Better Care Network highlights recent news pieces related to the issue of children's care around the world. These pieces include newspaper articles, interviews, audio or video clips, campaign launches, and more.
This article argues that poverty is a major driver of family separation in Pakistan, forcing many parents to place their children in orphanages or care institutions not out of choice, but as a survival strategy.
This BBC News article reports that the forced deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia has been classified by the United Nations as a crime against humanity.
The article explains that SOS Children’s Villages UK is planning a significant strategic shift, including moving toward becoming an independent organization separate from the international federation it has long been part of.
The UK government has announced a £126 million investment to better support kinship carers through a new pilot program in seven areas of England.
This article notes how a pan-India study revealed that thousands of children of incarcerated parents (CoIP) are left invisible and vulnerable within India’s criminal justice system despite Supreme Court mandates intended to protect their rights and well-being.
A Balkan Insight investigation highlights that the Czech Republic’s child protection system is struggling to safeguard children at risk due to systemic problems including a culture that has historically tolerated corporal punishment, uneven implementation of protections across regions, gaps in cooperation among social services, police, and schools, and insufficient training and resources for professionals to detect and prevent violence against children.
This article describes how UN human rights experts have expressed serious concern about historic illegal inter-country adoptions in Guatemala in which at least 80 Indigenous children were reportedly taken from an institution called Hogar Temporal Elisa Martínez after being captured or forcibly disappeared between 1968 and 1996, and later adopted abroad without proper consent or legal safeguards.
This article reports on Swedish adults who were adopted from Colombia decades ago and are now searching for their birth mothers after discovering that many international adoptions — involving around 60,000 children including nearly 5,700 from Colombia — were marred by irregularities such as false documentation, coerced consent, and children declared orphans when they were not, leaving adoptees without accurate identity information and grappling with psychological impacts of lost heritage.
This article describes how a new bipartisan U.S. congressional report finds that children with mental health needs are often incarcerated in juvenile detention centers across the country—sometimes without having committed any crime—because community-based mental health care and placement options are severely limited or unavailable.
This article describes how French authorities have issued a rare international appeal for victims and witnesses in the case of 79-year-old former educator Jacques Leveugle, accused of raping and sexually assaulting 89 children across five continents over more than five decades while working in roles that brought him into contact with young people — including as an educator in a children’s home in Bogotá, Colombia — highlighting concerns about long-term abuse in settings where children, including those living without family care, can be particularly vulnerable.