By Fernando Restoy
Building Trust Before Trying to Solve 
The first task in Child Protection is often not to advise, correct, or investigate. It is to create enough emotional safety for the child to speak honestly.
This means slowing down, observing carefully, and paying attention to what emotions may be present under the surface. Is the student angry, ashamed, frightened, confused, numb, or hopeless? Is the behavior masking fear? Is silence hiding something more serious?
Through emotion coaching, staff can move from reacting to behavior to understanding emotional experience. Instead of asking only, “What is wrong with this student?” we train ourselves to ask, “What might this student be feeling? What might this behavior be protecting? What happened that made school feel unsafe?”
A central part of this is building a secure base. Deep, nonjudgmental listening establishes a bond of trust, creating an environment where children feel safe enough to share vulnerabilities and report when they are being harmed.
When students feel that an adult is trying to understand rather than judge them, trust begins to grow. And that trust often becomes the doorway to protection.
Using Emotion Coaching to Make the Invisible Speakable
Many of the students we support have never developed the habit, or the permission, to talk about emotions. So one of the most important parts of the work is helping them build emotional language.
In one-to-one support, students are helped to identify what they are feeling, connect emotions to events, and reflect on the consequences of different decisions. Disclosure is never forced. Instead, they are accompanied with calm, structured questions that help them make sense of their experiences.
This matters enormously. A child who cannot name fear may only show aggression. A child who cannot express sadness may simply stop coming to school. A child who feels invisible may say nothing until the situation has become severe.
Emotion coaching helps transform emotional chaos into something understandable. It gives students a way to reflect instead of react, and it gives adults better information to determine what kind of support or safeguarding response is needed.
Using Nonviolent Communication to Reduce Shame and Strengthen Connection
In vulnerable environments, direct confrontation often creates more resistance, especially with students, parents, or educators who already feel blamed, ashamed, or overwhelmed.
With students, this means listening without immediately moralizing, and helping them express what happened, what they felt, and what they needed. With parents, it means exploring family stress, conflict, or neglect without turning the conversation into accusation. With teachers, it means reflecting on relational breakdowns in ways that invite responsibility rather than defensiveness.
This approach is especially important in cases involving bullying, family conflict, or emotional abuse. In these situations, if adults react only with blame or punishment, the root causes often remain untouched. But when communication is grounded in empathy, clarity, and accountability, the possibility of repair becomes much stronger.
Bringing Emotional Learning into the Classroom
Beyond case management, emotional learning needed to become part of daily school curriculum, not only something reserved for students already in crisis.
That is why we implemented of Social and Emotional Learning curricula across 17 classes, equipping 420 students with core protective skills such as self-awareness, resilience, empathy, and responsible decision-making.
This shift has been deeply meaningful. Many students who had never spoken about emotions before are now participating in lessons where they learn to identify feelings, reflect on triggers, listen to others, manage conflict, and think more carefully about decisions. In other words, emotions are no longer invisible. They are becoming part of the language of the classroom.
That change is not superficial. It is protective. When students learn that emotions can be named, understood, and discussed safely, they become more likely to seek help, more able to manage tension, and better equipped to build healthy relationships.
Intervening Earlier, Before Pain Becomes Crisis
One of the most promising developments of the program has been the creation of an early-intervention model for low-risk students before concerns escalate.
This model combines structured check-ins, rapid case classification, and coordinated emotional intelligence and relationship-based support. Rather than waiting until a student becomes a severe case, we intervene earlier when warning signs first appear: reduced attendance, disengagement, emotional withdrawal, repeated conflict, or signs that school is beginning to feel unsafe.
The results have been very encouraging. The model achieved 98.94% retention, compared with 95.29% in non-pilot classes, improved attendance among older students, and is now being adopted school-wide.
This pilot reinforced a key lesson: emotional intelligence is not only useful in response to crisis. It is most powerful when used early, before damage deepens.
What Three Years in Cambodia Have Taught Me
Over these three years, one lesson has become clear: trust is not an optional extra in Child Protection. It is one of its central mechanisms.
Emotional intelligence is not abstract. In practice, it means noticing emotional signals, listening carefully, asking better questions, helping students understand themselves, and supporting adults to respond with empathy and structure. It means turning relationships into protective factors.
Coaching matters because many children have never had an adult sit with them calmly enough to help them understand what is happening inside them. That simple act can change how a student sees themselves, their choices, and their future.
Nonviolent Communication matters because protection work often happens in emotionally charged environments. Families may feel ashamed. Teachers may feel criticized. Students may expect blame. Communication that preserves dignity while addressing truth is not a luxury; it is often what makes cooperation possible.
SEL matters because children should not have to wait for crisis before learning how emotions work. They need spaces where reflection, empathy, expression, and emotional regulation are taught openly and consistently. For many of our students, this has been the first time in their lives that emotions were treated as something important, legitimate, and worthy of care.
Above all, I have learned that some of the most serious cases come to light not because we pushed harder, but because we built trust first. This is the quiet power of emotionally safe spaces. When students feel safe enough to speak, we move from assumptions to understanding, and from reaction to prevention.
This is just one part of the more than 300 cases of bullying, family conflict, domestic violence, and sexual abuse that we have been able to respond to with individualized support over the past three years.
Meeting children’s need to feel seen, heard, and protected strengthens safeguarding and reduces dropout. In our largest school, the dropout rate fell from 14% in 2023 to 10% in 2025.
When trust is present, conflict can become connection, silence can turn into dialogue, and risk can become an opportunity to protect.
That is perhaps the biggest lesson from this work in Cambodia: emotional safety is not secondary to protection. In many cases, it is the condition that makes protection possible at all.