The article describes how Catholic nuns in India have helped more than 1,000 orphaned and abandoned children find permanent, loving families through a long-running adoption program.

This article tells the story of adoptive parents in Singapore who, after forming a deep bond with their child, are devastated to learn he may have been trafficked from Indonesia as part of an illegal adoption network.

This chapter compares kinship care policies and practices across five high-income countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and South Korea—examining how different welfare and governance systems support children placed with extended family. It highlights growing prioritization of kinship care over institutional care while emphasizing differences in state support, regulation, and reliance on informal family networks.

This study examines the implementation of child assessment standards in alternative care institutions (LKSAs) in Indonesia. Using a mixed-methods approach, it explores how assessment practices support children’s rights, care planning, and the quality of institutional care.

This article explores the lifelong journeys of three intercountry adoptees from India who are searching for their biological mothers and answers about their origins.

Through a brief history of both domestic and intercountry adoption practice, as well as case studies of intercountry adoption abuses in Guatemala, Cambodia, Uganda, and Kenya, this article demonstrates the problems that have resulted from intercountry adoption and the challenges they have posed for the social work profession.

This statement from UNICEF Tajikistan announces and welcomes the government’s adoption of its first-ever National Programme on the Protection of Child Rights (2026–2030), describing it as a major step toward strengthening the country’s child protection system.

This article examines compassion as a relational institutional ethos within alternative residential child care in Nepal. Drawing on qualitative case study research conducted in a children’s home operating in collaboration with local and international non-governmental organisations, the study explores how Tibetan Buddhist ethical principles intersect with contemporary safeguarding and governance frameworks.

This article examines how recent war in Iran has disrupted and reshaped the country’s child welfare system, forcing authorities to rethink long-standing institutional approaches to caring for orphaned and abandoned children. As violence threatened hospitals and orphanages, the state welfare system began rapidly placing infants and vulnerable children into private homes, including with foster families and single women, marking a significant shift toward more family-based care arrangements.

This webinar—hosted by the Transitioning Residential Care Working Group under the Transforming Children's Care Collaborative—brought together practitioners from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Eastern and Southern Africa to explore how social norms shape efforts to transition away from residential care and how they can be effectively addressed.