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 article examines how, years after the Covid-19 crisis, many children in India who lost one or both parents continue to struggle due to gaps in government support systems.

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.

This article from the Children’s Commissioner for England argues that care-experienced young people have the same aspirations as their peers but face systemic barriers that limit their opportunities, particularly in housing, education, and employment.

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.

This article explores Haiti’s shift from institutional orphanages toward family- and community-based care, told through the story of Émile Bejin, who spent the first 14 years of his life in an orphanage outside Port-au-Prince before moving into a foster home in southern Haiti. The piece explains how the number of orphanages surged after the 2010 earthquake, many of which provided inadequate care and sometimes exposed children to abuse, while most children in these institutions actually had living parents.

This Guardian article examines Japan’s landmark legal reform allowing divorced parents to negotiate joint custody for the first time, ending a decades-long system that granted sole custody typically to mothers and often cut off the other parent from a child’s life.