Australia

This article from the Atlantic explores the impacts of school shutdowns, social distancing, and lockdowns on children during the COVID-19 pandemic and how supportive caregivers can mitigate the harms of social isolation.

This article from the Chronicle of Social Change discusses how, in the United States, "states and counties that have come to rely on interdisciplinary legal representation – a model that includes social workers and peer advocates working alongside attorneys to fight for parents and children – have overcome the new barriers imposed by the pandemic to help families reunify."

This online event will launch the Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children, which advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

This report provides key recommendations from three roundtable discussions about how to support permanency with kin, relational permanency, and successful older youth adoption.

Cracks in the System is a new report from Lumos that is the first of its kind to systematically explore the links between institutional care and child trafficking in Europe.

This longform investigative article from CBC News explores the case of Serenity, a four-year-old girl who died in care, through an extensive review of court documents and interviews to seek to understand Serenity's life, and "what went so terribly wrong."

"Foster care [in the UK] is in a “state of emergency” as the number of referrals rockets while the number of people looking to take children in has halved during the coronavirus pandemic," according to this article from the Independent.

This article from Child Rights International Network (CRIN) outlines some of the risks faced by children in residential care institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic and how governments should be responding during – and after – this pandemic.

In this second part of the Lancet Group Commission on institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children, international experts in reforming care for children identify evidence-based policy recommendations to promote family-based alternatives to institutionalisation.

This paper reviews the literature on child institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation from a global perspective. This review included a survey of historical and cultural trends and estimates of current numbers of children in institutional care, a systematic review and meta­-analysis of developmental sequelae, and a largely qualitative review of factors found to predict individual variations in such outcomes.