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.
Global warming and climate change are happening at an unprecedented rate. Women and girls are especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which can include poverty, displacement, and lack of education. These all relate to, and can exacerbate, gender inequality. According to the Global Climate Risk Index, some of the countries most affected by climate change are Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi; all of which have astounding rates of child marriage. In these countries, 53 percent, 34 percent, and 42 percent (respectively) of girls are married before they turn age 18, often bearing children in their early teens.
The latest Family Matters report released by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, an Australian non-governmental peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children – reveals that there are there more than 22,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care.
Linking adoption to abortion so casually, with no further elaboration, reveals a particular view of the world. The logic seems so clear: Lots of parents want to adopt babies, the babies who will no longer be aborted could be those babies. Two incredibly complex social issues, one easy almost-beautifully reductive solution. But of course, the reality isn’t so simple.
Human rights experts in a Harvard Law School panel on Wednesday discussed how the United Nations has responded to violations of children's rights during global armed conflict. The panelists examined the UN’s attempts to hold governments and non-state actors accountable for rights violations.
Department for Education’s (DfE) statistics on looked-after children in England, released earlier this month, showed the number of unaccompanied children in care grew by 1,430 in the year to March 2022, surpassing the overall increase of 1,390 in the care population. The latter rose for the 14th consecutive year, by 2%, to 82,170.
No part of Scotland was “immune” to abuse of children in foster care over more than eight decades, an inquiry has heard. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) has been told of physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse, neglect and exploitation since public hearings for the foster care case study opened in May.
On 25 September 2022, a referendum was held in Cuba to approve the Family Code 2022. The historic new legislation, which is widely celebrated as one of the “most progressive codes of families”, provides important, strengthened measures for the protection of children and adolescents across the country.
Queensland child safety authorities have quietly ditched a "racially biased" decision-making tool that had been widely used for years. The move came on the back of preliminary findings from a Queensland expert comparing the tool's accuracy across Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. The tool, known as the Structured Decision Making model, was used to rate children on their risk of harm and help authorities decide whether to intervene.
In 2020, an agreement between the Australian federal government, the Coalition of Peaks, all state and territory governments and the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) was struck, aiming to renew ways of working together to improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians. This report is the first since the national agreement on Closing the Gap took effect and shows many of the targets are not on track.
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act, also known as ICWA, enacted in 1978 to put in place adoption protections for Native American and Alaska Native children. If those protections are overturned, it would make it easier for non-native families to adopt a native child.