Morocco’s newly established National Agency for Child Protection creates a window of opportunity to integrate developmentally-sensitive priorities into standards of care in Child Protection Centers. Establishing adolescent autonomy must be a priority if CPEs wish to effectively address adolescent deviance. 

While opponents of Morocco’s newly established National Agency for Child Protection (ANPE) doubt its capacity, its creation has engineered momentum for Moroccan Child Protection Centers (CPEs) to integrate developmentally backed research into clear standards of care for their youth. Across Morocco, youth are placed by court order in one of 20 CPEs when their physical or emotional security is threatened or when they commit an offense against the law. However, despite intended purposes and potential to support and reintegrate these youth, the system has historically provided unstandardized nutritional, educational, and psychosocial care across different CPEs. 

ANPE introduces distinct groups of child protection facilities as well as new standards for facilities across the board. Closed centers, for youth in conflict with the law, will fully restrict youth’s engagement with the outside world, while open centers, for youth placed in CPEs because of unsafe home environments, will provide residents opportunities to participate in outside programs while still being supervised by the agency. More generally, proponents of........

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