This article is a qualitative phenomenological study seeking to examine the perceptions, views and feelings of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), care-givers and community leaders on their experiences with Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) as a material and psychosocial support intervention in Zimbabwe.

This paper chronicles the goals of the partnership and the planning and implementation of the Child Protection Training Academy, developed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the University of Illinois Springfield in the U.S.

This research project aimed to study and inform the effective use of Pupil Premium Plus (PP+)-funded interventions to support educational outcomes for looked after children in the UK.

The aim of the present study was to provide understanding into the past and present experiences of individuals who had resided in a child-care institution during their childhood and/or adolescence and to contribute to the study of the long-term impact of institutional care on adult life.

This article describes a policy adoption case study about deinstitutionalization of childcare in Georgia since independence. It highlights the evolving and non-homogeneous nature of transnational agency in the area of childcare deinstitutionalization, and offers insights into the complex relationship between transnational agency and national policymaking.

This paper explores the efficacy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention, UN General Assembly, 1989) through the lens of the over-representation of First Nations children placed in out-of-home care in Canada and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia.

This document provides interim guidance for child protection and health actors in the context of quarantine and isolation measures to mitigate related child protection risks, minimize family separation,and promote family unity and social cohesion.

This study selected children who remained in kinship care (N = 267) for three waves from nationally representative data and examined the longitudinal associations among poverty, economic pressure, financial assistance, and children’s behavioral health outcomes in kinship care.

This study uses secondary data analysis of the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect 2008 to explore what case and worker factors predict the provision of ongoing child welfare services.

This Policy Brief by the United Nations highlights the impact of COVID-19 on persons with disabilities and in doing so, outlines key actions and recommendations to make the response and recovery inclusive of persons with disabilities.

This Policy Brief offers four basic tenets to guide our collective response to human mobility and the COVID-19 crisis, including the response to children on the move and children who are separated or unaccompanied in particular.

Each “case study” chapter in this book provides a rich description of the development, current status, and future of residential care in countries from Brazil to Botswana.

The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of residential care from the perspectives of a group of young people who had lived in residential childcare institutions in Bangladesh with a view to making improvements in residential childcare in the future.

In the context of COVID-19, this manual focuses on psychosocial care of children and prevention of violence in spaces where children stay (child care institutions, families, temporary isolation facilities, NGO shelters, etc.)

This issue brief addresses the following questions: What are family resource centers? What are the defining characteristics of a family resource center? What do we know about the effectiveness of family resource centers in reducing child welfare involvement? What is the return on investment? What is missing from the research literature?

Abstract

Background

This TACTYC funded research highlights the role that Maintained Nursery Schools (MNS) play in supporting families within areas of extreme social deprivation in the UK.

This rapid assessment was conducted with 12,100 respondents across 13 countries, aimed at understanding the needs and gaps in assuring assistance for affected children and communities during the COVID-19 crisis.

Ce rapport souligne que, bien que les enfants ne représentent pas un groupe à haut risque en terme de mortalité directe due à la COVID-19, la pandémie a des impacts secondaires de grande envergure qui augmentent les risques pour les droits et le bien-être des enfants africains.

This policy paper by Save the Children outlines some of the main threats the COVID-19 pandemic poses to children in Africa and suggests some of the political and programmatic responses to protect children’s rights.

This open letter calls on national governments and multilateral institutions to work immediately to strengthen ‘child protection in COVID-19’ response frameworks and to provide sufficient donor support to implement these responses effectively.

In this comment from the Lancet, the authors explores how to communication to children about the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly when someone in the family is hospitalised for or dies from COVID-19.

This child-led research initiative was conducted under the umbrella of World Vision’s DEAR project (Development Education and Awareness Raising) and the Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. The study explores explore SDG 16.2, the goal that focuses on the issue of ‘abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and all forms of violence against and torture of children’.

Child Trends conducted this 10th national survey of U.S. child welfare agency expenditures to promote an understanding of the challenges and opportunities agencies face in serving vulnerable children. This report is part of an array of resources compiled from the survey’s findings.

This paper explores how college graduates with foster care histories fare after graduating from a 4-year college that offered a campus-based program.

