Help 2.1m Children of Prisoners in Europe to Cope

With your invaluable support, we are well underway in our preparations for the 2017 edition of our awareness-raising campaign “Not my crime, still my sentence”, launching in June.

Children separated from a parent in prison frequently suffer emotional, social and economic difficulties. Without support, they are vulnerable to these and other difficulties—exclusion, bullying, stigma, behavioural and mental health issues. School performance can slip. We are reaching out to schools right across Europe to ensure that these children receive the adequate, timely and meaningful support they need to prevent them from falling further between the cracks.

And this is thanks to you.

Thanks to your donation, our campaign this year will be focusing on raising awareness in schools, both among general students and teachers but also directly among children impacted by parental imprisonment. COPE is currently working on the child support packs, lesson modules and visuals. Eye-catching posters have already been designed, with the varying emotions of children with imprisoned parents in mind, and have been sent to our 84 partners to be distributed in schools across Europe and farther afield.

Many children with imprisoned parents do not know that there are people to whom they can turn for support. Reasons for this can be diverse: they do not know that these types of NGO exist; their non-imprisoned parent or caregiver is not aware of the support and so they are not encouraged to ask for it; they may not even ((not)) see a need for support. These simple campaign visuals will increase our reach to children with imprisoned parents. We will be able to provide them with support in the form of resources, psychological and psychosocial help and, above all, a safe place to express their feelings.

The poster  aims to provide an easy way for children to make contact with our teams who are working in or near their schools and to show that they can talk to a school staff member they trust about their experiences. With the generous outpouring of support we have received, we are now able to increase the number of multilingual posters we can provide to schools and broaden our reach in schools across Europe. Translations into other languages are underway, and once received, we will add QR codes to the posters so that children who prefer to learn more online can connect right away.

One of our Swedish member organisations, Solrosen, has launched a further programme in a new part of Sweden and has decided to focus specifically on schools, using COPE’s “Not my crime, still my sentence” campaign. Thanks to the support from our donors, this means that they will be able to reach more children with imprisoned parents in Sweden than ever before.

We would like to thank you again for your support. If you haven't subscribed to our email list, do so here to keep up to date on our other projects.

With our gratitude,

Children of Prisoners Europe