As increasing numbers of Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) are arriving in Europe, there is a need to investigate which factors promote psychological resilience and improve their mental health. This review aims to identify preventive post settlement influences, including living arrangements, access to mental health services and effective treatments that may improve mental health outcomes.

Informed by the qualitative method and the descriptive-interpretive design, this study, which was underscored by radical humanist goals of structural social work, reflects the voices of 16 youth who had transitioned out of care.

In the present research, the aim was to develop, implement, and examine the effectiveness of an education program for mothers for the prevention of child neglect.

This study draws on a bioecological systems perspective to propose the parameters for a broader unit of analysis of inclusion for young children with disabilities in research within low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) contexts.

The goals of this study were 1) to examine this relation in youth placed in foster care with high levels of maltreatment exposure, and 2) to investigate the relation between maltreatment frequency and acute pain, and maltreatment frequency and general chronic health condition.

This study examined the relationship of caseworker ratings of risk across multiple domains to youth functioning and service use for a sample of children open to the child welfare system.

This thesis takes a range of Russian Children’s Villages as its case study in an attempt to investigate foster parents’ perceptions of parenting and thus shed light on the present-day development of the alternative care system in Russia.

This study aimed to establish how well the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) identified children who required treatment.

This study aimed to explore school bullying in LBC and examine the effectiveness of art therapy intervention for reducing bullying victimization affecting LBC in rural areas of China.

The objective of this study was to test the associations between parent-child separation with telomere length (TL) and psychopathology during adolescence.

Out of the shadows: Shining light on the response to child sexual abuse and exploitation - a 40-country benchmarking index - examines how countries are responding to the threat of sexual violence against children.

This Guide and Toolkit outlines why a community-led approach is needed and how to start putting it into practice, using a mixture of real-life examples, key tips and reflective questions.

This study focuses on the impact of abuse on the child’s education while it explores how these children are being supported in care institutions to minimize and overcome the effects of abuse on their educational journey.

This article examines the aftercare experiences of young people who have recently left a residential care institution in Lagos State, Nigeria.

The aim of this article is to analyse the specific factors which influence adoption breakdown by comparing cases of adoption breakdown which occurred prior to the onset of adolescence with those occurring after the beginning of this developmental stage.

The current study compared behavioral and adrenocortical functioning of maltreated and comparably aged (1.5–3 years) institutionally-reared children soon after (1.5–2.5 months) placement in foster care or adoptive homes, respectively.

This study used magnetic resonance imaging to compare adolescent AIDS orphans reared in institutions with a sex- and age-matched group of healthy adolescents reared in families in China using a voxel-based morphometry analysis.

The Families First Programme, an adaptation of the Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting Programme to the West Java context, is a parenting support programme anchored on children’s rights that gives parents guidance on child development, parenting and positive discipline practices. This trial will evaluate the effectiveness of the Families First Programme compared with a waitlist control group.

The current study examined longitudinal trajectories of memory and executive functioning (EF) from childhood to adolescence in the Bucharest Early Intervention Project, a randomized controlled trial of foster care for institutionally reared children in Romania.

This paper examines the recordkeeping governance requirements of the childhood out-of-home Care sector in Australia, with critical interlaced identity, memory, cultural and accountability needs.

Drawing on national-level data from the United States' child protection system, this study examines the prevalence of substantiated child protection cases involving a parent with an intellectual disability as well as information about demographic characteristics, risk factors, child maltreatment types and services provided at the start of a child protection case.

The objective of this study was to assess item characteristics indicative of the severity of risk for commercial sexual exploitation among a high-risk population of child welfare system involved youth to inform the construction of a screening tool.

This systematic literature review examines how the construct of cumulative harm is understood and operationalized within current Australian child protection legislation, policy, and practice and situates this within an international context.

Indigenous children have a long history of overrepresentation in child protection systems. This exploratory, mixed methods study examined practitioner perceptions of risk in response to client ethnic group. 

The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of the maternal role and support given in mothers with cognitive limitations who have children in placement.

This paper aims to investigate the protection framework established by the Family Reunification Directive for refugees who are unaccompanied minors.

This study employed a strict textual analysis of the relevant literature on the use of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic to understand the implications of this on regional security.

This articles presents an analysis of 33 semi-structured interviews with foster families in Flanders, exploring the tensions between voluntaristic and professionalising tendencies in foster care.

In this article, the authors reflect on a pilot project implementing a mindfulness-based stress reduction program among traumatized youth in foster and kinship care.

This working paper has reviewed cross-national datasets for the general population and available national data and other relevant (grey and academic) literature concerned with young people in care and care leavers in the three study countries.

This article outlines the arguments made in recent litigation undertaken by the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) on behalf of young people who requested access to legal audits conducted on their files by the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Family and Community Services (FACS).

This paper presents different instruments for the assessment of child abuse in families with parental mental illness.

This Global Report on Trafficking in Persons describes human trafficking on a global scale, including the incidences of child trafficking per region and country.

This guidance was produced with the Kenya Society of Care Leavers to address how to best engage care leavers - who may have suffered personal trauma in their past and may not have an existing safety net to protect them, yet have a very important voice - in care reform.

