This U.S.-based study analyzes data from a statewide kinship caregiver survey which collected demographic data, challenges, and needs.

This article presents novel findings from interviews with 17 girls and young women and eight Youth Offending Team (YOT) staff, highlighting how being in care in the U.S. can affect offending behaviour and how YOTs may provide support to care-experienced girls who have been inadequately supported elsewhere.

This study examines how multiple factors from foster caregivers’ surrounding environments impact satisfaction and retention among 462 foster caregivers in the United States.

This chapter summarizes results of a study of high service use, or “superutilization,” among children in foster care in the U.S. The study linked administrative data from child welfare, Medicaid, and other services for two sites.

This article offers a cross-national comparison of social work in two countries, Australia and Canada, about the care of Indigenous children within the context of colonization and the evolving profession.

This paper intends to capture the landscape of alternative care and its evolution in India, drawing from the review of the legal and policy framework, existing literature, and detailed discussions with Civil Society Organisations(CSOs) and State functionaries.

This article highlights the continuity of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and systemic racism, in the Australian child protection and out-of-home care systems over time.

This article explores the challenges of child and youth care workers (CYCWs) working with children in South Africa.

This study examined the extent to which Nigeria’s current disability and childhood policies have integrated the CRC and the CRPD frameworks. Using a structured search of databases and Nigerian federal and state government websites, we conducted a policy review to identify their disability and child-related disability policies.

Los daños medioambientales son una amenaza importante para los derechos de la infancia en todo el mundo. Los niños y las niñas exigen que se tomen medidas inmediatas y que se protejan sus derechos.

Cette Observation générale explique pourquoi il est urgent d'agir en faveur de l'environnement et du climat et ce que les gouvernements doivent faire pour protéger tous les droits des enfants. Elle précise également que les gouvernements doivent protéger les droits des enfants d'aujourd'hui et ceux des générations futures.

In this general comment, the Committee emphasizes the urgent need to address the adverse effects of environmental degradation, with a special focus on climate change, on the enjoyment of children’s rights, and clarifies the obligations of States to address environmental harm and climate change.

Tiegan Boyens, of ATD Fourth World and Teen Advocacy, shares about the importance of staying connected to birth family as an adoptee as well as maintaining other connections such as friendships made throughout childhood. 

The OHCHR submitted the first-ever child-friendly report, conducted with over 600+ child participants worldwide. The premise of this report is based on children's right to social support. Most children cannot access social aid and protection and, therefore, cannot access their other rights.

This longitudinal study aims at investigating the attachment disorder symptoms during the first year of placement in foster care. The participants
were recruited through German social services departments around Dortmund, the Ruhr valley, and the Metropolitan region of Nuremberg.

This paper explores why the right to leave marriage matters, describes the obstacles to girls’ access to divorce and to protections after divorce or separation, and links these to the factors that drive child, early, and forced marriages and unions. The authors reviewed reports and evidence from countries in all regions of the world by drawing on a previous systematic scoping review and related research done by the authors.

Drawing on the findings of a qualitative study undertaken in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, this article applies the concept of ambiguous loss to outline the ways in which Out of Home Care practitioners can more adequately respond to children's experience of grief and loss.

In this article, the focus is on youth with minority backgrounds living in majority foster homes and their views on cultural continuity. What is important for these young people when developing their identity in foster homes? The study is based on qualitative interviews with nine adolescents from minority
backgrounds who live in majority foster homes, which are homes in which one or both foster parents have ethnic Norwegian backgrounds. The analysis was conducted using a hermeneutic phenomenology methodology and shows that youth do not necessarily want cultural continuity in the sense of living in a culturally “matched” foster home.

The purpose of the article is to describe and problematise the practice initiated idea of developing a digital tool for children in child welfare investigations and whether and how this welfare technology is useful for social workers. The results include interview data and descriptions of the research process.

This qualitative study explores the prevalence and role of natural mentors in the lives of unaccompanied immigrant youth residing in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area. The authors' findings suggest that natural mentors provide various types of social support and social capital, which fulfil the emotional or educational needs of young people.

This research article explores the situation of children in alternative or institutional care in Pakistan, aiming to shed light on the challenges they face, interventions implemented to address their needs, and the associated laws and policy implications.

The purpose of this nonexperimental quantitative study was to examine the responses of 18- to 24-year-olds (n = 83) who had been in out-of-home care, comparing early adolescent versus non-early adolescent placement, placement setting, and sibling accessibility on attachment.

The purpose of this review is to explore how UNICEF country offices have used Public Finance for Children (PF4C) analyses and interventions within child protection, with a view to learning lessons from their experiences.

This Maestral document aims to provide guidance on how to provide credible evidence and support for an increased budget for child protection policies and plans of action.

