Most of the time, the work we’re doing should be enough to convince others to help.

When it comes to preventing child sexual violence, that should be true more than in many other cases.

Yet, it isn’t always so.

Spain was struggling with a fragmented and retraumatising child protection system.

Save the Children Spain  wanted to change this.

Instead of only exposing the failures, they offered a solution: a child-friendly, multidisciplinary protection model known as Barnahus.

Originally developed in Iceland, the Barnahus model brings police, prosecutors, doctors, and psychologists together under one roof, providing coordinated, trauma-sensitive support and reducing the burden on children.

This is how Save the Children used it in their context:

To make it successful, simply importing the model wasn’t enough. Working with partners in Iceland, Denmark, and the PROMISE Barnahus Network, they co-designed a version tailored to Spain’s legal, social, and political context.

Using this, they then created a detailed roadmap for regional governments, showing exactly how to adapt and implement it step by step.

Why was this so important?

Regional governments often lacked the time, capacity, and technical know-how to develop a new system from scratch. Save the Children’s approach was to make it easy for governments to act — providing clarity, guidance, and a structure that each region could own while maintaining fidelity to international standards.

They aimed for a balance between structure and local ownership, providing research, facilitation, technical advice, and links to the Barnahus network, while stepping back from delivery.

This gave regional governments confidence to lead, aligning with Spain’s decentralised governance structures.

By 2025, 13 Barnahus centres are established or in development across five autonomous communities, serving hundreds of children and setting a new gold standard for child protection in Spain.

⚖️  Broader scaling lesson:

Sustainable change often depends on knowing where you sit in the ecosystem, and making it easy for others to adopt your solution by understanding their barriers, pressures, and priorities.

Save the Children Spain’s story and the ones from other organisations scaling prevention are in more detail in our report:

→ Preventing Child Sexual Abuse at Scale: What It Takes 📘