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 article examines how child protection systems continue to reflect colonial power by disproportionately intervening in Indigenous families and undermining cultural practices and kinship systems. It highlights growing Indigenous-led movements to reclaim authority over child welfare, emphasizing self-determination and the rebuilding of care systems grounded in Indigenous laws, values, and relationships.

This report contains the conclusions, observations, and recommendations adopted by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities regarding the procedure for investigating serious or systematic violations established in Article 6 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention.

El presente informe contiene las conclusiones, las observaciones y las recomendaciones adoptadas por el Comité sobre los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad sobre el procedimiento de investigación de violaciones graves o sistemáticas que se establece en el artículo 6 del Protocolo Facultativo de la Convención.

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.

This study examines the physical and psychological well-being of children and adolescents in residential care facilities in Mexico, addressing a major gap in systematic data. It finds that well-being levels are often below desired standards and that institutional responses only partially meet child protection principles, highlighting the need for improved practices, training, and coordination.

Since taking office in 2025, the second Donald Trump administration significantly expanded immigration enforcement while weakening safeguards for due process, family unity, and parental rights, resulting in record detention levels and widespread impacts on immigrant families. This research by Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found that many deported parents were denied the opportunity to make arrangements for their children, leading to increased family separations that may become long-term or permanent.

This Guardian article reports on a new investigation finding that, under recent U.S. immigration policies, some parents are being deported without their children—often without being given the opportunity to make arrangements for their care. Based on interviews with deported families and advocacy organizations, it highlights how these separations can happen abruptly during detention, leaving children—including very young or vulnerable ones—behind in precarious situations.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides U.S. state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why.

For nearly 30 years, U.S. federal legislation shaping adoption has remained largely unchanged, even as expectations around privacy, youth voice, and family support have significantly evolved. This toolkit offers practical strategies and resources to modernize policy and practice, centering young people’s agency across consent, privacy, family recruitment, and post-adoption support.