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 U.S. and Canada are starting to face their history of forcing indigenous children into abusive boarding schools. Here's everything you need to know:
What was the school's goal?
Simply put, cultural genocide. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. government and religious leaders used compulsory boarding schools to force young Native Americans to give up the languages and cultures of their ancestors, which were considered self-evidently inferior to a Christian, Western-style upbringing. Boarding schools were made mandatory for Native American children in 1891. This often meant forced separation from their families and communities. And because these schools were underfunded, crowded, and often unsanitary, thousands of students died of disease. Canada also coerced at least 150,000 indigenous children into a network of residential schools that were mostly run by the Catholic Church; last June, researchers uncovered 1,148 unmarked graves on the grounds of three schools. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo people whose maternal grandparents were forced to board, has opened an investigation into America's boarding-school policy. "This attempt to wipe out Native identity, language, and culture," she wrote in a June Washington Post article, has "never been appropriately addressed."
A Guardian investigation into the state of children’s services in the UK during the last 18 months has revealed a sharp rise in social services referrals during lockdown, plus spiralling costs for mental health support and a bulging backlog in the family courts, with some councils buckling under the weight of the extra work brought by coronavirus.
The American Bar Association’s policymaking body has voted in favor of a resolution supporting the U.S. Interior Department as it works to uncover the troubled legacy of federal boarding schools that sought to assimilate Indigenous youth into white society.
Lawyers representing children in U.S. immigration custody asked a federal court on Monday to order the release of migrant teenagers from two emergency housing sites in Texas where minors have reported mental distress, substandard conditions, prolonged stays and inadequate services.
As Indonesia’s COVID-19 death toll rises, too many young children are learning the despair of losing their parents.
Former Canadian senator Murray Sinclair and a group representing survivors of the Sixties Scoop are calling for a federal inquiry into the actions and policies of governments that led to thousands of Indigenous children being taken from their homes over four decades and placed with non-Indigenous families.
Kisha Supernant has brought radar technology to the search for burial sites in Canada while she works to reshape her profession’s relationship with Indigenous communities.
For this article from the Guardian, photographer Maroussia Mbaye spoke to women in Senegal who said "crushing social stigma, poverty and lack of traditional support systems had left them with no choice but to commit infanticide."
In May this year in Goma, a city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a volcano erupted. "In the chaos that followed, families fleeing the eruption became separated," says this article and accompanying video from BBC News.
In this opinion piece, Anne Smith, Global Director of Changing the Way We Care, calls for an increase in funding for international humanitarian and development assistance in order to support children who have lost a parent to COVID-19 to stay with their families.