The 2017 Children of Prisoners Europe (COPE) “Not my crime, still my sentence” campaign was very successful! Thanks to the motivation and work of members across the European Union, a variety of events and awareness-raising activities were organised throughout the month of June that featured the voices of children with a parent in prison. Promoting UNCRC Article 12, one of the main goals of the 2017 campaign was to give children a space to communicate their views to prison directors in order to improve the prison visiting experience.
To gather the opinions of children, COPE members (in the Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, England & Wales, Italy, France and Sweden) held workshops and discussion groups with children to talk about prison visits. Some of these children then filled out expression cards during or after a visit to prison. Children were asked to respond to questions that included: “What do you like about prison visits?”, “How do you feel when you visit your parent in prison?” and “What would make visiting better for you?”.
The aim of these opinion cards was to move away from the use of negative language often used when discussing issues surrounding the prison visiting environment for children. With more of a focus on positive experiences and forward-thinking solutions, the COPE campaign aims to highlight good practice initiatives and to focus on solutions co-constructed by prison directors, staff and children. The expression cards used during the campaign will help to better inform prison directors and policymakers as to what children of prisoners would like to see during their visits to prisons. Over one hundred children across Europe participated in filling out expression cards, and their responses can be found here.
In addition to the expression cards, campaign posters were used to raise awareness in schools, while several members organised awareness-raising campaigns through social media. REPR (Switzerland) held a drawing competition and Families Outside hosted a film screening. Telefono Azzurro (Italy) published a journal (pages 12-13) highlighting COPE and the campaign, while FFP (Norway) encouraged prisons to make waffles for the children visiting and provide other activities to improve their experience. REP ASBL (Belgium) prepared reports on children of prisoners during the month of the campaign, and Probacja (Poland) gave expression cards to 20 schools for educators to use to teach on the subject of children with imprisoned parents. Solrosen (Sweden) worked with children to create shoebox models of prison cells as a way of illustrating changes they wanted to see. Exodus (Netherlands) gave their expression cards to the director of The Custodial Institutions Agency of the Netherlands during an agency meeting and NIACRO (Northern Ireland) created a video showcasing children’s voices on how to improve prison visits. All in all this year’s campaign saw a number of creative approaches put into place, and was quite encouraging. COPE would like to thank all members for their activities and achievements during the campaign, making this year’s campaign a fruitful one!