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.
As in years past, some recipients of CNN’s 2015 Heroes Awards included “ill-advised but well-meaning” people who have been involved in building and operating orphanages in developing countries. By including those running orphanages among its recipients, CNN is perpetuating the incorrect idea that orphanages are a safe place for children.
This article describes growing skepticism around the value of "voluntourists" for local communities around the work, and many NGOs are questioning the unregulated industry that brings many young, unqualified westerners to developing countries. Often, volunteers are ineffective in providing help to communities, and sometimes can even pose danger to the community members or themselves.
This article describes how many children who were put up for adoption as "orphans" in countries around the world, such as Ethiopia and Haiti, were actually not orphans, and how these incidences of "adoption corruption" have helped to change the direction of a powerful adoption movement among U.S. evangelicals. In previous years, international adoption had been a preeminent evangelical social cause in the United States, grounded in the idea of an "orphan crisis" affecting 143 to 210 million children around the world, including some that lived with one parent or extended family in poor conditions.
This short video by GHR presents information on the Children in Familes program with a focus on Cambodia. GHR's grantees are supporting child protection interventions that strengthen families in order to prevention separation of children from their families.
Through the ‘InvestInUGChildren’ campaign, UNICEF has partnered with media outlets to highlight issues such as malnutrition, hunger, domestic violence, early marriage, poor health, and education in Uganda.
According to the Juvenile Justice Act for Kerala (a state in India), every police station in the state must have a special juvenile police unit or a child welfare officer (CWO).
Social workers and homeless advocates say it is common among young people on the Eastern Shore in Maryland to age out of the foster care system and have to fend for themselves, often becoming homeless. There are few resources to help them transition out of foster care to living on their own. Thus, there is a growing trend of homeless youth considered too old to be wards of the state, but who are not quite ready to live on their own.
The article describes the increase in "orphanage tourism" in Cambodia, which has led to many new orphanages being created to serve the country's tourism industry.
According to Ireland's Child and Family Agency, Tusla, ten Irish children remained in care placements overseas as of late December 2015. All ten of the children were placed in facilities in Britain.
This video investigates Nigeria’s “baby farms,” an industry in which young pregnant women are lured into “orphanages” with the promise of shelter, meals, and basic care and, in return, are coerced into giving up their babies at birth.