This insight from Changing the Way We Care provides an overview of the household economic strengthening (HES) activities that were part of a holistic family strengthening approach in Kenya.

This study purposed to assess the psychological wellbeing of adults who were raised in children’s homes and other institutional care in Kenya and had since transitioned out. T

This article explores the importance of strengthening mental health education for left behind children in rural areas and proposes various strategies to meet their mental health needs. The study emphasizes the importance of parental participation, school counseling mechanisms, diverse educational activities, and social support.

This article focuses on The Taken Children of Ukraine during the first 6 months of the war and its implications for social workers engaged in work with children and their families.

On 21st September 2023, the Governments of Canada and Zambia, in partnership with UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage and the Child Marriage Monitoring Mechanism, hosted a High-Level Side Event during the Seventy-Eighth Session of the United Nations General Assembly. The event was titled 'Charting Brighter Futures: Utilizing Data for Accelerated Action to End Child Marriage and Achieve SDG 5.3'.

To commemorate their 10th anniversary as an Alliance, this year’s Symposium took place on October 26, 2023, and offered a retrospective view of the Cape Town conference and the impact it achieved, both in the participating countries and globally. Then, through a deep dive into the experiences of three other countries— Romania, Rwanda and Viet Nam—it will explore the different ways countries have made progress in strengthening their workforce over the past decade and will highlight the continuing and emerging challenges facing the workforce in each country.

Tiegan Boyens, ATD Fourth World and Teen Advocacy

Judge Raul Pangalangan International Criminal Court Judge (2015 – 2021)

Dr Rhiannon Evans, Reader in DECIPHer, discusses a systematic review taken of international evidence to understand what programmes work for improving the mental health of care-experienced children & young people, how they work, and what might be the challenges to delivery and engagement.

Daniela Mamaliga, Director of Partnerships for Every Child, presents the findings and conclusions of a comprehensive 2022 financial assessment conducted by CTWWC in six residential institutions. The financial assessments aimed to inform political decisions on the future of the six institutions, including their transformation/reorganization plans. Ms. Mamaliga highlights that though the average annual cost for caring for a child is increasing in all six institutions, even as number of children and staff is decreasing in some of them.

“When we talk about equity and efficiency and what is right for children, when we provide services to families and children, we need to make sure that we are not just investing wisely, but that we are reaching out more broadly to all children in need."

As an experienced social worker and practice lead at Social Work Scotland, Vivien Thomson shares valuable insights underscoring the importance of investing in the social service workforce to drive meaningful care reform. Drawing from lessons learned in Scotland's Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) policy framework, Ms. Thomson, illuminates the critical role of social workers and the need to empower them as the glue that holds together multi-agency teams.

This article uses life history research to reveal a new understanding of institutional care. The study draws on interviews with care leavers from a Latvian orphanage who narrate life histories and identify critical life events and moments of resistance to times of adversity.

This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of how Child Protection Services and Law Enforcement Agencies in Nigeria can combat domestic violence against children. It seeks to provide recommendations, on strengthening these entities as other important stakeholders involved in preventing detecting, responding to, and protecting children from domestic violence.

This comment in the October 2023 issue of The Lancet discusses gender equity in health care and how improving access to sexual and reproductive health services can lead to a considerable reduction in maternal mortality rates. Other reports emphasise how collecting and analysing sex-disaggregated and gender data can help identify disparities in access to education, health care, and other services that are crucial for overall development.

The article grapples with the tacit interplay of poverty, caste, and gender and its effects on the education of children in a village. It explores how pandemic-induced school closure impacted the life chances of marginalised children during and after the pandemic in the ‘deprived geography’ of rural Madhya Pradesh, India.

This research is part of a wider project commissioned by the Hong Kong Committee on Children’s Rights (HKCCR), a non-governmental organisation originally formed in 1992 to promote, advance and ensure the rights of the child in Hong Kong. The aim of the wider project was to establish an independent baseline study of the implementation of Article 12 across all relevant sectors in Hong Kong, from constitutional and high-level policy-making to health and education to matters of leisure, culture and built environment, amongst others.

From 2021 to 2023, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has taken administrative actions to prioritize the implementation of Family First prevention services. These actions minimize traumatic deployments of CPS, reduce the use of family separations, and bolster support for families providing kinship care. In this brief, the authors highlight where progress has been made—and where the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) could still take additional steps in 2024.

This longitudinal study evaluates the effectiveness of BLINDED intervention, an intervention that utilizes family search and engagement practices to place children who enter foster care in kinship placements as quickly as possible in the U.S.

The objectives of this study were to examine (1) the associations between parental absence for six months or more, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), mental health problems, and substance use among young adults in sub-Saharan Africa, (2) whether parental absence and other ACEs are independently associated with mental health outcomes and substance use, (3) and if parental absence explains additional variance above and beyond those explained by other ACEs.

This is a systematic review of literature published from 2002 to 2022 to assess the differences in outcomes of children and youth who were adopted out of foster care compared to children and youth in foster care (CYFC) who were in other permanency placements (reunified, aged out, long-term foster care). The review yielded twelve (N = 12) studies from Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

To promote the return of juveniles to a home-like environment (e.g. living with (foster)parents) after secure residential treatment (SRT), it is important to know which factors are related to this outcome. The current study, based in the Netherlands, examined which characteristics of the juvenile, family, and SRT, including family centeredness and use of systemic interventions, are related to the living situation after discharge.

This article published in the Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies is part of a complex overview of the connections between the child’s right to be heard and the child’s best interests and parental responsibility matters and cases. The focal point of the paper is how Hungarian codification, judiciary and academic legal literature have changed over the last decade and how they have adapted to the modern child-focused standards.

This article analyzes the integration process of children returned from ISIS territory in three regions of the Russian North Caucasus from where the largest number of ISIS fighters with Russian citizenship originated. Following the concepts of “reintegration of returned migrants” and “cultural citizenship”, it explicates the role of key actors in the processes of adaptation and integration of children and their families, as well as analyzes the nature of the barriers they overcome to restore their lost civil status and identity.