On 24 March, a meeting of the Commission on Minors' Affairs of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus was held to consider the issue «On measures taken to prevent unlawful behaviour of minors by state organs, institutions and organizations engaged in the prevention of neglect and delinquency of minors». The chairperson of our organization Alexey Ananenko took part in it.
The head of the main department for the protection of law and order and public safety prevention by police of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Roman Melnik, spoke at the meeting about the established tendency to reduce the level of juvenile delinquency and expressed concern about the spread of the swatting movement in the country.
Deputy Minister of Education Alexander Kadlubay spoke about the efforts of the governing bodies and educational institutions in the implementation of preventive measures. He devoted a special place in his speech to experience in adapting structured methods to assess the risks of further criminalization of children with whom Individual Preventive Work (IPW) is carried out. This practice has been realized for a number of years by Ministry in cooperation with charity public association «World Without Borders». Today this work is being carried out in 25 regions of the country. For example, only last year, the experience of implementing the project demonstrated the effectiveness of individual preventive work using the proposed forms and methods: in the selected regions, the share of adolescents who repeatedly committed offenses during the period when the IPW was conducted with them decreased by almost 2 times in 2020 (from 7 , 5% to 4%) compared to a group of children with whom the work was organized in a traditional way. To date, the approaches proposed have been effective and need to be mainstreamed across all agencies. Especially in a situation when a teenager commits crimes and offenses. In connection with the entry into force of amendments to the Administrative Offenses Code and the Code of Procedure and Enforcement of Code of Administrative Offense of the Republic of Belarus, these approaches become especially relevant. They will make it possible to individualize decisions made in relation to adolescents, fill them with specific content and make the rehabilitation process transparent and controlled.
Bogdan Elena, First Deputy Minister of Health, presented activities to prevent the use of psychoactive substances.
Kovalkov Valery, Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Protection, noted that in order to organize effective work for adolescents during the holidays, the list of organizations, where they can be employed, has been expanded.
In the draft decision of the Commission on Minors' Affairs, it was proposed to include an instruction to the Regional and Minsk City Executive Committees to disseminate in all educational establishments the experience of use of structured methods of assessing the risks of further criminalization in preventive work (based on the results of the project of the Ministry of Education and CPA «World Without Borders » implemented in 25 regional sites).