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.
In Cambodia's booming orphanage industry, children have become money-making tourist attractions, and it is suspected that sexual abuse is common in residential centres where there are few checks to identify child abusers among foreign volunteers.
The Independent Review Panel on UN Response to Allegations of Sexual Abuse by Foreign Military Forces in the Central African Republic released a report detailing the United Nations' "gross institutional failure" to act on allegations that French and other peacekeepers sexually abused childre
This article discusses a new set of standards for orphanages that the Cambodian Ministry of Social Affairs plans to begin enforcing. The new standards (known as the sub-decree on the management of residential care centers) are part of an effort to move towards family- and community-based care rather than institutionalization.
While data indicates that the use of corporal punishment by schools has declined significantly in recent years, the practice is still in use for tens of thousands of public school students in the United States. Many activists and parent groups are demanding that the practice be outlawed in schools.
This article describes China's plan to offer residency status to some of the millions of migrant workers who have moved from rural areas to cities in recent decades.
Many children in Uganda are taken to Europe and the United States for adoption every year by guardians who pay local law firms and agencies between four to nine million shillings. The law firms and agencies have consequently turned adoption into a profitable business.
This article recounts the story of two children who spent the first five years of their lives in Rwanda’s largest and oldest orphanage, the Noel Orphanage. With support from the Ishema Mu Muryango (“Pride for the Family”) program in Rwanda, the children have been reunited with their older sister. Ishema Mu Muryango receives support from USAID’s Displaced Children and Orphans Fund and aims to reintegrate children from institutions into their families or communities.
This article - written by Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University, editor of globalsl.org and member of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative, Eric Hartman - outlines a few major issues that individuals should consider before committing to an international volunteer program.
This article from the BBC tells the story of one family, and many others like it, in a small town in Burkina Faso where it has become customary for men to migrate to Italy for work, leaving wives and children behind.
This article describes how thousands of minors have taken risky journeys to escape a political crisis in Burundi and landed in refugee camps in bordering countries.