This qualitative study examines how young care leavers in Ghana are involved in decisions about their transition from residential care, revealing that despite national and international policy commitments, their participatory rights are often neglected. Findings show that care leavers frequently feel excluded or manipulated in key decisions, highlighting the need for more inclusive, rights-based approaches that recognize them as active partners in planning their post-care futures.

The multiple and extensive transformations that have occurred in Eastern Europe since the 1990s did not bypass care, bringing diverse care regimes. This chapter, in the Research Handbook on Social Care Policy, aims to explore the main trends in the development of care policies in Croatia (a post-Yugoslav country) and the Czech Republic (a Visegrád country).

This policy paper examines Egypt’s protection framework for unaccompanied and separated migrant children, highlighting both significant recent advances, such as national SOPs, a new asylum law, and expanded residence permits, and persistent challenges related to legal visibility, registration delays, and service access. It proposes actionable reforms to strengthen legal, administrative, and service systems, including expanding family-based alternative care to migrant and refugee children, developing child-friendly asylum procedures, and better integrating NGO, refugee-led, and community-based support into state structures.

This article explores how infants’ rights in alternative care are understood and advocated for by practitioners in Finland, drawing on interviews with foster carers, social workers, and other professionals. The findings show that advocacy is driven by recognition of gaps in standardised practice and is enacted through embodied, institutional, and structural approaches, highlighting the need for age-aware expertise to fully recognise infants as rights holders in care.

This article examines how vulnerability is constructed and experienced within residential childcare institutions involved in humanitarian interventions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with particular attention to adult narratives and Western positionality. Drawing on ethnographic research, it deconstructs structural and relational factors shaping children’s marginalisation and proposes methodological approaches that centre children’s perspectives in research.

This paper critically reviews India’s child welfare policies, highlighting how gaps in implementation, funding, and monitoring continue to leave millions of orphaned and abandoned children vulnerable despite existing legal frameworks. Drawing on international best practices, it proposes a shift toward family-based care, strengthened mental health and social work systems, technology-enabled monitoring, and greater child participation to build a more inclusive, child-centred welfare system.

This study examines the educational barriers faced by children in institutional care in India, identifying how structural rigidity, limited resources, stigma, and emotional neglect undermine equitable access to meaningful learning. Drawing on qualitative insights from care and education professionals, it highlights the critical role of social work in advancing child-centred, rights-based approaches to transform institutional care into an environment that supports inclusion, wellbeing, and educational equity.

This paper explores the lived experiences of Bhutanese unaccompanied and separated refugee children living in camps in eastern Nepal, examining how they navigate prolonged displacement, statelessness, and institutional neglect through ethnographic and narrative methods. It argues that these children exist in a “state-of-nowhere,” rendered politically and administratively invisible within refugee governance systems, and calls for rights-based, child-centred responses that address the structural and epistemic violence shaping their exclusion.

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences, motivations, and expectations of foster parents in Albania as the country transitions from institutional to family-based care, drawing on in-depth interviews with all active foster families at the time of the research. Findings reveal that fostering is driven by faith and compassion but shaped by limited state support, social stigma, and increasing awareness of children’s trauma, offering rare insight into how institutional and social contexts affect the sustainability of foster care in Albania.

This paper explores the mental health and wellbeing of care-experienced girls in Pakistan, highlighting how structural and systemic factors shape their experiences. Using focus group data, it identifies limited mental health awareness, gender discrimination and harassment, and restricted opportunities as key challenges, and offers recommendations framed within children’s and women’s rights to better support their futures.

This study examines how the introduction of a conditional cash transfer program in Peru affects parental discipline practices. It finds that in districts receiving the program, reports of physical punishment by mothers and fathers among low-income families decrease by at least 2.7 percentage points (11%), suggesting the program may provide additional benefits by reducing harsh disciplinary practices.

This book reflects two decades of work by the International Network on Transitions to Adulthood from Care (INTRAC) to advance academic research and policy reform on leaving care globally. It includes thirty-two country chapters, each providing background information and key statistics on children in care and care leavers based on available national data.

