How the Maldivian child protection system currently operates: which institutions are responsible for what, how cases move through the system from initial report to intervention, and where the procedural gaps are. Based on the Child Rights Protection Act (19/2019), the case management Procedure Manual used across the Ministry and FCSCs, and the Rogers, Ali & Naeem (2025) systems analysis.
CRPA Article 126 requires any person who knows or suspects child abuse to report to CFPS or police. Failure to report is a criminal offence carrying up to 2 years' imprisonment; failure to report for financial gain carries up to 5 years. Under the Domestic Violence Prevention Act, good-faith reporters are protected from civil and criminal liability where the report was made with reasonable belief of violence.
The 2019 Act restored a mandatory reporting obligation that had been absent since 2001, when a repeal of Penal Code Chapter 3, Section 72 inadvertently removed it – an 18-year gap during which reporting abuse was encouraged but not legally required.
Violence against children is often viewed as a family issue to be resolved at home, and victims and their families face stigma and shame from the community. The cultural norm of satr – the concealment of family faults – and the social cost of disclosure in small island communities compound under-reporting. Where the alleged perpetrator has gang, trafficking or extremist connections, cases may not be reported at all for fear of reprisal. When previous reports have produced no visible response from the system, the incentive to report again is undermined.
The case management Procedure Manual sets out a step-by-step process that CFPS and FCSC social workers follow, built around an Initial Assessment Screening, a Comprehensive Assessment Report and an Intervention Plan. The CRPA provides three types of judicial orders that can be sought at different points: Interim Assessment Orders (where an offence has been committed, an investigation is required and the parents or guardian have not consented), Protection Orders (temporary removal and placement with a state-approved person), and Supervision Orders (child remains with family under monitoring).
Multi-disciplinary working – bringing law enforcement, DJJ, CFPS, prosecutors and medical and mental health workers together for child abuse cases – is a commitment in the National Action Plan on Violence Against Children 2024-2028 rather than an established system. NAPVAC Activity 11.2.1 pilots a Multi-Disciplinary Centre led by the Maldives Police Service with the Ministry, DJJ, the Attorney General's Office and the Ministry of Health, from a 2024 baseline of none. Draft SOPs for collaborative working were developed by UNICEF in 2021, but a 2025 assessment found no established case conferences or consistent review meetings in practice.
At the national level, the Council for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (NCPRC), reconstituted in early 2020, brings together senior officials from the relevant ministries, police, the Prosecutor General's Office and civil society. Its members and its president are appointed by the President; it answers to the Minister and advises on implementation of the Act. At the atoll level, Child Protection Committees (CPCs) were intended to replicate this coordination function, but their current operational status is uncertain and they may no longer be active in many locations.
Separate data systems – the police-maintained Maldives Child Protection Database (MCPD), the FCPW offender database, the Ministry's ITHAA case management database, and NSPA's Social Protection Information System – do not communicate in real time. A child known to one agency may be invisible to the others. There is no formal coordination mechanism: the 2017 action plan identified its absence, and stakeholders consulted for the 2024-2028 plan again reported institutions working in silos. On outer islands, a single FCSC worker is the coordination mechanism, attempting to connect with untrained police, health workers, and teachers across dispersed island communities.
Children come to the attention of the system through several recurring scenarios, each with its own pathway:
All three orders must be applied for within five days of taking a child into state care, providing a safeguard against prolonged informal removal without judicial oversight. Article 95 of the CRPA grants the state power to remove children assessed to be in unsafe home environments and place them in alternative care. Rogers, Ali & Naeem (2025) describe an over-cautious approach that results in rapid removal of children from biological families into institutional care, owing to the lack of foster care.
