In this interview, BCN’s Senior Technical Advisor, Rebecca Nhep, speaks with Phil Aspegren, Founder of Casa Viva, about transitioning residential care services with child sponsorship funding models.
This global scoping review aimed to examine the extent and nature of existing literature on the influence of adverse childhood experiences and resilience on the cognitive, physical, mental, and social health outcomes among older adults.
This practitioner guidance paper outlines the work of the Pillars Ka Pou Whakahou -- a charity based in New Zealand that provides support for the children and families of those in prison by providing wraparound support for these families, with home-based social work and a youth mentoring programme.
This practitioner guide outlines the Aviva program in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand that provides support to children, young people and adults who have experienced family or sexual violence.
This practitioner guidance paper details the work of the VOYCE – Whakarongo Mai centres in New Zealand which centres its work around the belief that care-experienced young people are already experts on the care system – they just need to be offered appropriate training and support to get their voices heard.
This UNICEF paper summarises evidence on the current use and impact of boarding schools in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region and draws on wider international evidence. It proposes a typology of boarding schools and considers the drivers for their use, as well as the concerns and challenges related to that use for vulnerable children.
This Global Thematic Review on Education examines the under-researched relationship between education and institutional care.
Around the globe, an estimated 27 million people are exploited for labor, services, and commercial sex. Through force, fraud, and coercion, they are made to toil in fields and factories, in restaurants and residences. Traffickers prey on some of the world’s most marginalized and vulnerable individuals – profiting from their plight. Among these individuals are children who are forced into criminality, sex trafficking, child soldiering, and in some countries the forced marriage of children has been defined as a form of exploitation.
On March 20, 2024, an immersive simulation lab event took place in Sri Lanka. Child protection allies from the Western Province of Sri Lanka gathered for a hands-on experience aimed at transitioning from a system reliant on child care institutions to one focused on promoting family-based care and strengthening family initiatives.
This article aims to trace and present some themes on Sweden's history of transnational adoption, with a particular focus on the public debate and the different narratives that representatives of the adoption triangle—the adoptees, the adoptive parents, and the biological parents—tell when dealing with transnational and transracial adoption as a personal and political phenomenon.
The study investigated the psychosocial consequences of poverty on rural Zimbabwean learners from child-headed households who are lagging behind in their learning. The study also aimed to generate recommendations based on the research findings.
This article aims to examine how the training and competencies of social workers during the deinstitutionalization processes in Lithuania impacted the preparation of children for independent living in society. The review of the scientific literature, presented in the article and the research data, can be applied to improve community care homes providing social services to highlight the role of social workers in creating a safe environment for the child, involving the child in the planning and organization of activities, fostering self-confidence and their abilities.
This article details to unique challenges faced by youth in care in the US when receiving inpatient treatment and how that varies in several ways from the care of non-foster care youth. Children in care have more medical, behavioral, and psychiatric problems and require health care at higher rates than youth not engaged in the child welfare system.
This article details the authors' findings that provide the first description of foster care trajectories in the US. Both practice and policy formulation can benefit from these empirically supported descriptions. Using such trajectory typologies, researchers can now explore how trajectories may predict wellbeing outcomes.
The aim of this empirical study was to analyse the relevance of long-term care solutions implemented in Poland for children leaving foster care, from the perspective of professional caregivers of the process of becoming independent.
In this chapter, the authors explore the intricate relationships between young disabled children, their families, institutional settings, and disability services in Canada, with an emphasis on the challenges stemming from unstable custodial dynamics and governmental interference.
This article provides an analysis of key policy and regulatory documents preceding or accompanying outsourcing policies in England (e.g., policy document relating to the 2012 and 2022 Health and Social Care Acts and the 2014 Care Act), and peer reviewed research on the impact of outsourcing within the NHS, adult's social care, and children's social care.
In Kenya, economic challenges often force families to place their children in residential care facilities (sometimes referred to as orphanages), leading to long-term negative impacts.
This study, conducted in Mthatha in South Africa's Eastern Cape province, sought to describe Xhosa cultural attitudes in relation to adoption.
Resistance from donors is a common barrier for organizations transitioning from residential care to family-based care. What works to sustain and even increase funding for organizations in transition?
This workshop explores why it is important to support care leavers networks, and how these networks can be supported. The workshop was designed and facilitated by care leavers, with presentations from a regional network working across Africa, and networks in Uganda and Zimbabwe.
2024 Annual Meeting for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action.
This brief provides an overview of Kafaalah, an alternative family care option rooted in Islamic tradition, where a sponsor (Kafiil) cares for a child (Makfuul) without severing the child's ties to their birth family. It explains how Kafaalah differs from adoption by emphasizing that the child retains their birth family name and inheritance rights.
This book looks at major macro trends affecting children as well as interventions that have been used to address problems that children face. Topics that are addressed include the UN Convention on Children, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that support children, and development issues like pre and post-natal health, family systems, gender roles, and puberty/adolescent issues. Attention is given to major risk factors and challenges such as sex trafficking, child labor, street children, protecting children in congregate care, and violence against children in the home, in institutions, and in the community.
