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 escalating human trafficking menace across the Horn of Africa region should be tackled as a matter of urgency to avert social turmoil and instability, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said in a statement during World Day Against Trafficking of Persons.
UN human rights experts today expressed concern about the situation of children with disabilities in Ukraine placed in institutions and being displaced to other institutional settings either within Ukraine or further afield.
The Biden administration says it is officially ending the controversial Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico as their cases wind through court, often in grueling conditions for months or years.
Fourteen-year-old Serhii Sorokopud is still haunted by what happened when Russian tanks rolled into his village five months ago. He lifts his T-shirt to show the deep scars across his back -- a reminder of a trauma both hidden and visible.
My father left my mother while she was pregnant – she gave birth when he had already left. People call me “daughter of a bitch”. They disturb and hurt me so much. They say they will chase me because I am a foreigner. I am suffering. These are the words of Emma* – a 13-year-old girl from Beni, a city in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) near its border with Uganda.
Luiza Baloh left her home in Dnipro, central Ukraine, in March. Fleeing the constant sound of explosions, she and her five children came to the Czech Republic hoping to find refuge. Instead, they found themselves behind a barbed wire fence in a repurposed immigration detention center that was, she says, dirty and full of strangers, some of whom were aggressive towards her and her children.
As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.
Coverage of the conflict in Ukraine has been a stark reminder of the pace and extent to which war turns lives upside down. The terrifying experience of conflict sees people turning to loved ones and places that are familiar and comforting. Children are no different. And yet, even before the war in Ukraine started on 24 February, for over 100,000 Ukrainian children the familiar wasn’t a family environment, but an institution.
In July, Russian mortars rained down on a psychiatric home in northern Ukraine, while dozens of elderly and disabled residents were sleeping.
Flames soon swept through the facility’s dining room, and its dormitory and administration buildings were wrecked. Miraculously, only three people were injured. But it marks the latest in a series of deadly attacks in which some of Ukraine’s most vulnerable have been caught up in a savage conflict far beyond their control.
There was nothing obviously untoward about the woman who approached the Palanca border crossing between Ukraine and Moldova with a 15-year-old boy she said was her nephew. But something about the pair just seemed odd. The boy, in particular, appeared embarrassed and uncomfortable.