In June 2022, hundreds of care reform leaders gathered to discuss the importance of providing adequate public financing to strengthen families and protect children in Moldova and across the globe. Conference speakers advocated for the provision of a minimum packages of services for families and children.

The origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States includes a dependency on slave labor and sales to sustain itself and build its institutions.

Cazul de investiții argumentează importanța și impactul investițiilor într-un sistem de îngrijire centrat pe familie și prezintă o estimare a resurselor necesare pentru a finanța serviciile de care Republica Moldova are nevoie pentru (i) a preveni plasarea copiilor în îngrijire rezidențială; (ii) a asigura îngrijirea copiilor în familii sigure și protectoare; și (iii) a transforma instituțiile rezidențiale în centre comunitare care răspund efectiv nevoilor comunității.

This analysis investigates factors shaping the inadequate global prioritization of the care of vulnerable children.

The present report is submitted to the General Assembly by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution 52/32, which renewed the Commission’s initial mandate for one additional year. The report concludes that "the collected evidence further shows that Russian authorities have committed the war crimes of wilful killing, torture, rape and other sexual violence, and the deportation of children to the Russian Federation.

This paper advances the global and transnational agency approach to the study of out-of-home childcare, specifically the institutionalization of children.

The focus of this article is the link between the modern world culture and national public policy commitments. Drawing on world society theory and using data for 193 countries between 1990 and 2020—1411 documents in total—the authors analyze the global pattern of policy commitments to out-of-home childcare deinstitutionalization.

Rapporten visar på omfattande sexuella övergrepp och kränkningar mot barn på svenska statliga ungdomshem – platser som är avsedda att vara trygga för unga med omfattande psykosocial problematik. Kunskapen om att barn utsätts för sexuella övergrepp på SiS har funnits länge. Bara förra året kom granskningar från Institutionen för vård och omsorg (IVO), Justitieombudsmannen (JO) och Statskontoret som alla visade på stora brister inklusive våld och sexuella övergrepp.

The article presents the newly collected data on the adoption of childcare deinstitutionalization policy by 15 countries – previously republics of the Soviet Union. Qualitative comparative analysis is employed to explore the role of national-level attributes affecting the timing of policy adoption and the rate of implementation.

The paper presents new data on childcare deinstitutionalization policies in 15 ex-Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The data suggest significant convergence among countries in the adoption of both deinstitutionalization policy ‘ends’ and ‘means’, despite drastic differences in political regimes.

In this article, the authors aim to analyse how the process of deinstitutionalization in Bulgaria relates to the concept of child’s rights articulated in the CRC on which it is based. They focus on children without disabilities, specifically children raised in small home centres (SHC2) subject to so-called residential care.

Cette évaluation dresse un tableau de la situation en Côte d'Ivoire des enfants handicapés privés de soins parentaux ou risquant d'être séparés de leur famille, ainsi que des options de prise en charge alternative disponibles.

This UNICEF ESARO webinar explores the role of case management in care reform and examines strategies for effective case management from Kenya, Ghana and Uganda. Speakers address case conferencing, integrated case management, caseloads, and monitoring case management.

This case study explores the systems strengthening approach to implementing care reform in Kisumu County, Kenya.

El informe analiza los peligros meteorológicos más comunes que provocan el mayor número de desplazamientos: inundaciones, tormentas, sequías e incendios forestales.

Ainsi, le présent rapport analyse les aléas météorologiques les plus courants à l’origine de la majeure partie des déplacements, à savoir les inondations, les tempêtes, les sécheresses et les feux incontrôlés.

‘Children displaced in a changing climate: Preparing for a future already underway’ analyses the most common weather-related hazards that lead to the largest number of displacements: floods, storms, droughts and wildfires.

The Unaccompanied and Separated Children Training of Trainers (UASC TOT) course is designed to prepare participants to facilitate training on unaccompanied and separated children (UASC). This training reinforces participants’ understanding of the specific needs of UASC, highlight good practice in working with unaccompanied and separated children under a protection framework, and provide participants the opportunity to apply learning so they can roll out training on UASC within their own organisation and to other stakeholders.

Family for Every Child’s Virtual Gallery is dedicated to the voices of children and young people from around the world, exploring the issues that affect them and their care. They collaborated with VOYCE – Whakarongo Mai to support the “You Promised… Now Deliver!” campaign, and developed a gallery that highlights children and young people’s perspectives on care in Aotearoa via a virtual hikoi to parliament.

The objective of this analysis is to provide a better understanding of the government spending towards foster care and residential care services for children deprived of parental care, as well as to estimate the cost per child of such services. The analysis is intended to support UNICEF advocacy efforts towards the closure of residential care institutions in Moldova.

This first International Conference on Financing of Family Strengthening and Child Protection Services in the Context of Moldova’s European Union Association Agenda held in Chisinau from 20-21 June 2023 has been a focused discussion between central and local government, non-governmental, private and academic sectors, international experts and organizations, on ensuring adequate public financing for strengthening families and protecting children, and meeting the challenges associated.

