By Fernando Restoy
A Mission Shaped by What Children Could Not Yet Say
My name is Fernando, and my professional path in Child Protection began in 2014, when I started volunteering at Pour un Sourire d’Enfant (PSE), supporting Cambodian children exposed to extreme poverty, drug addiction, sexual exploitation, and violence.
Working closely with students and families in post-conflict Cambodia, I witnessed how intergenerational trauma, domestic violence, neglect, and emotional abuse continue to shape children’s lives long after formal conflict ends. Many children grow up without emotionally safe relationships at home or at school. Over time, I came to understand something that has deeply shaped my work: material poverty is devastating, but the absence of emotional safety is often what turns hardship into dropout, vulnerability, and long-term harm.
Determined to respond in a more structured and meaningful way, I deepened my academic and professional training. I earned a Master’s degree in International Relations, became a Certified Emotional Intelligence Coach under the teachings of Dr. Daniel Goleman, and pursued further training in neuroscience, education, mindfulness, and Nonviolent Communication.
In 2022, I relocated to Cambodia to work full-time at PSE, transforming a long-standing commitment into a professional mission: building safeguarding systems that are preventive, emotionally grounded, and capable of restoring trust.
Today, my work focuses on designing and strengthening integrated Child Protection and education support systems within schools. I build preventive frameworks centered on early risk identification, structured case management, safeguarding protocols, multidisciplinary coordination, and strong family engagement. What makes our approach different is the deliberate integration of emotional intelligence, emotion coaching, and Nonviolent Communication into Child Protection itself. We do not see these as soft skills sitting outside safeguarding. We use them as practical tools to identify risk earlier, build trust faster, support children more effectively, and prevent harm before it escalates.
The Hidden Problem Behind Dropout
In many vulnerable contexts, children do not leave school only because of money. They often disengage because school no longer feels emotionally safe, meaningful, or connected to their lives.
At PSE, we work with children who face not only poverty, but also bullying, family conflict, neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, and, in some cases, sexual abuse. Many students carry heavy emotional burdens that adults around them may not immediately see. Some become quiet and withdrawn. Others become angry, disruptive, avoidant, or chronically absent. What may look like laziness, bad behavior, or lack of motivation is often a protective response to pain, fear, shame, or hopelessness.
This is one of the biggest lessons I have learned: children rarely say, “I am emotionally unsafe.” Instead, emotional distress appears through behavior, disengagement, conflict, poor attendance, silence, or refusal to participate.
When I arrived at PSE, I also saw that many students had never been invited to speak openly about their inner world. For many of them, emotions were not something to identify, express, or reflect on. They had never had regular opportunities to name what they felt, understand why they felt it, or experience an adult responding with calm curiosity instead of judgment. In such contexts, serious protection concerns can remain hidden for a long time.
Without trust, children stay silent. And when children stay silent, schools are forced to react only once harm becomes visible.
Turning Emotional Intelligence Into a Safeguarding Tool
At PSE, I designed and led a Child Protection and Student Retention Programme to strengthen safeguarding systems for vulnerable students and ensure continued access to education. The programme was built from the ground up, establishing systems for identification, referral, case management, risk assessment, and follow-up to detect and respond to children at risk of harm, disengagement, or dropout. It also involved recruiting, training, and supervising a multidisciplinary team of child protection officers and educators, strengthening institutional response systems across a school of 1,000 students.
Over three years, through structured screening, risk triage, and close coordination with families, teachers, and school leadership, our team supported more than 450 children facing protection and educational risks. We identified and responded to over 300 cases involving bullying, family conflict, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. These interventions achieved over 75% retention after three months and contributed to reducing overall dropout from 14% to 10%.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. What made these results possible was not only better systems. It was also the way we used emotional intelligence to make those systems more human, more trusted, and more preventive.