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.
The directors of Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) and Office of a Children’s Services (OCS) face a proposed class action lawsuit that alleges the state’s child welfare system has “long failed” those in foster care, in particular Alaska Native children.
Ukraine temporarily suspended international adoption for the period of the war, but is grateful to partner countries that give asylum to Ukrainian children, said the Verkhovna Rada, Commissioner for Human Rights Liudmyla Denisova.
The U.S. and Canada are facing a reckoning over their use of boarding schools to assimilate Indigenous children. A US government report released last week found at least 53 burial sites at boarding schools containing hundreds of graves, with officials expecting to discover thousands more.
Siret, a small Romanian town that borders Ukraine, is no stranger to attention. Just after the 1989 revolution, foreign journalists flocked there to reveal its grim story to the world. Under the Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu’s brutal regime, which forbade birth control and exacted appalling privations on its people, thousands of children were abandoned in inhumane state orphanages.
The first-ever meeting of the Pan-European Mental Health Coalition, a new network of organizations and individuals aiming to transform mental health systems across the WHO European Region, gathered to discuss ways to support the mental health of people in Ukraine.
Last week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released a more than 100-page report on the federal Indigenous boarding schools designed to assimilate Native Americans in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. Between 1819 and 1969, the U.S. ran or supported 408 boarding schools, the department found. Students endured “rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse,” and the report recorded more than 500 deaths of Native children—a number set to increase as the department’s investigation of this issue continues.
The pandemic has claimed more than 6.25 million lives since it began in March 2020—and millions more have been lost indirectly through overburdened health care systems and other circumstances. Those numbers mean the pandemic is depriving children of parents and caregivers.
Worldwide, researchers believe more than 7.5 million children so far have suffered the loss of a parent or primary caregiver to Covid-19. They report that pandemic-associated orphanhood and caregiver loss are increasing at an unparalleled speed.
A U.S. government investigation into the dark history of Native American boarding schools has found "marked or unmarked burial sites" at 53 of them, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said on Wednesday.
This is a summary of what was said by UNICEF's Regional Advisor - Child Protection for Europe and Central Asia, Aaron Greenberg – to whom quoted text may be attributed - at a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.
There are claims that thousands of disabled Ukrainian children have been forgotten and abandoned in institutions that can’t look after them. The human rights organisation, Disability Rights International, has carried out an investigation and found children with severe disabilities tied to beds in overrun children’s homes unable to cope.