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annual report 2012
naturally be informed about the Children’s Division (organisations working
with children’s rights)? How should the general public be informed?
The target group of the Children’s Division
The Ombudsman’s Children’s Division is to monitor that the rights of the child
are respected. In other words, the Division considers children and their conditions. However, is it a division for all children, and does it have particular
obligations towards certain groups of children?
Any child may have its rights infringed or at least need an assessment of
whether its rights have been infringed. It was therefore soon obvious that we
should not distinguish between young and older children, whether they are in
a difficult personal situation or other individual circumstances. The Children’s
Division is for all children.
Nonetheless, there are groups of children in a vulnerable situation, whose rights
may be under pressure. The Ombudsman has special obligations towards the
very weakest citizens in society. These include children who live in residential
institutions – especially children placed in care. The Children’s Division therefore has a particular obligation towards these children.
Easy access for children
The Ombudsman is not used to processing complaints made by children and
young people themselves. We recognise that the way to the Children’s Division is long for this group, and indeed we have not considered receiving a large
number of complaints from children and young people an indicator of success
in itself. In relation to major issues such as children’s rights, it is natural that
children’s interests are handled by adults. Nonetheless, it was important that we
were able to provide facilities for any children who do find their way and need
to complain to the Ombudsman themselves and that we advertised this possibility as well as possible.
We were aware that children and young people primarily communicate via
digital platforms such as mobile phones, tablets and computers, but to adapt as
well as possible to children’s reality, we had to investigate how other institutions
communicate with them. We therefore contacted the Danish National Council for Children, Children’s Welfare (a Danish organisation offering the Child
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