This article is a qualitative phenomenological study seeking to examine the perceptions, views, and feelings of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) and their caregivers on their lived experiences in OVC care and support in Zimbabwe.

In this paper, the authors use procedural justice theory as a lens to explore how “intervention with parental agreement” (IPA) policy is enacted in practice.

Qualitative data from a mixed‐methods study were used to explore the phenomenon of complex trauma in 20 urban‐dwelling mothers using a combined interpretive phenomenological and directed content analysis.

This research investigated the association between care placement and the presence of child mental health problems after controlling for children’s pre-care experiences. It also identified factors associated with mental health problems among children in care in the UK.

This study uses data from 215,885 children in 62 countries from the fourth and fifth rounds of UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) to examine the relationship between spanking and child well-being.

This study aimed to: (1) Explore the challenges that healthcare professionals (HCP) face when managing cases of abuse; (2) Explore cultural beliefs and understand how these shape practice and (3) Identify training needs.

Guided by social-ecological theory, this study explores responses to violence against children with disabilities, including preventative measures and treatment of victims in the West African countries of Guinea, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

The primary aim of a recent qualitative study was to optimise grandparent-grandchild connectedness after child safety concerns.

In this article, the argument is made for having a positive error culture in child protection to improve decision‐making and risk management.

This study contributes to the development of understanding of empathy as a social work skill through a mixed‐methods analysis of 110 audio recordings of meetings in a child protection service between workers and parents, applying a coding framework for analysis.

This paper reviews the Friends of the Children (FOTC) long‐term mentoring programme in the US and how it was adapted to serve children and families with child welfare system involvement.

The present study describes a community implementation of treatment foster care (TFC) for children and youth involved with child welfare in Ontario, Canada.

To inform decisions about permanent care arrangements, the authors of this study used Swedish national population registers to create a sibling population consisting of 194 children born 1973–1982 who had been in out-of-home care (OHC) at least 5 years before adolescence but were never adopted (50% boys) and their 177 maternal birth siblings who also had been in OHC at least 5 years before their teens but were adopted before adolescence (52.5% boys).

This study presents the feasibility and pilot evaluation of the Reflective Fostering Programme (RFP), a recently developed, group-based program to support foster carers, based on the concept of “reflective parenting.”

It is well documented that children placed in out-of-home care in Denmark perform poorly on a wide range of short-term and long-term outcomes compared to other children. This paper describes the core components of an innovative project that will attempt to address some of the major weaknesses of previous interventions and which, if successful, will be rolled out across foster care families nationwide.

The aims of this investigation were to (a) examine the effectiveness of the KEEP intervention at reducing behavior problems among children in foster care, as assessed by the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), during implementation of the intervention by a community agency using a randomized design and (b) determine whether the intervention is effective at reducing internalizing forms of behavior problems.

In this paper, the authors advance a framework for examining the nature and consequences of neglect, which they posit can be represented as variations along a continuum from severe psychosocial neglect to environmental enrichment.

The purpose of this paper is to compare loneliness between the left-behind children of migrant workers and the non-left-behind ones, and identify the most significant predictors of loneliness among the left-behind children.

Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) are increasingly, and increasingly effectively, being used in development and humanitarian work. Whereas health and education lead this use, application to child protection remains sparse and ill-understood. This paper helps address these two gaps.

The purpose of this scoping review is to assess the effectiveness of independent living programs on educational outcomes among youths aging out of the foster care system in United States.

This comprehensive literature review adds to the knowledge of pregnant and parenting mothers in foster care and their children by identifying and summarizing all relevant studies published between 2011 and 2017.

The current study explores how historical trauma has impacted American Indian tribes' trust in today's US public child welfare agencies.

The aim of this meta-analysis is to identify the most effective interventions to promote parental engagement and family reunification in high-income countries.

This research explores how decision-making heuristics are used by practitioners to determine which foster family is the best fit for a child.

This study includes 20 physically abused children aged 9–17 who completed Combined Parent–Child Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Outlining developments with reference to relevant studies, this review characterizes the perspectives used to explore and understand the phenomenon of children being left behind in rural China by parents going to work in cities.

The present investigation leveraged unstructured, case narrative fields in child welfare records to enhance knowledge about Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement among children born to mothers in care.

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate social workers’ perceptions of the problems that prevent successful family reunifications after foster care. The study explored social workers’ perceptions of barriers that prevent family reunifications in central Mississippi, USA.

This phenomenological study included 18 in-depth interviews with six mothers aged 19–22 years in or transitioning from foster care.

After the cancellation of the 2013 US National Child Welfare Evaluation Summit, the Children’s Bureau decided to develop short videos as a means of sharing ideas and issues that could not be presented at the conference. The result is the Virtual Summit Series, a group of 17 videos that combine illustration, animation, motion graphics, and content from national experts.

This webinar series offers technical assistance to child welfare agencies in the US on how to use data to improve outcomes for children and families.

The 2018 Home Visiting Yearbook uses 2017 data to present the most up-to-date look at home visiting on the US national and state levels.

