Quick Facts About Protection

• Protection refers to efforts that help keep forcibly displaced people safe, uphold their rights, and reduce risks such as violence, exploitation, detention, family separation, and exclusion from services.
• Protection can include child safeguarding, legal support, documentation assistance, survivor support, referrals, and community-based safety measures.
• Children, women, older adults, people with disabilities, and those traveling alone often face heightened protection concerns during displacement.
• Protection is not only about responding after harm occurs. It also includes prevention, community support, and helping people access information and services safely.
• Protection is closely connected to education, health care, emergency assistance, and advocacy.

Why Protection Matters

For people forced to flee their homes, safety cannot be taken for granted. Displacement often exposes families to violence, exploitation, detention, family separation, discrimination, loss of documentation, and barriers to basic services. Children, women, older adults, people with disabilities, and those traveling alone may face even greater risk.

Protection matters because it helps safeguard human dignity and human rights during every stage of displacement. It can mean helping a child stay safe, ensuring a family understands its legal options, supporting survivors of violence, or responding quickly when people are newly displaced and in urgent need. Without protection, access to education, health care, livelihoods, and long-term stability becomes far more difficult.

What JRS/USA Means by Protection

At JRS/USA, protection is about helping forcibly displaced people live in greater safety, dignity, and hope. It includes efforts that reduce harm, defend rights, and strengthen the ability of individuals and communities to respond to risk.

This work is rooted in accompaniment. JRS begins by listening closely to displaced people and responding to the realities they face in camps, urban settings, border regions, host communities, detention settings, and emergency contexts. Protection is not only about responding after harm occurs. It is also about preventing abuse, strengthening community support systems, improving access to information and legal pathways, and helping ensure that humanitarian response respects the full dignity of each person.

How JRS Supports Protection

JRS supports protection through rights-based, community-centered programs that respond to immediate risks while helping build safer conditions over time. Depending on the context, this can include legal orientation, case management, referrals, child protection services, safe spaces, psychosocial support, survivor-centered responses, and emergency assistance.

Because protection risks vary by place and circumstance, JRS works at the local level with communities, families, local partners, faith communities, and service providers. This proximity helps identify what people need most and how support can be delivered in ways that are practical, culturally appropriate, and grounded in dignity. JRS also recognizes that effective protection must take age, gender, and other dimensions of diversity into account so that people are not excluded from support or placed at greater risk.

Key Areas of Protection Work

Child Protection

Displacement can expose children and adolescents to abuse, trafficking, exploitation, neglect, family separation, interrupted schooling, and recruitment by armed actors. JRS works with families, communities, schools, and local partners to help create safer environments for children and young people.

This can include identifying children at risk, supporting unaccompanied or separated children, strengthening family and community care systems, providing psychosocial support, and offering activities that help children regain stability and a sense of safety.

Legal Assistance and Documentation Support

Many displaced people face serious risks because they lack documentation or do not understand the legal systems around them. JRS protection teams may help people understand their rights, access legal information, navigate asylum procedures, renew documents, and reduce the risk of detention, exploitation, or exclusion from services.

Legal support is especially important for asylum seekers, refugees, and stateless people whose safety and future may depend on lawful status or documentation.

Gender-Based Violence Risk Mitigation and Survivor Support

Women, girls, men, and boys can face heightened risks of gender-based violence during displacement. JRS works to help reduce those risks through awareness, referrals, safe spaces, community-based prevention, and services that center the dignity and needs of survivors.

Protection efforts may also include training, case support, and coordination with health, legal, and psychosocial service providers.

Community-Based and Emergency Protection

In emergency settings, people may need immediate support to survive and stay safe. JRS responds in crisis situations with practical assistance such as shelter, water, sanitation, essential items, and other forms of support that reduce exposure to harm.

Protection in emergencies also means identifying urgent risks early, supporting women and children who may be especially vulnerable, and helping communities strengthen their own capacity to keep people safe during periods of instability and displacement.

Related Programs

Protection is closely connected to other areas of JRS/USA’s work that help displaced people rebuild their lives in safety and dignity.

Education

Education can provide structure, stability, and safer environments for children and young people affected by displacement.

Health Care

Protection and health care are closely linked, especially for people facing trauma, injury, chronic illness, or barriers to services.

Emergency Assistance

In crisis settings, emergency assistance helps reduce immediate threats by meeting urgent needs such as shelter, water, and essential supplies.

Reconciliation

Protection also includes helping people rebuild trust, strengthen communities, and recover dignity after conflict and displacement.

Advocacy

Advocacy helps advance humane policies and defend the rights of refugees, asylum seekers, and other displaced people.

Frequently Asked Questions About Protection

Sources

• JRS/USA: Protection
• Jesuit Refugee Service: Protection
• UNHCR: Global Trends Report 2024
• UNHCR: Refugee Statistics
• Global Protection Cluster: Global Protection Update