The goal of this research project is to inform policy and practice in Uganda by providing an estimate of the number of children on the streets in Kampala, Jinja, Iganga and Mbale; insight into the characteristics of these children; and exploration of children’s perspectives of their engagement on the streets.

This briefing note from Spoon Foundation provides considerations for program implementers, policy makers, and funders of programs in nutrition, child protection, and early child development.

This document from the Spoon Foundation provides guidelines for residential institution administrators to keep children nourished and their immune systems strong during the pandemic through diverse, nutrient-dense foods.

This call to action, endorsed by several organizations, calls on European governments and European Union institutions to reinforce actions to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable children and families during the COVID-19 crisis. It outlines the main challenges for vulnerable children and families, and what the EU and European governments can do to address these challenges.

This briefing sets out how organisations can use the Keeping Children Safe International Child Safeguarding Standards to ensure they do all they can to protect children from harm caused by their staff, programmes, operations and partners in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Children's Trust Fund Alliance has compiled what they are hearing from parents in the U.S. and some of the creative and flexible responses that their members have been implementing into this document.

This two-module course is aligned to the Guidelines to Strengthen the Social Service Workforce for Child Protection and aims to equip the learner with key strategies to strengthen social service workforce.

This think piece from Innocenti, UNICEF's Office of Research, unpacks what COVID-19 means for data collection efforts on violence against children (VAC). 

This report from Change the Record aims to provide an Australian national overview of the Critical Condition of First Nations communities during Covid-19. The report includes evidence on the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on children in detention centers as well as children in out-of-home care and their families.

This qualitative study used a case study design to explore the manifestations of the core psycho-social deficits associated with children domiciled in child headed households.

This webpage from the Children's Trust Fund Alliance features research and theory of change, training, and resources on prevention child neglect.

In this webinar hosted by the Center for the Study of Social Policy, experts discussed how family support professionals and organizations have adapted to serve families during the COVID-19 outbreak, and what we are learning that we will carry forward from this time.

If the United States adopted a child allowance, says this brief from the Center for the Study of Social Policy, it would ensure that families with children always have a minimum income on which they can rely, whatever the circumstances.

This brief from the Center for the Study of Social Policy in the U.S. calls for "a much more robust and permanent solution to ensure that everyone has access to paid leave who needs it, during this immediate crisis, and into the future."

The Committee on the Rights of the Child has issued this statement to warn of the grave physical, emotional and psychological effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on children and calls on States to protect the rights of children. 

Kusudi la dokezo hili la kitalaamu ni kusaidia watendaji wa ulinzi wa watoto na maafisa wa serikali katika mwitikio wao wa kukabiliana mara moja na changamoto za ulinzi wa watoto zinazowakabili watoto ambao wako katika hatari ya kutenganishwa na familia zao au kuwekwa  mahali kwaajili ya uangalizi mbadala katika kipindi hiki cha  janga la COVID-19. 

Este documento complementar à Nota Técnica da Força-Tarefa Interagências sobre a Proteção de crianças e adolescentes durante a pandemia de COVID-19: Crianças, adolescentes e cuidados alternativos apresenta dicas úteis para promover o engajamento e a participação de todas as partes interessadas, algo crucial para a manutenção da continuidade dos serviços para crianças e adolescentes.

This tool is meant to help practitioners stay grounded in family strengths as a way to overcome challenges and help families thrive even when the current COVID-19 crisis is weighing heavily on practitioners' and families' minds.

This article illuminates the important role the Committee on the Rights of the Child played in monitoring child abuse and neglect in the implementation of the now thirty years old Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

In this study, a transdisciplinary group of key stakeholders in Australia jointly constructed a causal loop diagram to bring forth the systemic structure underlying the issue of repeat child removals (where parents lose successive infants and children to out-of-home care) and identify system conditions that need to be altered.

This exploratory secondary data analysis compares demographics, mental health/well-being, and protective mothering strategies of mothers who have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) whose children were taken into care compared to those whose children were not to identify key characteristics associated with children being removed by child protective service (CPS) in Western Canada.

The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and resilience in Eritrean unaccompanied refugee minors living with foster parents in Sudan.

Based on the resilience theory, which highlights the role of one’s social resources in fostering resilience, the current study explored the role of care leavers' formal and informal social networks during the transition to adulthood, from the point of view of 50 young adults and their social workers.