The Data Supplement to the 2017 Home Visiting Yearbook presents 2016 data on early childhood home visiting, a proven service delivery strategy that helps children and families thrive.

This three-part video series shows how a fictional organization, Greene County Department of Human Services, set out to improve permanency for children and youth by increasing the number of available foster and adoptive homes using data-driven decision making (DDDM).

Drawing on international and European law and guidance and the Barnahus model, this document introduces ten good practice standards, the “European Barnahus Standards”, for multidisciplinary and interagency services for child victims and witnesses of violence in Europe adapted to the child.

This brief explores challenges and strategies for evaluating systems and organizational change in US child welfare settings.

This paper outlines a psychological skills group for unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people with a focus on cultural adaptations in the context of a UK mental health service.

The authors of this paper aimed to examine the available evidence on the impact of overseas parental migration on healthcare seeking for common childhood illnesses and the nutritional status of children left-behind under five years of age.

This study compared the prevalence of mental health and psychosocial problems between left-behind children (LBC) and controls in Sichuan province, China.

The primary aim of this meta‐analysis was to compare the incidence rates and factor scores of behavioural problems in Left‐behind children (LBC), who now account for more than one‐fifth of Chinese children, and non‐LBC.

This comprehensive meta-analysis examined the pooled prevalence of depressive symptoms in ‘left-behind children (LBC)’ in China and its associated factors.

This study examined the effects of grandparent–grandchild cohesion on the cross-lagged associations between depression and cultural beliefs about adversity in a sample of 625 rural left-behind children in China.

This thesis aimed to systematically review literature on the types, measurement and effectiveness of residential staff training, focussed upon psychosocial outcomes.

This article investigates policy in the Philippines relating to the protection of children, which, despite policy efforts in this space, and growing evidence of child maltreatment and its impact, remains unexamined by the literature.

The European Commission Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) commissioned SOS Children’s Villages International to undertake case studies of arrangements for ‘alternative child care’ in six non-European countries across three continents to help inform the EU’s future strategy for provision of support for children in countries outside Europe.  This report is a case study of one of the six countries, Ecuador.

The European Commission Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers commissioned SOS Children’s Villages International to undertake case studies of arrangements for ‘alternative child care’ in six non-European countries in three continents to help inform the EU’s future strategy for provision of support for children in countries outside Europe. This report is a case study of one of the six countries, Chile.

The overall purpose of this study is to present an ‘introduction’ to alternative care systems in Central and South America (CSA).

The objective of this study is to examine the intergenerational transmission of out-of-home care in Sweden.

This factsheet for families offers tips for helping a child transition from foster care to adoption.

This bulletin for professionals explores concurrent planning, which is an approach that seeks to reduce the amount of time children spend in foster care by considering all reasonable permanency options the moment a child enters the system.

The present longitudinal study explored the impact of initial emergency shelter placement on long-term externalizing behavior (i.e., aggression, delinquency) and internalizing symptom (i.e., anxiety, depression) trajectories, and whether kinship involvement moderated the effect of shelter placement on behavioral outcomes.

In this study, the authors assessed differences in the risk of early motherhood among low-income, maltreated, and foster youth and investigated whether differences likely reflect selection factors versus effects of involvement with Child Protective Services (CPS) or foster care.

This research examined the relationships among family structure (leftbehind status), caregiving, and child depression using archival data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses.

In this chapter of Communicating for Social Change, the author presents an analysis of the micro- and macro-level challenges of transnational separation of Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW)-parents and their left-behind children, which consequently beget psychosocial distresses among transnational family members.

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluated the effectiveness of the Incredible Years® (IY) Parenting Program in modifying children's behavioral problems, parenting practices and parents' psychological well-being among families under child protection and using other special support services.

The objective of the mission was to gather data on Honduras as a case study to support the IFRC global study on smart practices for protecting unaccompanied and separated children (UASC) from sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) through health and psychosocial services in last mile locations.

This study examined whether children with Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement who were in foster care had more advanced receptive vocabulary than children with CPS involvement who resided with their birth parents.

This book focuses on the lives of six mothers who had been pariahs and then became partners with child welfare commissioners, social workers, lawyers, foundation officers, and child welfare agency executives. It recounts how their courage and resilience brought about the most significant changes in the history of New York’s child welfare system.

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Social Work brings together the world’s leading scholars in the field to provide a cutting-edge overview of classic and current research and future trends in the subject.

This study tested the effectiveness of Parent Management Training, Oregon (PMTO) model on child social–emotional well-being.

The two goals of this article from the Special Issue on Adoption Breakdown of the journal of Research on Social Work Practice are the analysis of the duration of adoptive placements ending in breakdown and the role of age at placement in the breakdown experience in Spain.

The goal of this article from the Special Issue on Adoption Breakdown of the journal of Research on Social Work Practice is to review the existing research literature on adoption breakdown.

This article, that also serves as an introduction to the remaining articles in this special section on adoption breakdown, considers the multiple reasons why adoption breakdowns occur.

This special section of the journal of Research on Social Work Practice focuses on adoption breakdown.