This document outlines a capacity-building roadmap for scaling up the transition of residential care services. It is an interagency resource developed by Better Care Network and the Transitioning Residential Care Working Group (Transforming Children's Care Collaborative).

This article explores the existing policies and services that are prevalent in Bhutan that are enhancing childcare and protection. It also tries to bring forth the good practices that are currently in place and how it can be strengthened further by addressing challenges within the system. It also provides insight into history and evolution, and role of stakeholders involved in alternative care in the country.

This is a series of written interviews conducted with care-experienced persons from Bhutan, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka who have had experience with alternative care. These interviews were published in the September 2023 issue of the Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond journal.

This article explores the steady move towards family-based care in Sri Lanka over the last decade. The country has given priority to family strengthening and strong gatekeeping mechanisms to prevent children from being unnecessarily separated from their families.

Based on the literature and observation, this article explores ideas on the alternative care of children, particularly relating to its modalities and challenges in the context of Bangladesh. The authors opine that the children’s best interest cannot be achieved when a group grows without quality care.

In this editorial, Ian Forber-Pratt, editor of this tenth anniversary edition of the Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond, gives an of alternative care in Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. 

This article focuses on the national efforts advancing children’s right to alternative care services in Nepal. It presents the government’s existing laws and policies in providing responsible care to children in need of special protection and for children who cannot be placed in parental care due to various reasons for family separation.

For more on this event, visit:

In this paper the authors reflect on their process and offer lessons learned from engaging in participatory evaluation that may apply to the field of kinship care and across social service delivery more broadly.

Ce Guide Technique pour la Réintégration Familiale en Haïti se veut un guide pratique pour les travailleurs sociaux de l’Etat, des Organisations de la Société Civile et des ONG travaillant avec les enfants séparés de leurs familles et placés en Maison d’Enfants ou en d’autres dispositifs de protection de remplacement en Haïti.

This is a practical guide for the social workforce from the State, Civil Society Organisations and NGOs working with children separated from their families and being placed in residential care institutions or in other forms of alternative care in Haiti. This ISS publication draws on case studies and best practices from various experiences in Haiti and abroad in the field of family reintegration.

This UK-based paper presents evidence of the importance of screening looked-after children for Adverse Childhood Experiences and demonstrates that the Trauma and Adverse Life Events (TALE) is a valid and reliable tool for this purpose. Adverse and traumatic experiences were highly prevalent in this population and appeared to be closely related with children’s psychosocial wellbeing.

This U.S.-based case study provides lessons on how states and civil society strategically manage a “crisis” and discusses the implications for immigrants’ rights and vulnerabilities.

In this essay, after providing some data regarding Ukrainian families and minors who fled their country after the Russian invasion and moved to Italy, the authors will focus on the extraordinary effort made to improve reception programs, on the peculiar condition of minors who reached our country accompanied by adults who were not their parents, and finally on the experience of placing these fleeing families into Italian households.

This book chapter highlights the consequences of the recognition of the kafala related to the religious freedom of the immigrant’s family, with a special concern to intergenerational transmission of religious values and the religious education of children in host countries.

The main aim of this paper is to gain insight into the needs of youth who have left alternative care in the social welfare system. The study was conducted in Zagreb, Croatia, on a sample of sixteen young people.

This paper examines South-South migration by investigating the stay-behind families of female migrants in Bangladesh with a focus on their unaccompanied children.

This paper considers eight evaluations of an extended care scheme in England known as ‘Staying Close’. Findings suggest that for extended care projects like ‘Staying Close’ to work, any service offer designed to support the transition from residential care to independent living must be seen by the young person, the carer, and the wider social network, as a continuation of earlier efforts to build and nurture a genuinely committed relationship.

This study aimed to investigate relational outcomes of Italian emancipated foster youth across open-ended reflections about their perceptions of their relationships with the biological and foster family, with partner and peers.

This global systematic review aimed to synthesise the international evidence base for interventions targeting subjective wellbeing, mental health and suicide amongst care-experienced young people aged ≤ 25 years.

This qualitative research aimed to develop the alternative care action plan for Thailand. The method used in this study included the analysis of documents related to the alternative care situations in Thailand and the interviews where the key informants were specifically selected so that the collected data could be used to develop the alternative care action plan.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study that explored children's and families' experiences of alternative care in Thailand. The study used arts-based methods to engage 160 children living in a range of care settings.

This paper explores the rarely examined experiences of unaccompanied refugee minors in Nairobi, Kenya.

The purpose of this article is to identify the relationships of affection that exist between children/adolescents institutionalized in the same shelter. Data collection was carried out with two sisters hosted in Brasília-Distrito Federal.