This study examined whether childhood out-of-home care was associated with all-cause mortality until the end of 2013 in the UK.

This policy brief reports new causal evidence of how foster care influences children’s safety and educational outcomes in the U.S. state of Michigan.

With a recent interest by stakeholders in Ghana to consider kinship care as an alternative care option in child welfare policy, this study explores current kinship care challenges to help identify and address potential setbacks for policy and practice recommendations.

The current study uses two randomized control trials, one conducted with foster caregivers and one conducted with birth parents, to investigate the longitudinal effects of caregiver type (foster versus birth parent) and a home-visiting parenting intervention on emotion regulation among young children referred to Child Protective Services (CPS).

The purpose of this study was to determine the financial challenges faced by caregivers of orphans in Kitui Central Subcounty, Kitui County, Kenya.

In this study, the authors interviewed social care practitioners including directors, senior and middle managers, frontline social workers, social worker‐academics and family support workers who work with vulnerable children to identify the issues and concerns held by social care workers about placing vulnerable children in boarding schools.

The current study aimed to describe the relative contributions of measures of professional quality of life (ProQOL) to intent on leaving the workforce among child welfare professionals.

This study systematically summarizes the effect of parenting interventions on kinship foster caregivers and their cared for children, and examines the intervention strategies and research methods used in order to provide a context in which to better understand effects of interventions.

This video from UNICEF Cambodia, in the Khmer language, explores children protection case management during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This webinar focuses on standard 16 from the 2019 edition of the CPMS - strengthening family and caregiving environments - in the context of the current global COVID-19 pandemic.

The Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action and UNICEF facilitated this webinar to discuss the guidance in the Technical Note on COVID-19 and Children Deprived of their Liberty and some of the successes and challenges in protecting the rights of children in detention during the pandemic.

This report from Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission aimed to trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies.

This article from UNICEF Cambodia describes how UNICEF and its partners are responding to the needs of children in residential care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study aims at comparing subjective well-being (SWB) of children in residential care and in foster families in two European territories or jurisdictions: Portugal and Catalonia (Spain).

This report presents the findings from a study of the organisational and institutional context of statutory children’s social care (CSC) in England and its contribution to inequalities in provision.

This review brought together studies which investigate whether or not family group decision making works better, for the children concerned, than traditional child protection decision-making.

This study focused on kinship care as the top of the hierarchy of out-of-home care placements and utilized data obtained from a U.S. mid-Atlantic State Automated Child Welfare Information System. The study followed children who placed in out-of-home care over a three-year period.

This note provides practical advice to child protection actors and service providers on how to support children and families through a child helpline service and explores how existing child helpline can contribute to, and participate in, efforts to support children and families during the COVID-19 pandemic through child protection mechanisms and systems.

This document highlights issues relating to prevention and response programming for Children Associated with Armed Forces or Armed Groups (CAAFAG) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This short paper from Family for Every Child argues that a failure to prioritize support for kinship care during the COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the risks that girls and boys face, and lead to poorly targeted and consequently ineffective strategies to prevent and mitigate the effects of the virus. The evidence presented is derived from a literature review which included published guidance developed in response to COVID-19, and evidence on previous experiences with Ebola outbreaks and the HIV pandemic.

This first How We Care series presents the work of three Family for Every Child Members to help combat child sexual abuse in their regions.

How We Care is an initiative of Family for Every Child designed for those working with children and families across the world, to help them to learn from other practitioners. These pages showcase a variety of their practice, in order to generate learning and exchange across the Alliance and beyond. 

This study explored the independent effects of left-behind experience (LBE) on self-esteem and aggressive behavior in Chinese young adult populations, or the interaction effects of LBE and self-esteem on aggressive behavior.

This briefing paper sets out how children in Uganda are being affected, and practical recommendations to the Government, donors and other key stakeholders.

This analysis of 127 Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs) submitted by 114 UN Member States (13 Governments reported more than once) indicates that families may be key to ensure progress towards the SDGs by 2030, with close to 90 per cent of countries making specific references to families.

For this study, the researchers interviewed unaccompanied minor refugees (UMRs) in two youth asylum-centres in rural Sweden.

