This study of adolescents in residential care in Portugal found that perceptions of psychological adjustment differ significantly between adolescents and their caregivers, with adolescents consistently reporting more emotional, behavioral, and peer-related difficulties. The findings highlight low agreement between informants and emphasize the need for multi-informant, developmentally sensitive assessments, greater inclusion of adolescents’ perspectives, and improved caregiver training and tailored mental health support.

This article from MaltaToday offers a behind-the-scenes look at the realities of foster care in Malta, using the example of urgent, late-night placements to illustrate the system’s challenges. It follows the work of child protection services, where professionals may receive emergency calls—sometimes in the middle of the night—to quickly find safe homes for young children removed from their families due to neglect, abuse, or other complex circumstances.

This study examines foster parents’ perspectives on Albania’s foster care system to identify policy and implementation gaps in family-based alternative care. Findings highlight legal inconsistencies, resource constraints, and coordination challenges, underscoring the need for stronger support systems and more coherent implementation to ensure effective child protection and deinstitutionalization efforts.

This review examines what happens to unaccompanied and separated children who go missing after arriving in Greece, a major entry point for asylum seekers, and finds that most likely continue their journeys irregularly or remain unofficially in the country. However, due to limited and mostly anecdotal evidence, it highlights a major gap in reliable data and calls for urgent research and policy action to better protect these children.

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.

The Government of Malta, through the Ministry for Social Policy and Children's Rights, is close to launching a formal After-Care Policy to support young people leaving residential alternative care, aiming to offer them stability, opportunities, an

This article examines child abuse in Kosovo by analyzing policy gaps, risk factors, legal frameworks, and challenges in implementing child protection laws, drawing on interviews with senior Ministry of Justice officials and national data. It highlights a significant rise in child victimization between 2020 and 2022 and recommends legislative updates, institutional reforms, and the development of a national strategic document to strengthen child protection systems.

The multiple and extensive transformations that have occurred in Eastern Europe since the 1990s did not bypass care, bringing diverse care regimes. This chapter, in the Research Handbook on Social Care Policy, aims to explore the main trends in the development of care policies in Croatia (a post-Yugoslav country) and the Czech Republic (a Visegrád country).

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences, motivations, and expectations of foster parents in Albania as the country transitions from institutional to family-based care, drawing on in-depth interviews with all active foster families at the time of the research. Findings reveal that fostering is driven by faith and compassion but shaped by limited state support, social stigma, and increasing awareness of children’s trauma, offering rare insight into how institutional and social contexts affect the sustainability of foster care in Albania.