Children not guilty of parents' crimes

When someone is sentenced to five, 10 or 20 years in prison, only he or she knows who they have left behind. Almost always there is a family waiting and living anxiously on the outside, and many times there are children who take this separation as a punishment. There are also parents who prefer to hide the fact that they are in prison from their children and ask their families to tell them that they are working outside Catalonia. “The worst thing for children is a sense of being abandoned,” says Montse Mariné, a doctor and member of the board of the NGO Niños sin Barreras, along with Elías García and Antonio Kastner Quiñonero.

The organisation began about ten years ago, when Kastner helped a woman coming out of the prison and with other colleagues saw that something needed to be so that the children of prisoners, almost always forgotten, would not fall into the trap of being excluded from society. Niños sin Barreras now includes 20 volunteers from different professions, from educators to entrepreneurs, who accompany between 14 and 20 youngsters when they visit parents in prison.

The organisation works in coordination with the Department of Justice to make this work in Catalan prisons and volunteers sign a contract formalising their assistance. Those adults acting as guardians of the children also sign a contract allowing the children to visit the parent concerned.

Although the visits are challenging, Mariné says that ““The children are very smart, they know what to say and what not in visits ... and parents, you create a space for interaction and trust between the volunteer and the child.” The trained volunteers also supervise the visits to make sure that there is no attempt to manipulate the children.