The Ministry of Family and Social Services established a call center to reunite unaccompanied children with their families and started using the "DerinGÖRÜ" face recognition and matching software developed by TÜBİTAK.
Giving information about the work carried out on unaccompanied children after the earthquakes in Kahramanmaraş, General Director of Child Services, Musa Şahin, stated that as the Ministry, they carry out the process regarding unaccompanied children or those who have not yet been reunited with their families.
Şahin said that the staff they assigned to the hospitals where the children who were removed from the wreckage were treated continued their work.
Emphasizing that they take care of every need of unaccompanied children who come to hospitals, Şahin said:
“First of all, we ensured that our children in the existing institutions in the region were transferred to safer areas. We made our institutions ready for our children who could not reach their families due to the earthquake. We do not have any collapse or loss of life in our institutions in the earthquake area. These organizations continue their work. In communication with the Ministry of Health, we take care of our children who are still undergoing treatment or who have not been able to contact their families yet. In the next period, we have started the process of reuniting with their families and relatives. As of now, we have identified 762 children who are being treated at the hospital. With the call center we have created, we record the demands of our children from their families or relatives in our system. In line with the information received from the hospitals, we aim to reunite the children we have identified in which hospital or institution and their families.”
“Families call the call center to reach their children”
Noting that the "DerinGÖRÜ" face recognition and matching software developed by TÜBİTAK has been made available to the Ministry for the detection of unaccompanied children affected by the earthquake, Musa Şahin gave the following information:
“When they call our call center, we take all the information about children together with their photos and save them in the system. Employees at TÜBİTAK also scan social media and process their applications and shares into the system. Our friends in the field also upload the information they have obtained from hospitals to this system, and at the end of the day, we make matches in this system. When the system gives us the warning, we first contact the province in which our child is in the hospital. Our staff there provides the first contact with the family. Here, the matching of the system is not enough. In this process, we first ask for support from law enforcement for identification and make the necessary social investigations. After we have a definite opinion about this, we start the process of reuniting our children with their families. Thanks to this system, we have delivered 78 of our children so far. Unfortunately, we also had children whom we learned to have passed away during the process, but so far 78 of our children have been reunited with their families and relatives.”
“There is no separate foster family system for our children affected by the earthquake”
Musa Şahin, General Director of Child Services at the Ministry of Family and Social Services, stated that they received many applications for foster families after the earthquake, and continued as follows:
“We have been saying from the very beginning that we do not have a foster family system for our children affected by the earthquake. The foster family system is one of the family-oriented services of our ministry. We have not yet established a system for the children affected by the earthquake. Because we do not know at the moment whether these children have lost their families or not. Our first goal here is to continue this process and ensure that they are handed over to their families. Then, in order to remove the trauma caused by the earthquake on these children, we made all kinds of preparations with all our professional staff and psychologists to help our children get out of this traumatic process, and we are starting this process. Our citizens insist that they want to be a foster family. As of now, there are more than 200 thousand applications for a foster family. We currently do not have a foster family application for earthquake victims. We are currently using all our strength to reunite our children with their families and relatives.”
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