This panel event focuses on strengthening anti-discriminatory safeguarding and care planning for children from minoritised and racialised communities.

Across Ukraine, families are living with daily uncertainty. Freezing temperatures, power cuts, and ongoing bombardment place a huge strain on parents and caregivers, as well as on frontline responders.

A Balkan Insight investigation highlights that the Czech Republic’s child protection system is struggling to safeguard children at risk due to systemic problems including a culture that has historically tolerated corporal punishment, uneven implementation of protections across regions, gaps in cooperation among social services, police, and schools, and insufficient training and resources for professionals to detect and prevent violence against children.

This article reports on Swedish adults who were adopted from Colombia decades ago and are now searching for their birth mothers after discovering that many international adoptions — involving around 60,000 children including nearly 5,700 from Colombia — were marred by irregularities such as false documentation, coerced consent, and children declared orphans when they were not, leaving adoptees without accurate identity information and grappling with psychological impacts of lost heritage.

For at least the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly been seen as a possible answer to how to make public services more efficient.

This article describes how French authorities have issued a rare international appeal for victims and witnesses in the case of 79-year-old former educator Jacques Leveugle, accused of raping and sexually assaulting 89 children across five continents over more than five decades while working in roles that brought him into contact with young people — including as an educator in a children’s home in Bogotá, Colombia — highlighting concerns about long-term abuse in settings where children, including those living without family care, can be particularly vulnerable.

This study examines the presence of compassion fatigue among foster and kinship carers in the United Kingdom and explores factors associated with it using survey data from 180 caregivers. Findings indicate that carers experience higher levels of compassion fatigue than helping professionals, with greater fatigue linked to lower parenting satisfaction, attachment avoidance, and unmet expectations of social support, highlighting important implications for social and clinical support systems.

This study examined protection trajectory patterns among 49 children who experienced residential care in Spain, identifying three distinct profiles through cluster analysis of case-file and psychosocial assessment data. The findings reveal diverse pathways—ranging from early transitions to family-based care, to unstable trajectories marked by multiple placements and higher adversity, to prolonged but stable residential care often involving diagnosed illnesses or disabilities—offering important insights for strengthening child protection decision-making and promoting stable, secure care experiences.

This article explores a pilot study in Italy in which care-experienced young people acted as co-researchers to examine perceptions of child maltreatment and state intervention, focusing on the co-construction of knowledge between survivors and academic researchers. It finds that peer-led research strengthens epistemic justice and professional practice by integrating lived experience with academic analysis and fostering relational, supportive spaces for young people’s voices in care proceedings.

This article explores the experiences of foster carers supporting unaccompanied asylum-seeking and trafficked children (UASTC) in the U.K., highlighting challenges such as limited specialist training, the emotional toll of managing risk, and navigating the asylum process. Despite the small sample, findings suggest the need for trauma-informed care pathways, tailored training and supervision, peer support networks, and further research into UASTC experiences across different placements.