There are over 5,400 children in the Virginia foster care system, according to the state Department of Social Services’ website. Roughly 30% of children in foster care nationally identify as LGBTQ and are often kicked out of their biological homes, ending up in foster care because their biological parents didn’t accept their sexual identity.

Roughly 1 in 100 children in the U.S. have their parents’ rights terminated by age 18, according to an expanded 2019 analysis by Cornell and Rutgers Universities, and Black, Brown and Indigenous families, as well as low-income families, disproportionately lose these rights.

There are currently more than 400,000 children in foster care in the United States. While the pandemic has made life more difficult for these vulnerable kids, many say the foster care system itself has been putting them at risk for decades. Special correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault sat down with one former foster child who is now on a mission to fix the system by helping families stay together.

COVID-19 has left many of Peru's children orphaned, placing severe strain on surviving family members to provide care for those left behind.

7.5 million children all over the world live in charitable children’s institutions, commonly known as children’s homes or orphanages, yet 80 per cent to 90 per cent of these children have a living parent or known relatives. In Kenya, an estimated 45,000 children live in charitable children’s institutions for various reasons such as the loss of a parent or primary caregiver, poverty at home, sickness and disability, violence, abuse, and neglect.

This article describes how a defrocked American priest in Timor-Leste has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being found guilty of sexually abusing orphaned and disadvantaged young girls under his care.

For years, specialists have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of collecting and failing to secure data on the world’s most vulnerable.

The analysis of the Step Up to Social Work and Frontline programmes found participants of both, while highly trained and valued by employers, often found the move to a full caseload a “major step up”.

But it said that “dissonance” between an idealised conception of social work and experience of local authority practice – leading to “disappointment” – was much more pronounced among graduates of the latter programme.

The use of the settings, which provide housing with limited or no support for children in care has been banned for under-16s. Campaigners had called for this ban to be extended for all under-18s.

But this week the government said the settings for 16- and 17-year-olds will be allowed to continue, and will be overseen by Ofsted from 2023 under a new set of mandatory national standards.

The government said it was unable to reach a global settlement with parents and children who were separated at the border under a Trump administration policy.