This book chapter examines the child welfare system, parental challenges, and family resistance, presenting a theoretical framework for building family resilience. It highlights stressors such as financial instability and mental health issues, and emphasizes collaborative, dignity-centered strategies that combine social work, mental health, and community support to improve outcomes for parents and children.

This article examines how gendered power dynamics influence restorative approaches to child protection, showing that traditional practices can marginalize children, especially girls and gender-diverse individuals. It highlights the potential for restorative justice to be transformed into a more inclusive and equitable system that addresses harm while challenging systemic power imbalances.

War negatively affects adults’ mental and physical health, which in turn impacts their parenting, exposing children to both direct and indirect stressors. This book examines these consequences, using evidence-based research and case studies from the Russian-Ukrainian war to highlight the importance of attachment, trauma-informed support, and interventions for families during and after conflict.

In Kenya, young people’s experiences of residential care and life after leaving care highlight trade-offs between material support, emotional guidance, and personal freedom. The study emphasizes that family strengthening and individualized case management are crucial to support children reunifying with families and successfully transitioning out of residential care.

This article critically analyzes the complex journey undertaken by foster families who decide to adopt the children or adolescents they initially cared for on a temporary basis. Through the study of four cases, it examines the experiences and perspectives of Chilean families who chose to transform their role from foster care to adoption, presenting narratives that highlight the controversies, inconsistencies, and tensions between the logics of temporary and permanent care within the Chilean child protection system.

This study examines the presence of compassion fatigue among foster and kinship carers in the United Kingdom and explores factors associated with it using survey data from 180 caregivers. Findings indicate that carers experience higher levels of compassion fatigue than helping professionals, with greater fatigue linked to lower parenting satisfaction, attachment avoidance, and unmet expectations of social support, highlighting important implications for social and clinical support systems.

There is still limited research on South African youths aging out of residential care, and there is no established protocol to guide social workers in preparing them for independent living. This study aimed to investigate what elements should be included in a protocol for social workers to effectively prepare youths leaving child and youth care centres (CYCCs).

This scoping review examined the scientific literature on youth aging out of substitute care in Canada to address challenges in estimating the country’s contribution to this growing global research field. The review identified key trends, research gaps, and future directions, emphasizing the need to better integrate existing findings to build a more cohesive Canadian evidence base.

This webinar, co-hosted by the Columbia University Seminar on Global Mental Health, examined how the shift toward localization is reshaping community-based child protection. The session explored both the challenges and opportunities of localizing child protection and well-being initiatives, emphasizing the need to transfer power to communities and support genuine local ownership for sustainable impact.

This article presents a brief history of intercountry adoptions from China and other countries, discusses reasons for its demise, and considers the consequences—for China’s children and for intercountry adoptions more broadly. It questions whether we are indeed seeing the end of intercountry adoption “as we know it,” while recognizing the emergence of new systems of care.

This article highlights the role of adoptee activism in raising awareness and changing policy regarding Intercountry Adoption (ICA) in The Netherlands. Through interviews with a selection of adoptees engaged in activism, this study shows that adoptees became engaged in activism as a result of growing adoptee consciousness in combination with encountering irreconciliation; they employed many types of activism, sometimes with different goals and strategies; they cooperated in different constellations and with many allies such as journalists, lawyers and scholars; and their activism had significant impact on general awareness and government policy.

This video provides a short overview of the Global Charter on Children's Care Reform:Guidance for Requesting Technical Assistance, which provides instructions on how governments can request technical support from a team of care reform advisors to develop or begin implementing those commitments. This includes a description of the different types of technical assistance available, ways it can be provided, and a step-by-step guidance for submitting requests.

This video provides a short overview of the Global Charter on Children's Care Reform: Guidance for Developing Commitments, which supports governments to design ambitious, measurable, and context-specific commitments that align with the Charter’s principles. It includes practical criteria, examples, and participatory approaches to ensure commitments are realistic, well-resourced, and responsive to children’s needs.