Child Freedom Index To ensure that no child is left behind by the framework for change as proposed in the respective chapters of the Global Study, the international community should make a joint effort towards the development of a Child Freedom Index. This should be driven by the shared methodology that allows for comprehensive assessment of existing legal frameworks, their implementation as well as impact on and perception by children. Only by these means adequate preventive and/or corrective measures can be identified. As the Global Study was able to identify numerous promising practices, the Child Freedom Index should not merely be a descriptive tool (assessing States’ compliance with international human rights law) but a prescriptive one, suggesting the most appropriate measures that should be implemented in a given country. In this regard, quantitative indicators should not be considered as a competitive exercise, but as a toolkit that can assist States in reducing the number of children deprived of liberty. This would require, in the first place, compiling an Atlas of Child Freedom that will collect major promising practices, including their regional (local) contexts. Only then, the identified practices can be assigned to the States based on their individual scores in the Child Freedom Index. The latter should take into account the following categories of variables: • Legal framework (e.g. minimum age of criminal responsibility, statutory regulations regarding maximum periods of administrative detention in the context of migration, existing non-custodial measures and community-based solutions); • practice (e.g. existing guidelines for personnel of detention facilities, de facto separation between adults and children as well as girls and boys, the number/ share of children released from detention or subjected to non-custodial measures); • voices of the children (e.g. children’s opinion on the conditions in the detention facilities, opinion on the treatment by the personnel of these facilities); • number (share) of children deprived of their liberty in each of the thematic areas analysed in the Global Study. As the Child Freedom Index should facilitate transfer of promising practices, it should be driven by the goal of achieving maximum comparability of data collected in various countries. Thus, the methodology should be flexible enough to accommodate various standards and approaches in documenting situations of deprivation of liberty. At the same time, the selection of variables should be driven by both gravity and availability. 43