APP 6: Survival, development, protection and participation
In our training experience we still find very useful, especially in emancipating the notion of needs into the notion of rights, the very basic clustering of principles and provisions in the four interrelated groups of survival, development, protection and participation.
By putting the child in the centre, the four domains are serving the purpose of highlighting the fundamental system proposed by the CRC. A series of concentric circles around the child provide an optimal visualisation of the various levels of responsibilities and action that could be developed to promote the Convention. At the same time this visualisation proposes an ecological map representing how the degree of response and recognition of rights depends both from micro and macro factors.
Our experience provided us many occasions to demonstrate the efficacy of this map also as a means to connect the CRC with human development theories aiming at demonstrating how the quality of human development depends from the relation of the individual with the micro and macro systems (see Bronfenbrenner).
Before getting into more sophisticated proposals, we would strongly suggest to start our training by developing with the participants this very basic iconography. The sequence that we adopt is to ask trainees to share all needs that they could imagine a child has. The second phase is to cluster these needs in the four domains, which are also representing the contents of the Convention. The third phase consists in determining concentric micro to macro layers of action, which are connecting systemically the four domains.
