Around the world, over 80 percent of children in orphanages have at least one living parent. So how do these children end up in orphanages rather than with their families? Unfortunately, there are countless families across the globe who face circumstances like the death of a parent, the loss of a job, or conflict that that threaten to separate them. 

The Canadian government has agreed to pay more than $30 billion to compensate Indigenous children who were taken away from their families and put into the child welfare system.

A Manitoba advocate for First Nations kids in care hopes a compensation agreement for those hurt by the child welfare system will benefit thousands of children in the province and lead to long-term reform. 

For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of COVID-19. And that was probably true in the spring of 2020, when nearly all of society shut down to slow the spread of a deadly and mysterious virus. But the approach has been less defensible for the past year and a half, as more is now known about both COVID and the extent of children’s suffering from pandemic restrictions.

There are approximately 11,700 children and youth under state guardianship in Ontario. Black and Indigenous children are highly represented, with Indigenous children comprising 30 per cent of kids under Ontario guardianship alone. Each year, around 1,000 youth “age out” of the system. For many, the transition is difficult, creating lifelong adverse outcomes including low educational attainment and income, unstable housing and homelessness, worse physical and mental health and criminalization.

The family of a 16-year-old boy who was restrained at a shuttered western Michigan youth center and died two days later of cardiac arrest has settled a second wrongful death lawsuit in the case. The settlement between the family of Cornelius

Child Maltreatment 2022 (the report) is the latest edition of the annual Child Maltreatment report series. The report is used by researchers, practitioners, and advocates throughout the world as a source for national child welfare data. Jurisdictions provide the data for this report via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS was established as a voluntary, national data collection and analysis program to make available state child abuse and neglect information. Since 1991, child welfare agencies in the 50 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia have collected and submitted data for NCANDS.

The causes of institutionalization are multiple and the impact it causes is reflected in different areas such as the development of the child in general, such as mental, psychic structuring, health, and nutrition. Psychologically, children present alterations in their cognitive, emotional, sexual, and social domains with a high probability of developing several pathological conditions. This chapter presents an overview of this phenomenon based on several research investigations carried out in Spain, Latin America, and Mexico.

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.

This bulletin outlines the importance of disaster planning in child welfare and discusses how caseworkers, with the help of their supervisors, can prepare themselves and the children, youth, and families on their caseloads for emergencies. It also provides direction for child welfare staff on response and recovery strategies they can use should disasters occur in their communities.