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.

A new assessment by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) finds that months of hostilities, displacement and an estimated 72,000 civilian deaths in Gaza are reshaping family structures and leaving a growing number of children without parental care, leaving communities and children to rely on informal kinship care arrangements.

This article reports on a new cross-party committee report urging the UK government to apologise to the thousands of people forcibly adopted as infants between 1949 and 1976. At least 185,000 children were taken from their mothers without consent, a practice survivors describe as traumatic and life-altering.

This article examines the long-term impacts of Australia’s immigration detention policies on children, drawing on personal stories and research to show how prolonged detention has caused significant psychological harm, disrupted development, and lasting trauma into adulthood.

This article tells the story of Maha al-Rubaie, a 56-year-old woman in Gaza who has become the guardian of her infant great-nephew, Hamza, after his entire immediate family was killed in Israeli strikes. Maha had previously raised Hamza’s father, and now she faces the immense challenge of caring for a child born amid war, surviving with oxygen deprivation, seizures, and limited medical care.

This blog from Hope and Homes for Children critiques a recent 60 Minutes segment that portrayed a Haitian orphanage in a positive light, arguing that such narratives overlook the deeper harms of institutional care. Drawing on extensive research and data, the article explains that most children in Haitian orphanages have living parents and are placed there because of poverty, not orphanhood, with orphanages often creating a “pull effect” that separates families.