspective on a topic that's as complex as forced marriage, for example, instead of doing that, maybe the goal really is just to plant that seed, to actually start having conversations and even just to create safe spaces. One of the key outcomes from our projects is it wasn't so much about changing people's values or beliefs. That's not what we're trying to do. What we were successful in was actually, for the first time, creating a safe, respectful space where people could feel heard for the first time and could actually safely engage with this topic. And that is what can then create more longer term impact in the future if we do receive more funding. So I think it's just being more strategic about what we can achieve and also having those outcomes being formed by people with lived experience who understand those communities and who can help to allocate those funds in the most effective way.

I understand the concern about funding and so far as involving especially children in consultations because in my experience I realize how much considerable resources we need to engage with children because it's not as straightforward as engaging with adults. You also have to think about safeguarding duties, inviting one children is sometimes equivalent to having additional two or more people to be with them. So the way we do this is to engage with partners who already have existing engagement with children. Also another one is to engage with established youth organizations or agencies that deals with children. For example, in the Philippines, we have the Philippine National Youth Commission. But really, I think the the best way to have a sustainable engagement of children is to really embed it into our laws, to institutionalize youth advisory groups or children advisory groups, because that will give us the leverage of sustainable funding, not just from our partners, but from the government itself. Thank you.

Thank you. Any further requests for the floor? I see a raised hand. You have the floor in the back.

Yes.

Thank you for your recognition. I'm a Sheen, a student from New York University, Abu Dhabi, and I am.

A part of a delegation of my university's collaboration with the Global Initiative for Transnational Organized Crime.

And the question that I had for the panelists.

Was, what part of your intervention proved most difficult to implement in practice?

And could you please share your learnings with us in this room?

The acoustics is a little bit bad in this room. Could you please repeat the second question that you had?

Yes, my question was that.

What part of your intervention proved most difficult to implement in practice? And could you kindly share your learnings in the room with us?

Mr. Ripley, please.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the question. I think, you know, one of the challenges is always just the political process. And, you know, as folks in this room know well, it's not always super linear and structured, right? And so I think certainly the challenge, you know, on the public service side is being ready to go when the political window opened, you know, so I I highlighted something like the Indigenous Justice Strategy, which was developed over years, and we actually had the fortunate liberty of having that sustained engagement with Indigenous partners. But sometimes the political window is open, and politicians and parliaments want to move on something, and you need to give advice quite quickly. And so I think part of Part of the challenge is moving into a mode of constantly having that relationship building in place and those relationships with stakeholders, civil society and interested partners. Sometimes, when you're asked to produce something quite quickly, it's only going to be by having those relationships nourished and sustained that you are going to be able to give the best policy advice possible, because otherwise you won't always have time time for, you know, the long consultation window, which, you know, you do have in some cases. But again, sometimes governments want to move quite quickly.

So for our project, the main question that we grappled with was how do we, with our limited funding and the limited timeframe of six months, how do we actually create an impact and engage with such a sensitive issue like forced marriage that is so intertwined with complex social and cultural factors. And to actually respond to this, we came from that place of humility and actually being open to learn. So we weren't trying to have all the answers and we didn't need to. We just had to ask the community what is actually important to you that we haven't considered or what would make you feel heard and respected in this process. Because I think we all agree that there is this need for meaningful participation, but what does meaningful actually look like for each person? And what we really learned was the need to actually treat people with lived experience as experts. So they're not just storytellers and not just a project for us to work on. We need to recognise them not just for their experiences, but also for the resourcefulness and the resilience that they demonstrated in terms of overcoming those experiences. So looking at what strategies they use with their communities to negotiate difficult conversations or looking at what strategies, for example, a young woman might have used to protect herself from a crime, those can be really impactful in terms of guiding our future responses and also how we direct a community project.

In my experience, I think one of the most difficult or challenging part is to really how to make the engagement with children sustainable and continuous. When we are in the government, sometimes we are so overwhelmed with so much things to do, so much things to do in a very quick manner. and that it's easy to sometimes forget that we have to also engage with our children before proceeding to any policy making or to any other actions that would impact the lives of children. So, what we are very fortunate that we have several child advocate partners. Uh they're the ones who poke us, you know, remind us that there's really a need to engage children in every step of the way. So, I think really important that we are able to come up with an institutionalized mechanism for sustainable and continuous engagement of children.

Thank you. Are there any further requests for the floor? Yeah, in the back here, the floor.

Hi.

