LONDON, (Reuters) – The Haiti earthquake offers an  opportunity to improve the protection of children in a country  where they have been routinely abandoned, trafficked and  exploited, a senior United Nations official said yesterday.

Susan Bissell, head of child protection at U.N. children’s  fund UNICEF said increased attention and funding for Haiti could  help transform a troubling landscape for children in the  impoverished country.

She pointed to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia’s Aceh province  as evidence that an emergency can be used as a launch pad for a  better child protection system.

“We’ve seen systems strengthened in countries where they  were weak before,” Bissell said in an interview. “I think it is  possible (in Haiti).”

In Haiti, 50,000 children were in institutional care — for  example in centres for abandoned babies or orphanages — before  the earthquake, according to the government.

Some centres had questionable standards and the entire  sector was unmonitored, UNICEF says. Large numbers of children  in the centres had families who visited them but had given them  up in the hope of providing them with a better life.

Before the earthquake, UNICEF, working with the government  and local partners, had already put systems in place to improve child safety.

They had set up a community-based network of volunteers, and  child protection brigades had been created within the Haitian  national police.