This study aimed to examine the sense of family belonging of individuals with childhood institutional care experience through personal details, institutional care, and post-institutional-care variables. This study was conducted with 313 adults with institutional care experience during childhood in Western Asia.

This paper explores how criminalisation, care experience and motherhood may intersect to produce multi-faceted structural disadvantage within both systems of care and punishment in England.

This study produced a nuanced understanding of the residential care experiences of LGBTQ+ young people in England.

This paper provides the first conceptual model for, and systematic scoping review of, callousness/unemotionality in children and young people with experiences of alternative care across the globe.

This U.S.-based study explores how common enduring relationships are among youth making the transition out of care and whether having an enduring relationship improves their outcomes in early adulthood.

This study contributes to emerging research on the self-care practices of foster carers in Australia and worldwide.

This study examines early adulthood outcomes—incarceration and teen parenthood—among youth in Wisconsin who entered foster care in early-to-middle childhood (ages 5–10).

Abstract:
 

This article presents the  development, current status and contemporary challenges of foster care in Poland and Hungary.

This global literature review seeks to draw attention to children’s perspectives regarding contact with birth parents when in out-of-home care. By collecting and systematizing existing knowledge on children’s experiences with contact, this article aims to make it more accessible and easily applicable for further investigation.

This research sought to improve understanding of the experiences of parents with disability of Australian child protection systems, paying particular attention to the experiences of First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse parents with disability.

Using caregiver survey data, this study examined the following questions: (1) What is the prevalence of children or youth living apart (LA)? (2) What are the risk and protective factors at child and family levels that are associated with LA? (3) What is the nature of the relationships between family members among those who have experienced LA? This study re-purposed data from surveys of adoptive parents and guardians of children formerly in foster care in four U.S. states.

This article presents a scoping review of research studies completed on the mental health care needs and outcomes of care leavers in Australia from 2015 to 2021.

This global study investigates how adolescents between 12 and 18 years old in residential and non-residential youth care services perceive their quality of life on the basis of a new specific measure: the Quality of Life in Youth Services Scale (QOLYSS).

This paper assesses the legal regime governing inter-country adoption under the Ethiopian family laws by making a brief comparative study with correspondent provisions of the Chinese family law.

This paper investigates the effects of a migration control policy in mega cities after 2014 in China on parent–child separation.

This article investigates the phenomenon and practice of intercountry adoption in the Netherlands from a historical perspective by using applied history methods.

This editorial published in the August 2023 issue of the The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health Journal discusses the needs of children who are disproportionately affected by displacement. The author urges countries to consider the unique needs of displaced children—including those displaced internally, disadvantaged, or with disabilities—in all initiatives and policies, to ensure that no one is left behind ahead of the Global Refugee Forum in December 2023.

In this Health Policy, the authors map the global variation in age restrictions and durations of stay in prison with a primary caregiver. They show a broad range of approaches and provisions for the placement of children in prison.

In septembrie 2022, Changing the Way We Care (CTWWC) a lansat o inițiativă pentru a oferi sprijin economic direct în procesul de reintegrare a copiilor în familii sau plasament în servicii de îngrijire de tip familial. În baza experiențelor anterioare de reintegrare, dar și din informațiile extrase din evaluările individuale ale copiilor și familiilor, echipa CTWWC a dezvoltat o abordare standardizată și echitabilă pentru a identifica tipul și valoarea sprijinului economic direct necesar.

In September 2022, Changing the Way We Care (CTWWC) launched an initiative to provide targeted economic support to assist the reintegration of children into families or placement into family based alternative care. Informed by previous experiences in reintegration and information captured in the individual child and family assessments, the CTWWC team developed a standardized and equitable approach to identifying the type and amount of targeted economic support required.

This learning brief reports on the reflection and shares a collection of case studies collated by caseworkers in Kenya. Using Most Significant Change Storytelling, the caseworkers, supervisors and program managers selected and discussed stories from their work. They discussed what lessons these stories and the discussion drew out about the case management practice. The each of the stories illustrates one or more of the case management steps.

Acest studiu analizează serviciile sociale de tip familial existente în Republica Moldova: Asistența parentală profesionistă (APP) și Casele de copii de tip familial (CCTF), cu scopul de a identifica argumente privind unificarea celor două servicii de îngrijire de tip familial APP/CCTF din perspectiva calității îngrijirii copiilor și a interesului superior al copiilor. Studiul include o analiză comparativă a cadrului de reglementare a serviciilor familiale alternative și recomandări privind posibilitatea și fezabilitatea unificării serviciilor sociale. Studiul a concluzionat faptul că, pentru a îmbunătăți calitatea și accesul la serviciile de îngrijire de tip familial pentru copiii aflați în situații de risc, se recomandă unificarea serviciilor APP și CCTF, revizuirea cadrului juridic al serviciului APP și luarea în considerare a celor mai pozitive aspecte ale ambelor servicii.