We stand for children, worldwide, who have suffered restraint and seclusion abuse in schools. Listening to the unheard voices and recognizing that, united, we can and must make change ~ internationally ~ to deliver our children the Human Rights they deserve.
We advocate to achieve the end of children being injured physically and psychologically. We are collectively attempting to knock down doors and to highlight human rights abuses and practices that have fallen short of providing our children an education delivered with dignity, respect, and humanity.
Our moral code: We see our children’s world as all it that should and can be and we have the audacity to challenge an ethos that does not help but instead harms. We do so knowing that, with change, a bright future ~ free from death, physical injuries, and the mental abuse that comes along with the practice of restraint and seclusion ~ is possible. We want to teach the general public the fact that these abuses last a lifetime.
Physiological and psychological traumas ~ indeed, lifelong injuries ~ are created within the current education system. Abuses are allowed and, in many cases, are funded by tax payers’ money. Often, many parents do not know this is allowed or that it is happening until their child is injured or physiologically/psychologically traumatized for life.
Our ambition is to learn of these abuses; to understand the root causes; to aid past, current, and potential future victims; to advocate for our children; and to inform and educate the public by exposing the international torture inflicted within school systems, daily, with little care or concern for the child who is being harmed. We are passionate about highlighting the daily deluge of media reports covering the restraint and seclusion abuses that take place with alarming regularity, whilst engaging with parents, disability advocates, legislators, human rights organizations, and charities to find a road towards achieving a total ban upon the barbaric use of dangerous restraints and seclusion. The time for change is now and we are ~ now ~ globally united to make that change happen.
The international Coalition Against Restraint and Seclusion is about resilience and determination and is based upon the ingrained belief that we can ~ and must ~ create change. We follow in the footsteps of those who have fought for decades to change the system and to eliminate the practices that are being allowed to persist within our school systems. It is on the shoulders of those brave campaigners and advocacy giants that we stand and whom we are proud to have within the ICARS family.
We reject complacency, slow-moving bureaucracies, and we challenge those who believe that abusing society’s most vulnerable ~ due to ignorance and a lack of knowledge ~ is okay . We collectively aim to do what is right by children worldwide, unafraid of the tasks that are not easy, from out of our collective skills, determination, and desire to end this terrible abuse.
ICARS: Creating a global network of advocates and change-makers ~ sharing ideas and advances in understand the needs of our children ~ to transform limited existing legal protections and to instill a human-rights-based framework to protect our most valuable and vulnerable. We work to shift the existing paradigm: we will see an end to the a world willing to turn a blind eye away from the abuses visited upon the world’s children. Our legacy shall be to provide our children with the bright future that they deserve; one based upon respect and dignity.