As of March 2023, only 16 children were in foster care out of 187 in alternative care nationally. The remaining 91% were in residential institutional settings – the inverse of international best practice, which strongly favours family-based placements. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, children in Kudakudhinge Hiya and Aman Hiya were placed in nine smaller institutions with a capacity for 18 to 24 children each in different atolls; as of March 2025 these nine FCSC shelters have replaced the other residential institutions, leaving Fiyavathi as the only remaining central children’s state home. The underdevelopment of foster care reflects several compounding factors: absence of developed recruitment, assessment, training, and support infrastructure; the existence of informal kinship placements and private fostering arrangements outside the formal system; the Islamic prohibition on formal adoption (tabanni) meaning foster carers provide care without full legal parental relationship; a Foster Parent Allowance of MVR 1,000 per child plus MVR 500 per foster parent per month that is poverty-targeted, so that most foster families – assessed for financial capacity as a condition of fostering – are ineligible for it; and regulatory gaps, with the Alternative Care Regulation (2020-R-69) containing no provision for oversight and monitoring of placements, a child’s health plan, family support and preventative services, staff development criteria, or support for young people leaving care. The foster care panel established in 2012 was formalised by the CRPA and the Regulation on Reintegration (2020/R-30), in force from May 2020; post-placement support required by Section 27 of that regulation remains limited in practice.
Separate data systems – the police-maintained MCPD, the FCPW offender database, the Ministry’s ITHAA case management database, and NSPA’s Social Protection Information System – do not communicate in real time. A child known to one agency may be invisible to the others.
In 2023 the Ministry of Social and Family Development received and attended 2,936 cases, of which 1,278 (43.5%) were violence against children cases; negligence was the most common type (22%), ahead of sexual abuse (21%), physical abuse (19%), witnessing domestic violence (16%) and emotional abuse (11%). Prosecutions for violence against children brought by the Prosecutor General fell from 82 cases in 2022 to 61 in 2023 and 52 in 2024.
Complex politics permeates child protection at every level. If a perpetrator belongs to a politically connected family, a case may be leaked to media before police or CFPS complete their assessment, and intervention becomes a public spectacle rather than a professional process. If a perpetrator has gang or criminal connections, cases may go unreported entirely – social workers who have reported such cases have received death threats (Human Rights Watch 2023).
Section 52 of the Sexual Offences Act 2014 requires at least five of seven specified types of evidence, absent a Section 53 circumstance, to prove rape, sexual injury or sexual assault beyond reasonable doubt. Child sexual abuse is prosecuted under the Special Provisions Act to Deal with Child Sex Abuse Offenders (12/2009), which allows the court to accept a lower level of evidence; even so, the CEDAW Committee in 2021 urged the Maldives to amend both section 52 of the Sexual Offences Act and section 47 of the Special Provisions Act to remove excessive evidence requirements. Medical professionals have documented instances where doctors identify indicators consistent with sexual abuse but decline to state this in medico-legal reports, further limiting the evidential foundation for prosecution.
Family Court maintenance enforcement remains weak: the Maintenance Enforcement Unit is nascent and child support payments typically run eight months or more late. Approximately MVR 2 million in unclaimed maintenance payments were due to the Family Court in Male’ as of 2018, while around 10,000 families depend on child support and MVR 10 million moves through the system each month. Children going without court-ordered maintenance for years is a documented contributor to child poverty, particularly in divorced single-parent households.
The Children’s Ombudsperson, in office since July 2020, presented at the 2022 UNICEF-partnered Child Rights Symposium on inter-agency coordination. The office is a functional independent accountability mechanism within the child protection system, but the impact and uptake of its recommendations remain uncertain. The Presidential Commission on Child Rights Violations, established in February 2020 in response to public concern over tragic child abuse cases, audited case management within the Ministry, the cases investigated by the police Family and Child Protection Wing, and the child protection cases reported to HRCM; its audits highlighted coordination lapses among those agencies. The paradox of the office is that its monitoring objectives create additional reporting burden on CFPS workers already managing critical caseloads – workers in perpetual fear of being accused of negligence may adopt defensive documentation practices over genuine child welfare improvement.