The current study examined irritability in 107 16-year-olds with a history of institutional care from a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an alternative to institutional care and 49 community comparison children.
In this article, the author adopts a broadly autoethnographic approach to reflect on how boys (now men in their late 40s and early 50s) brought up in the 1980s in a Scottish residential school recall being cared for.
This study describes a participatory, child-informed process of developing a multidimensional measure of child subjective well-being tailored towards the priorities of children who have lived in residential care. The survey was administered to 180 young people in Kenya and Guatemala who were reunified with family after living in residential care or at risk of entering residential care.
This Technical Note lays out ways in which national child protection systems can be enhanced to include children in the context of migration.
This project uses a mixed methods design to explore how residential youth workers in British Columbia conceptualize and account for grief and loss. Specifically, the authors explore service providers’ perceptions of how loss affects children’s behavior.
This study uncovers the internal mechanisms through which parental care deficit impacts depression in left-behind children in China.
The goal of this research was to map and identify service and social policy needs, gaps, barriers, and enablers for Western Australian custodial grandparent carers.
This study offers an updated review and analysis of policy reforms across both the child protection and youth justice systems in jurisdictions such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, targeting researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field.
In this global study, the authors used data from the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a longitudinal study of institutionally-reared and family-reared children, to test how caregiving quality during infancy is associated with average EEG power over the first 3.5 years of life in alpha, beta, and theta frequency bands, and associations with later executive function (EF) at age 8 years.
This study focused on internationally adopted children from Russia to Spanish families who suffered early institutionalization. The study found that these children were at risk of a late onset of internalizing problems in adolescence. Both pre-adoption, adversity-related, and post-adoption factors predict variability in internalizing problems in this population.
This guidance aims to tailor existing case management standards and guidance to include specific elements that are relevant to child marriage cases; using the voices of Syrian refugee girls from the Terre des hommes-Lausanne Foundation (Tdh) and King’s College London (KCL) research in Lebanon and Jordan to support Child Protection and Gender-Based Violence case management staff in their case management work on the issue of child marriage.
This webinar explored the importance of working across sectors to enable effective care reforms. Speakers focused in particular on work with social protection and education sectors, drawing on examples from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and Rwanda.
There is global agreement (illustrated by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child [1989], the most widely adopted human rights treaty) that optimal support for a child comes from a caring and protective family.
This is a comment on the the report Pathways to Better Protection which gives promising indication that deinstitutionalisation policies are closing residential housing facilities and that increasingly, with the exception of children with disabilities, children are less likely to find themselves in residential care.
This Literature Review was commissioned by Adoption England’s Regional Adoption Agency (RAA) Leaders’ Group to support practitioners in care planning for children. This summary document is for use by those directly involved in care planning, and also aims to potentially provide some support for those writing care plans and court reports for children needing permanency away from their family.
This short paper provides an overview of the existing links between disability and trafficking in human beings, how persons living with disability are affected by trafficking, and to what extent legal standards, policy frameworks, and anti-trafficking measures integrate concerns associated with disabilities.
This global report describes the process used to determine the priorities for research on the intersections between violence against children and violence against women, and the top 10 research questions identified.
This is a qualitative research study to gather primary data to examine the high demand for foster care services in South Africa and the impact on the country's social work services.
The study is aimed at examining organizational as well as managerial practices in orphanages located at Balasore, India to understand how these factors impact the care and development of orphaned children.
This research project was an open trial examining the feasibility of utilizing the Unified Protocol (UP) -- a form of cognitive behavioral therapy -- within a residential treatment facility in Calgary, Canada for children involved with child welfare authorities who often have limited caregiver involvement.
This study demonstrates the need for participatory recordkeeping to promote the right of children and young people placed in Swedish residential care homes to record-making, to facilitate access to a complete record of their placements. It is further through record-making that the experiences of the placed individuals can be used to inform practice and policymaking.
While the determinants of child marriage among females have been well-documented, there is a lack of research on the determinants of child marriage among males. This study aims to bridge the gap in the literature to investigate the determinants of child marriage among males and females in Vietnam.
The purpose of this U.S.-based study was to compare adolescent and caregiver reports of adolescent adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and their relationship with current adolescent depression and to analyze the relationship between ACEs and depression.
This study examines the factors which drive the decision to provide child protection and welfare services in Ireland using social work case files and multivariable analysis.
This U.S.-based study aimed to explore how caregivers perceive their role in decision-making when accessing residential treatment settings (RTS) for youth using interpretive phenomenological analysis.
Research highlights that residential care experienced children and young people in Scotland have poorer educational outcomes than their peers within the wider population. Despite experiencing adversity, attachment, separation and loss, school attainment data on leaving care only reflects part of the educational journey. This paper aims to address a gap in contemporary literature that is of benefit to practitioners, academics and policymakers.