My work is primarily based in the United States. And I'm wondering, a lot of you talked about different efforts for recruitment or intervention and prevention. And a lot of the recommendations are focused on community-based approach and lived experiences. And a lot of the work that-- in the work that I do, I observe a lot of distrust. with medical systems, criminal justice systems, right, or even community-based organizations because of the risk and vulnerability that exists for women and children, for example, in gang violence.

And so I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for, you know, sort of approaching strategies of trust for.

Across different social service and criminal justice systems.

Yeah.

In the interest of time, I would like to suggest that only one panelist answer. Mr. Ripley, I would invite you to answer. Thank you.

That's a hard question, building trust. takes time and consistency. I think what I might highlight is, you know, what comes to mind listening to your question is, since 2010 in Canada, we have had something called the Federal Victim Strategy, which is a very kind of dedicated, intentional strategy to build a community of practice among victim support organizations across the country. And so, you know, that strategy includes the legislative framework under Canada's Victims Bill of rights. It includes funding. So we, through the Department of Justice, make $50 million available every year to fund organizations working in the victim space. And then, you know, some very hardworking folk on my team every year organize National Victims Week, which is really designed to bring organizations together working in this field to share practices, to build that community, because I think we do recognize, to your point, we have to take advantage of that collective effort and the strengths and wisdom of different organizations and expertise of different organizations. That's just an example, I think, of how we are the Canadian context, very intentionally trying to build and nourish and support that community of practice, recognizing it's not going to be the government that has the answers to all of the challenges facing victims and survivors of crime.

Yeah, thank you very much. This is an interesting and very interactive discussion, but unfortunately, it's now time to conclude the work. of the second session of the workshop. And I'd like to invite the moderator to briefly wrap up the discussion and summarize the salient points of the discussion.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to everyone who took the floor. That brings our discussion to a close. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all our panelists again. And with your permission, Mr. Chair, I will take a few minutes to draw the morning together before handing back to you to close the session. Mr. Chair, distinguished delegates, dear colleagues, let me try to draw together what we have heard this morning. First, lived experience is expertise. Our three panelists showed us from three different points that people who have been through a system or who have served within it and alongside their communities know where it helps and where it fails in ways that no institution can establish from inside. Professor Salter reminded us that the evidence points the same way. Where survivors take part, prevention and response improve. Second, participation changes outcomes when it's built into the way institutions work. Our second panel and the video statements gave us a practical picture, a program designed around the people most affected with their safety, privacy and control over their participation protected, government department that consults deliberately reaches the people who do not usually answer a consultation and reports back on what it did with that with what was heard survivors councils in the Philippines children and young people taking part in the drafting of a national strategic action plan with the safeguards and arrangements that made it possible. And in Brazil, prevention shaped by the children, families, and communities who understand recruitment best, with the responsibility for protecting children remaining with the state as a key initiative to dismantle transnational organized crime. Third, what this means for the report of this workshop. including what were the recommendations of what came out yesterday. The recommendations that have emerged also this morning are practical ones. We will make sure that they are reflected in the report of the workshop and carried into the plenary under agenda item three. I would like to close by thanking our distinguished panelists, Ms. Akuffo, Commissioner Gatiti, Mr. Adamo, Ms. Chung, Mr. Ripley, Executive Director May, and Ms. Bauer de Albuquerque. Our video contributors, Professor Salter, Mrs. McDonald, and for the brave movement, Ms. Rivera, and our co-organizers at UNAFE. I would like also to thank the Secretariat and Conference Services, and all of you for your contributions this morning. And most importantly, thank you, Mr. Chair, Ambassador Vaughan, for your leadership. Mr. Chair, I now hand it back to you. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Alexandra. It was really a pleasure to work with you and with all panelists. Also from my side, thank you very much. I also like to thank the audience for this truly interactive discussion. And now, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, We have reached the conclusion of Workshop 1. Let me add that the report of the workshop will be brought to the attention of Committee 1 on Wednesday, 30 September, in the afternoon, and adopted by the plenary in the morning of Thursday, 1 October, according to the proposed organisation of work for the Congress. The report will consist of the proceedings as well as the summary by the Chair, containing a summary of the deliberations and the Chair's conclusions and recommendations drawn from the discussions. In the preparation, I will rely on the assistance of the Secretariat and on the summaries of salient points of the discussions made after each panel by the moderator of this workshop. I will also rely and I'm thankful for this on the support of the rapporteur of the workshop in ensuring the precision and clarity of what is to be reflected in the report. And as mentioned before, Mrs. Alexandra Martins of UNODC will make a short presentation on certain points raised during this workshop at the opening of agenda item 3 in the plenary. We will resume work in Committee 1 for the conduct of Workshop 3 on Monday afternoon. And with this, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you.