Listen to the silence of the child: Children share their experiences and proposals on the impact of drug use in the family

About the author

Dr Corina Giacomello is a consultant to the Pompidou Group. In this role, she conducted the research for and is the author of the 2022 publication Children whose parents use drugs – Promising practices and recommendations.

Dr Giacomello is a professor at the Autonomous University of Chiapas, Mexico. She is an academic and international consultant with expertise in gender studies, children’s rights, criminal justice and prison systems and drug policies. She has more than 15 years of experience in advocacy-oriented research and development of legal, judicial and public policy proposals at the national and international level.

Her lines of research include women deprived of their liberty, adolescents in conflict with the law, children with incarcerated parents and women who use drugs. She has published extensively on these topics.

Preface

The Pompidou Group provides a multidisciplinary forum at the wider European level where it is possible for policy makers, professionals and researchers to exchange experiences and information on drug use and drug trafficking. Formed at the suggestion of French President Georges Pompidou in 1971, it became a Council of Europe enlarged partial agreement in 1980 open to countries outside the Council of Europe.

On 16 June 2021, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted the revised Pompidou Group’s statute which extends the group’s mandate to include addictive behaviours related to licit substances (such as alcohol or tobacco) and new forms of addictions (such as internet gambling and gaming). The new mandate focuses on human rights, while reaffirming the need for a multidisciplinary approach to addressing the drug challenge which can only be tackled effectively if policy, practice and science are linked.

To better reflect both its identity as a Council of Europe entity and its broadened mandate, the group changed its official name from the Co-operation Group to Combat Drug Abuse and Illicit Drug Trafficking to the Council of Europe International Co-operation Group on Drugs and Addiction. In 2023, it encompasses 41 countries out of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, Mexico, Morocco and Israel, as well as the European Commission.

The year 2021 marked the launch of a new project concerning children whose parents use drugs, followed by a publication in 2022, Children whose parents use drugs –Promising practices and recommendations.

This project was proposed in response to the invitation to the Pompidou Group secretariat to contribute to the discussions on the Council of Europe Strategy on the Rights of the Child for the period 2022-27.

This strategy, adopted in 2022, includes in its objective Equal opportunities and social inclusion for all children the action 2.2.6 Mapping, analysing and providing guidance on the situation of children suffering from addictive behaviours and children of parents using drugs.

In 2022, the project on children whose parents use drugs continued with research in three parts: i. qualitative research based on interviews with children whose parents use drugs and with women who use drugs; ii. collection and analysis of actions and programmes targeted at people who use drugs and their families; and iii. analysis of children growing up in families affected by drug dependence and other conditions of vulnerability.

The results are also included in two other volumes in this series: We are warriors – Women who use drugs reflect on parental drug use, their paths of consumption and access to services and Children and parents affected by drug use –An overview of programmes and actions for comprehensive and non-stigmatising services and care.

Over the following pages, we aim to make children’s experiences visible, ensuring they are listened to, thus breaking the silence that surrounds the impact of parental drug use on children.

The children’s voices are expressed with delicacy, introspection, firmness and sometimes confusion or uncertainty. Their voices are reproduced with an awareness that only by listening to children and feeding back the results to them can an effective, human rights-based, participatory children’s rights agenda be transformed into action.

Chapter 1

Introduction

" When I was younger, it was difficult for me because I lived with my parents and they were both addicts and from the time I was 6 years old I took care of my sister: I made her dress to go to school, or I looked for food for her because we didn’t have anything to eat.

Regina is 16 years old and lives in Mexico City. Her mother is currently undergoing outpatient treatment at Centros de Integración Juvenil (Youth Integration Centres).¹ Regina, her younger sister Valentina and their mother, Sonia, participated in the 2022 phase of the project Children Whose Parents Use Drugs implemented by the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe (Pompidou Group hereinafter).

Children Whose Parents Use Drugs is a human rights-oriented project and reflects the Pompidou Group’s mission to provide knowledge, support and solutions for effective, evidence-based drug policies, which fully respect human rights.²

The project started in November 2020 as a response to the Council of Europe invitation to the Pompidou Group to provide input to the drawing up of the Strategy for the Rights of the Child (2022-2027). As a result of the collaborative and enthusiastic participation of 16 countries,³ between November 2020 and December 2021, the Pompidou Group developed a dedicated web page,⁴ two reports (Pompidou Group 2021a and 2021b) and an ISBN publication (Giacomello 2022) on the topic of children whose parents use drugs.

As a result of the Pompidou Group’s work, children whose parents use drugs are explicitly identified for the first time in the above-mentioned strategy, which outlines the action: 2.2.6 Mapping, analysing and providing guidance on the situation of children suffering from addictive behaviours and children of parents using drugs (Council of Europe 2022).

In the first two phases of the project (2020 and 2021), the international research focused on programmes and services at the national and local level in the participating countries, collecting and analysing practices in the fields of i. data gathering; ii. family and children-oriented services that take into account drug dependence; iii. drug treatment and harm reduction-related services that develop specific actions targeted at children with parents who use drugs; iv. services and actions targeted at women who use drugs, including those who are mothers; and v. services for women victims and survivors of abuse who use drugs and their children.

The reports Children whose parents use drugs: a preliminary assessment and proposals⁵ (Pompidou Group 2021a); and Children whose parents use drugs: report of focus groups held in February 2021⁶ (Pompidou Group 2021b), as well as the publication Children whose parents use drugs –Promising practices and recommendations⁷ (Giacomello 2022), include numerous recommendations on how to further develop and integrate the above-mentioned areas of intervention, provide policy makers and practitioners with examples of international experiences and foster collaboration between governmental and non-governmental national and local stakeholders.

Children whose parents use drugs (ibid.: 2022) also highlights the need to create spaces of participation for children with parents who use drugs and for women affected by drug dependence. This allows women and children’s opinions to be listened to, taken into account and have an effect on the services that address their needs directly or indirectly, in fulfilment of human rights standards and their inclusion in drug-related policies. The right of children to be heard and for their opinion to be taken into account, which is enshrined in Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, is one of the pillars of the current paradigm of children’s rights and is tightly linked to the rights of children to protection and provision.

Given the wide acceptance and enthusiasm regarding this project and its outcomes among the participating countries, agencies and actors, the Pompidou Group’s Permanent Correspondents (PCs) meeting held on 27 October 2021 agreed on a consultation in order to determine which countries were interested in the continuation of the project in 2022.

Eleven countries participated in the third phase of the project (February to December 2022) –Croatia, the Czech Republic,