Themis Foundation Raises Alarm Over Child Protection Risks Following Venezuela Earthquakes

In the hours after two major earthquakes struck northern Venezuela, the images were familiar: crumbled walls, families sleeping in plazas, volunteers handing out water and blankets. But beneath the visible destruction, humanitarian organizations are warning of a second, less visible catastrophe — one that unfolds quietly and disproportionately affects the most vulnerable. Children, already exposed by the loss of shelter and supervision, are now at heightened risk of trafficking, exploitation, and family separation.

The Themis Foundation, a human rights organization working across Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean, is raising the alarm that disaster recovery must go beyond food, water, and medical care. It must also protect. “The focus right now must be on protection, prevention, awareness and rescue,” the organization said in a statement urging regional governments and relief agencies to act before the window for prevention closes.

A disaster within a disaster

Earthquakes do not distribute their harm equally. When a community is displaced, the systems that ordinarily keep children safe — schools, extended family networks, neighborhood watch groups, health clinics — are themselves damaged or dismantled. Children lose the daily rhythms that made them visible. They lose the adults who would otherwise notice if something was wrong.

Humanitarian researchers have documented this pattern across decades of crisis: after a natural disaster, the risk of child trafficking and exploitation rises sharply, often within days of the initial event. Criminal networks are quick to exploit the chaos, using the disruption of documentation systems and the desperation of families to move children across borders under false pretenses.

The scale of the current crisis is significant. According to preliminary humanitarian assessments, roughly 68,000 children require humanitarian assistance in the affected corridor, more than 1,500 families have been displaced, and over 2,300 people have been injured across the two major events.¹ These figures, the Foundation emphasizes, are not abstractions — each number represents a child whose safety now depends on the speed and quality of the response.

Why children are most at risk

The risks to children in the aftermath of an earthquake are not theoretical. Temporary shelters, often crowded and under-resourced, place children in close quarters with strangers and reduce the ability of parents to maintain supervision. When families are separated — by the chaos of evacuation, by injury, by the loss of a home — children become invisible to the very systems designed to protect them.

Damaged neighborhoods and reduced lighting create unsafe communities after dark. Strained services mean that social workers, child protection officers, and community volunteers are stretched thin, sometimes across multiple shelters at once. And in the confusion that follows any mass displacement, traffickers can present themselves as relatives, aid workers, or employers offering help.

The Themis Foundation stresses that none of these risks are inevitable. Each one corresponds to a protection measure that, if implemented early, can dramatically reduce a child’s exposure to harm.²

A framework for protection

The Foundation’s recommendations are built around a simple principle: protection must be designed into the response from the first day, not added on after the emergency has stabilized. That means creating child registration and screening points at shelters, deploying dedicated child protection teams, and ensuring that accommodation is not only available but actively monitored.

It also means investing in awareness. Parents and guardians need clear, plain-language information about how traffickers operate during disasters. Communities need Spanish-language outreach and workshops. Television, radio, print, and social media campaigns can reach families who would otherwise never encounter the guidance. And border monitoring — often the last line of defense — must be strengthened in the days and weeks following a major event, when movement across borders is both most necessary and most difficult to verify.

The Foundation also calls for sustained investment in the services that follow the emergency phase: victim services that expand protection and recovery support, youth programs that keep children engaged and visible, and family reunification programs that help reconnect displaced families safely. These are not short-term interventions. They are the infrastructure of a community’s long-term recovery.

A regional responsibility

The earthquakes in Venezuela are a regional event, and the response must be regional as well. The Caribbean’s shared borders, shared languages, and shared vulnerability to natural disasters mean that a child protection gap in one country can quickly become a trafficking route to another. The Themis Foundation is calling on governments across the region to coordinate — not only on aid, but on the protocols, data sharing, and cross-border vigilance that protection requires.

There is still time to act. The window for prevention is narrow, but it is open. With coordinated child registration, trained protection teams, safe and monitored shelters, and a public that knows what to watch for, the region can meet this disaster with the response it demands — one that protects children not as an afterthought, but as the measure of its success.