This episode of the Helping Children Worldwide podcast provides a deep dive into the complexities and triumphs of reintegrating children into family environments in Sierra Leone and beyond.

This Resource List catalogues critical resources to guide ethical good practices in participatory research with children in humanitarian contexts. It is not an exhaustive compilation, nor does it propose new ethical guidelines. Instead, it highlights existing tools that help researchers and practitioners understand, utilise, and apply well-established ethical principles. 

Researching the factors contributing to the separation of children from their families is particularly challenging due to the overrepresentation of higher-income countries in existing literature and the influence of both the objective capacity and subjective perspectives of those recording the reasons for children’s admission to alternative care. This makes it difficult to consistently understand and document the phenomenon.

To address this challenge, the report integrates key findings from a systematic literature review of global research, and it introduces new data from country studies across various income levels, filling gaps in current research to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to family separation and ways to prevent it.

In this report, SOS Children's Villages and partners from 10 academic institutions from around the world, have researched the phenomenon of child-family separation and what can be done to prevent it. This research tries to fill a global gap of information regarding middle and low-income countries, the contexts of which are not well understood.

Case studies from the Global South provide insights on how to effectively support children who have experienced violence.

This year's report provides a snapshot of the key trends and promising initiatives shaping the social service workforce. It zeroes in on a particularly important issue: the critical role that the workforce plays in ensuring children can always benefit from safe and stable family care—whether that be in their own family or through family-based alternative care, when needed.

This thematic brief helps government policy and decision-makers understand the essential role of the social service workforce and how to strengthen that workforce in line with their national commitments to care reform and regional and global conventions. It includes high level guidance, recommendations and practical examples from diverse contexts for consideration when developing, supporting and strengthening the social service workforce.

This briefing book, prepared by the Inter-Parliamentary Taskforce on Human Trafficking, serves as a practical guide for legislators on how to--through a combination of global partnerships and domestic action--work together to educate, advocate and legislate to end orphanage trafficking.   

This UNICEF publication presents the first-ever global and regional estimates of sexual violence against children. It narrates through numbers the tragic reality of sexual violence, amplifying victims’ voices.

This is the Executive Summary of the World Social Protection Report 2024-26: Universal Social Protection for Climate Action and a Just Transition which provides a global overview of progress made around the world since 2015 in extending social protection and building rights-based social protection systems. It calls on policymakers, social partners and other stakeholders to accelerate their efforts to simultaneously close protection gaps and realize climate ambitions.