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. 

This webinar presented findings from a 2025 Media Landscape Analysis by Pinkston and Barna’s 2025 survey of U.S. Christians, highlighting a significant shift in Christian media narratives away from orphanages and toward family-based care, alongside rising awareness that poverty—not orphanhood—drives most placements.

This brief by the International Data Alliance for Children on the Move (IDAC) calls for urgent global action to close these data gaps and strengthen evidence-based policies that uphold the rights of unaccompanied and separated children. Based on a 2025 literature review of more than 200 sources, it identifies key trends by age, gender, migration status and route, and other variables.

This webinar, held December 16, 2025, spotlighted the powerful intersection between two consequential global advocacy movements in human rights: the reform of alternative care systems for children and the advancement of children’s access to justice.

ACE Zambia, founded in 1998 as a faith-based organization supporting orphans and vulnerable children, gradually shifted from operating multiple residential care facilities toward strengthening family- and community-based services after recognizing the harms of long-term institutionalization. Between 2014 and 2025, the organization closed all residential homes, expanded preventative and family-focused programs, and ultimately increased its reach by supporting far more children in safe family settings using the same level of resources.

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) affirms the importance of family, culture, and community in children’s lives and obligates governments to support families and protect children from discrimination, violence, and exploitation, yet many countries still lack policies that require a child-rights approach, prioritize best interests in decision-making, or prohibit corporal punishment. This article critically examines how effectively Australia, Canada, and the United States have implemented key CRC principles—particularly best interests and corporal punishment—by comparing their child protection policies, legislation, and practices to assess the Convention’s influence and its potential to drive broader system reform.

The development of foster care in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region should be seen in the context of a global movement for child care system reform, framed by the key principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1989), the UN Convention on the Rights of Pers

What We Stand For: Essentials of Children’s Rights is an engaging, story-driven online course that brings UNICEF’s child rights mandate to life. The course helps translate their shared commitment to children’s rights into everyday practice across all areas of work.

The Chapin Hall report evaluates the My First Place program, which provides intensive case management and fully subsidized housing to young people aging out of extended foster care in six California counties. Using data on 2,598 participants, the report finds that program completers were more likely to be employed, earned higher wages, and were more likely to enroll in and complete a semester of college compared with nonparticipants or those who did not complete the program.

Adoption in Zimbabwe, while intended to provide stable families for children without parental care, often marginalizes adopted adolescents by excluding them from decisions, limiting transparency, and severing cultural ties. This study highlights the emotional distress and identity challenges this creates and calls for more inclusive, transparent, and culturally grounded adoption practices that uphold children’s rights and voices.

Building on a presentation invited for a Kilbrandon Children’s Research webinar on media representations of children and young people in the care and criminal justice system, this article discusses the legacies of Canadian ‘care’ practices premised on violent assimilation and erasure.

This study examines how children in Swiss residential care perceive safety, revealing that while institutions aim to protect them, many still experience both safety and unsafety shaped by physical spaces, institutional rules, and relationships with staff. By centering children’s voices, the article highlights gaps between residential care’s protective mandate and children’s lived experiences, calling for a more nuanced, justice-oriented understanding of safety in child welfare.

كجزء من الحملة العالميّة لإصلاح رعاية الأطفال، تُحثّ الدول على تقوية الأسر، وتوسيع نطاق الرعاية البديلة الآمنة والحانية ضمن بيئة أسريّة، والإنهاء التدريجيّ والمستمرّ لاستخدام المؤسّسات لرعاية الأطفال.

Dans le cadre de la Campagne mondiale pour la réforme de la prise en charge des enfants, les pays sont encouragés à renforcer les familles, développer des modes de prise en charge alternatifs sûrs et favorables au développement de l’enfant, et mettre progressivement fin au recours aux centres d’a

Como parte de la Campaña global para la reforma del cuidado de la niñez y adolescencia, se exhorta a los países a fortalecer a las familias, ampliar los cuidados alternativos seguros y protectores basados en la familia y poner fin progresivamente al uso de instituciones para el cuidado de la niñe

Las niñas o niños que no pueden ser cuidados por sus madres o padres a menudo viven con familiares o amigos de la familia. Este tipo de cuidado se le conoce cómo cuidado familiar.

As crianças que não podem ser cuidadas por seus pais geralmente vivem com parentes ou amigos da família. Esse cuidado é conhecido como cuidado por família extensa ou próximos.

This paper analyzes child rights in conflict, with a particular focus on the ongoing war in Ukraine, where children face heightened vulnerabilities to trafficking and exploitation. It identifies the key impacts of contemporary conflicts on children and the role of social workers in these contexts.

This study explores the experiences of young Syrian migrant women transitioning out of institutional care in Türkiye, revealing how gender, migration status, and structural barriers shape their pathways to adulthood. It finds that gaps in education, employment support, housing, social capital, and aftercare services create persistent instability and exclusion, underscoring the need for more inclusive, gender-sensitive aftercare policies.

Investing in parent and caregiver support is one of the most impactful and cost-effective actions countries can take to advance children’s rights and accelerate progress toward the SDGs.

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a child rights crisis, with children without parental care being particularly vulnerable to its impacts. This brief highlights how climate change heightens risks of losing parental care, creates unaccompanied children, and disrupts alternative care systems, and it offers recommendations for policymakers and practitioners to prevent separation and protect these children.

Governments across Europe and Central Asia have advanced child care reforms, yet many children—especially those with disabilities or from marginalized communities—still face risks of separation without strong statutory family support systems in place. This White Paper outlines the essential policies, services, workforce standards, and rights-based approaches countries need to prevent unnecessary separation, strengthen families, and ensure every child can grow up safely in a supportive family environment.

The Moldova Transformation Guidance aims to support the transformation process of residential care facilities (RCF) to models that promote family support and community-based services, or to safely close them and redirect their resources. National and local authorities can use this guidance to design, plan, budget, communicate, and coordinate transformation at both individual and system levels.

The publication summarizes lessons and good practices from the Community Engagement for Better Care pilot project implemented in four communities by Diaconia of the Bessarabian Orthodox Church in Moldova in 2024-2025. The project explored how faith communities - especially the Orthodox Church - can support children and families in need.

This booklet of sermons, developed by Diaconia of the Bessarabian Orthodox Church in Moldova promotes solidarity-based communities where children and families thrive in safe and nurturing environments. It provides sermons for priests to emphasize child protection, family values, and community engagement.