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 reports that New Zealand’s Child Protection Investigation Unit—established to investigate serious harm to children in state care and identify systemic failures—is being significantly hindered by poor information-sharing between government agencies and partner organizations. Internal reports reveal that delays, limited access to critical data, and lack of visibility into other agencies’ work have slowed investigations and risk undermining the unit’s effectiveness and impact.
This UK government announcement outlines a newly launched review into the deaths of vulnerable young people leaving the care system, prompted by evidence that a disproportionately high number are dying at a young age. The review—led by Ashley John-Baptiste and Clare Chamberlain—will examine individual cases to understand the circumstances and identify gaps in support, particularly during the transition to adulthood when many care leavers lose consistent social services.
This article from UNICEF describes how Turkmenistan has initiated the development of its first National Programme on Child Protection and Justice for Children, marking a significant step toward strengthening its systems to safeguard children’s rights and well-being. The article highlights how the programme aims to establish a more coordinated and comprehensive framework for preventing violence, improving access to justice, and ensuring child-friendly services across sectors such as social welfare, education, and law enforcement.
This CNN article examines how increased immigration enforcement in the U.S. is leading to more children being separated from their parents and, in some cases, placed into foster care. It explains that as detentions and deportations rise, some states are changing laws and policies to prevent children from entering the foster system by allowing temporary guardianship arrangements instead.
This article explains that adoption rates in Australia have fallen to historically low levels, based on new data showing a long-term and continuing decline. It highlights that only a small number of adoptions now occur each year, dropping significantly over recent decades, with most adoptions involving children already known to the adoptive family, such as foster or kinship carers, rather than infants or intercountry placements.
This Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights article warns that escalating violence in South Sudan is driving a severe and growing child trafficking crisis. It explains that ongoing conflict, widespread attacks on civilians, and massive displacement—both internally and from neighboring Sudan—are creating conditions in which children are highly vulnerable to exploitation.
This article examines South Korea’s decades-long international adoption system as a major human rights scandal, arguing that the country’s past role as a leading “baby exporter” was driven by state policy rather than purely humanitarian motives. It explains how, from the post-Korean War era onward, the government promoted overseas adoption as a cost-saving alternative to building domestic social welfare systems, enabling widespread abuses such as falsified records, coerced or fabricated parental consent, and the misclassification of children as orphans.
The article reports that the ongoing US-Israeli war in the Middle East is having a severe and long-lasting impact on children across the region, with hundreds killed and thousands injured and over a million displaced, particularly in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran.
This article reports on a lawsuit and family’s account that a 3‑year‑old immigrant girl was allegedly sexually abused while in U.S. federal custody after she was separated from her mother at the U.S.–Mexico border and placed in a foster home.
This article describes lives of street children in Kinshasa, where thousands of children survive in extreme poverty and face daily violence, exploitation, and neglect. It highlights how many are driven onto the streets due to family poverty or accusations of witchcraft, exposing them to abuse, drug use, and sexual violence.