This report maps and assesses the forms of care provided to unaccompanied migrant, asylum-seeking and refugee children in six European Union Member States: Bulgaria, France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain.

This article compares how the global policy of deinstitutionalisation (DI) of child welfare travelled, was translated and institutionalised in two post-Soviet countries – Russia and Kazakhstan.

El presente informe sistematiza la información recabada en encuentros virtuales realizados con adolescentes y jóvenes y con equipos del Sistema de promoción y protección de derechos desde el inicio del aislamiento. Se pudo relevar información sobre el impacto social del aislamiento en contextos institucionales, las dificultades que enfrentan en el cumplimiento de las medidas de aislamiento y de las pautas de cuidado, así como también las buenas prácticas que están teniendo lugar en el marco del cuidado de niñas, niños, adolescentes y jóvenes (NNAJ) privados de cuidado parental.

This brief explores kinship care and how this critical resource is at risk now and in the future.

The current literature review provides a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding child institutional maltreatment.

This paper provides a summary of laws, policies, and programs pertaining to stepfamilies in a selection of Western countries, with a special focus on the United States.

This Africa Regional COVID-19 Situation Report outlines how how World Vision has reached over 18.2 million so far (including 6.9 million children) with their response interventions covering 26 countries on the continent. 

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the consequences of criminal justice–related prenatal substance use policies for family reunification and to examine differences in parental reunification by racial/ethnic group.

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a peer-delivered detection and active outreach program upon depression and engagement in mental health services among caregivers involved in the child welfare system.

This article describes the challenges in changing policy and practice in the provision of formal alternative care in Indonesia.

The purpose of this study was to capture the association of exposure to prolonged separation from both parents early in life and allostatic load (AL), a measure of biological multi-system dysregulation.

Este documento presenta 10 principios para ayudar a niños/as y familias vulnerables durante la pandemia de COVID-19.

This guidance note has been developed as a framework for minimum preparedness and response actions for a potential increase in the number of unaccompanied or separated children in need of alternative care in Bangladesh.

This document from Amnesty International reports on the family separations happening at U.S. immigration detention facilities in light of the COVID-19 crisis.

This report from Amnesty International outlines the "reckless response" of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the COVID-19 crisis, which threatens public health, and calls for the release of immigration detainees.

This brochure from the Center for the Study of Social Policy's Strengthening Families initiative shares tips for parents to draw on their own strengths and build a network of support to better help their children to thrive during challenging times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

These Standards for Foster Care are available to all stakeholders engaged in the protection, care and support of children where foster care provision may be required. These Standards are intended to guide social workers and other service providers in monitoring foster care services.

This issue brief provides an overview of U.S. national protective factors approaches to prevent child abuse and neglect.

This factsheet was designed by Save the Children to communicate the five key messages of parenting without violence, produced as part of the child protection COVID-19 response to protect children in their homes.

Save the Children has developed these key messages, on Parenting without Violence, which can be adapted to a particular context. This resource was produced as part of the child protection COVID-19 response to protect children in their homes.

This guidance from Miracle Foundation outlines case management process and tools aimed at children in Child Care Institutions (CCIs) in India who have been placed with their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of these case management processes and tools is to determine feasibility of permanent placement and expedite family-based care in families in which children were placed quickly and without proper preparation during COVID-19 lockdown.

L’obiettivo della presente nota tecnica è di aiutare i professionisti di protezione dell’infanzia e i funzionari governativi nelle loro azioni di risposta immediata ai problemi relativi alla protezione dell’infanzia affrontati dai bambini a rischio di separazione o in affido etero-familiare durante la pandemia di COVID-19.

This UN policy brief presents three urgently recommended actions to minimize the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current study examined the attachment development of 92 internationally adopted Chinese girls, focusing on the influence of type of pre-adoption care (institutional versus foster care) and sensitive adoptive parenting.

Based on experience working with children, families and communities in emergencies, including epidemics, in this policy brief, World Vision outlines a number of recommendations for Governments, UN Agencies, Donors, NGOS, Private Sector and Faith Leaders to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 on children’s health and nutrition, particularly for vulnerable children. 

This article argues that Greece's use of closed-type institutions for child protection is violation of children’s rights and a practice of secondary victimization, stigmatization and exclusion of children living in these institutions.