Improving the Safety of Civilians: A Protection Training Pack

This training pack from Oxfam GB is intended to help humanitarian workers to improve the safety of civilians being subjected to violence, coercion, or deliberate deprivation. According to the Introduction: "These are the two sides to protection: first ensuring that humanitarian action does not expose civilians to further risks, and second, pro-actively using humanitarian action improve the safety of civilians. Although the two can never be entirely separated, this training pack focuses on the latter: designing programmes that aim to improve the safety of civilians being subjected to violence, coercion, or deliberate deprivation."

The pack includes modules on:

• What is protection?
  
• Planning a programme
  
• Mainstreaming protection
  
• Programming for protection

Topics include international standards for civilian protection, objective-setting, indicators and monitoring, humanitarian negotiation, co-ordination and alliance building, reducing the risk of sexual violence, and advocacy for humanitarian protection. As detailed here, there are three types of threats: violence, coercion, and deliberate deprivation. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) try to improve the safety of people by doing one or more of the following: reducing the level of threat; reducing the level of vulnerability; and reducing the amount of time exposed to the risk.

According to the document, international human rights, humanitarian support documents, and refugee law is the backdrop for protection, and monitoring and educating people about their rights can be useful in protection programmes. However, this document sets out an additional set of options, as stated here: "Some actions can be used to reduce the level of threat against civilians: advocacy to persuade others to protect; capacity-building to help them protect; and ‘presence’ to deter potential perpetrators. Others can be used to reduce people’s vulnerability or exposure to threats: the provision of assistance or information; and helping civilians have a stronger ‘voice’ to negotiate or advocate for their own safety."

Actions include the following:

"To reduce the threat:

• Advocacy: convincing those with power to protect people or getting others to put pressure on them to protect people
  
• Capacity-building: supporting the authorities to protect civilians
  
• Presence: using physical presence to deter attacks on civilians (can also reduce time exposed to the risk)

To reduce vulnerability:

• Assistance: directly providing services or goods so that people can avoid threats (can also reduce time exposed to the risk)
  
• Voice: helping people to negotiate their own safety
  
• Information: providing impartial information to help people make informed decisions about their safety."

The document names and describes the protections offered by various entities and to whom they might be offered. These entities include: the United nations (UN) Security Council; other states; the government of the state in which protection is needed; non-state armed actors; the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); NGOs; and communities, families, individuals, and tribes. It lists actions that can be used by each of these groups and by individuals to obtain safety. It gives instruction on steps to analyse a situation by gathering and managing information, to assess risk based on the information gathered - including reducing or managing the risk, and to develop a framework, using a programme management cycle (PMC) approach for mainstreaming protection and protection programming, and coordinating with other agencies.

Improving the Safety of Civilians outlines all activities, with detailed trainers’ notes, timings, resources needed, and handouts, feedback, and evaluation sheets. Colour cards and posters are included at the back of the book. An accompanying CD-ROM contains the full text of the manual including the cards and posters for users to print. The materials are designed for use by experienced facilitators, who have some knowledge of protection issues, to train emergency-response teams. Activities can be adapted for participants with different levels of knowledge.