In this episode of the Protected! Podcast, Elsa Laurin, the Senior Child Protection Officer for the East and Horn of Africa from UNHCR, tells Hani Mansourian how they and their partner organisations re-prioritised child protection cases in response to the changing situation of shut borders in eastern Africa as the threat of an outbreak of COVID-19 loomed.

This thesis aimed to explore health, abuse, support, and preconditions for school among children in out-of-home care (OHC) in Sweden and to assess changes after an intervention targeting foster children’s school performance.

In this second part of the Lancet Group Commission on institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children, international experts in reforming care for children identify evidence-based policy recommendations to promote family-based alternatives to institutionalisation.

This paper reviews the literature on child institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation from a global perspective. This review included a survey of historical and cultural trends and estimates of current numbers of children in institutional care, a systematic review and meta­-analysis of developmental sequelae, and a largely qualitative review of factors found to predict individual variations in such outcomes.

In this commentary piece, Aisha K Yousafzai - of the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the  and Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at Aga Khan University - notes that "the evidence presented [in the Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children] and their call to action to ensure abandoned children can thrive in family-based care environments rather than in institutions matters now more than ever as the global community addresses unprecedented challenges to ensure a generation of children are not left behind with respect to their survival, health, development, learning, and safety."

In this commentary piece, Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, explores the use of children's care homes in England and the need for improved supports to prevent placement in children's home and to provide for the needs of children and young people who are placed in these homes.

In this commentary piece for The Lancet Psychiatry, Joan Kaufman highlights some key findings and recommendations from the Lancet Group Commission on the institutionalisation and deinstitutionalisation of children.

This Executive Summary provides an overview of the Lancet Group Commission, which advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

This Lancet Group Commission, published between The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health and The Lancet Psychiatry, advocates global reform of the care of separated children through the progressive replacement of institutional provision with safe and nurturing family-based care.

This guidance is designed to inform child protection actors in Kenya in light of the COVID-19 crisis. It guides actions targeting, and services provided for, vulnerable children and families, including children living in institutions, children living on the streets, children with disabilities, and others.

The aim of this Technical Note is to support child protection practitioners and government officials in their immediate response to the child protection concerns faced by children who are at risk of separation or in alternative care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This dashboard draws on periodic country office reporting against an evolving questionnaire, first initiated on 12 March 2020, representing important early indications of the impacts of COVID-19 on the disruption of essential services for children and families.

This webpage from UNICEF links to the Policy Brief on the Impact of COVID-19 on children, the Dashboard on Data to inform the COVID-19 response, and other key data resources on COVID-19 and its impacts on children.

This dashboard contains the latest data from UNICEF’s global databases that are relevant to the COVID-19 response for children. Explore country-level data by gender, residence and wealth quintile.

This Joint Statement the ASEAN Ministers responsible for social welfare and development outlines their concerns and commitments to action regarding meeting the needs of vulnerable people impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, including children with disabilities, children deprived of liberty, and children in institutional care, among other groups.

This webinar focused on Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Settings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article from UNICEF describes the increased risks and vulnerabilities faced by children left behind by migration in Kyrgyzstan due to the COVID-19 crisis, and how UNICEF and its partners are responding to meet their needs.

This synthesis is the first in a series of digests of COVID-19 related resources (guidance, news, & academic articles) from the Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action. It focuses on sexual and gender-based violence and COVID-19.

The purpose of this checklist from the European Expert Group on the transition from institutional to community-based care, with Hope and Homes for Children, is to ensure EU funds in the 2021-2027 programming period contribute to independent living and inclusion in the community, including by supporting desk officers to check the consistency of the measures to transition from institutional to family-based and community-based services for children and the prevention of institutionalisation and separation of children, including with disabilities, from their families.

This paper from Just for Kids Law (JfKL) explores an issue that the organization has come across through their work: cases of under 18s (mainly 16- and 17-year olds) in the UK who are facing homelessness and do not receive the support they are entitled to from local authority children’s services. 

In this paper, after a historical introduction, the authors will refer, from a general point of view, to the current moment of immigration witnessed in Spain offering not only statistical data regarding this phenomenon but also legislation, and description of the policies carried out by the central and regional governments on issues like immigration, asylum and integration, with a particular focus on unaccompanied minors.

For this study, in-depth interviews with 17 currently or recently-involved parents in a Midwestern U.S. family treatment court, which are specialized child welfare dockets designed to address substance use, were conducted and analyzed using constant comparative coding, in order to understand parents’ perspectives on their own substance use, including its impact on their parenting, before and during child welfare system involvement.

Relational permanence – a form of social support characterized by the presence of an ongoing caring and supportive person in the context of the foster care system – is the primary type of social relationship that is explored in this article. Regression analyses were conducted examining whether relational permanence predicted later delinquency.

Through the lens of institutional ethnography, this paper explores how experiences of education inside one Secure Children’s Home in England are shaped by the institution.

The purpose of this study was to examine the mental health status and substance use behaviors of urban left-behind children and urban children still living with their parents in comparison to rural left-behind children.

This study explores a particularly wide discretionary space set for decision-making within the Norwegian welfare bureaucracy; care order decisions concerning newborns directly removed from the hospital by the child protection system.

This article describes the first United States-based national study to compare the rates of substantiation of maltreatment among cases reported to child protective services involving caregivers with and without disabilities.

This paper provides a structured overview of the existing parenting literature with the aim of developing an evidence-based and culture-sensitive framework of parenting and its influence on child development.

Drawing on the narratives offered by child and family social workers, this paper considers a series of possible explanations for Northern Ireland (NI)'s significantly lower out of home care rates.

This article is a qualitative phenomenological study seeking to examine the perceptions, views and feelings of the orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), care-givers and community leaders on their experiences with Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) as a material and psychosocial support intervention in Zimbabwe.

This paper chronicles the goals of the partnership and the planning and implementation of the Child Protection Training Academy, developed by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and the University of Illinois Springfield in the U.S.

This research project aimed to study and inform the effective use of Pupil Premium Plus (PP+)-funded interventions to support educational outcomes for looked after children in the UK.

The aim of the present study was to provide understanding into the past and present experiences of individuals who had resided in a child-care institution during their childhood and/or adolescence and to contribute to the study of the long-term impact of institutional care on adult life.

This article describes a policy adoption case study about deinstitutionalization of childcare in Georgia since independence. It highlights the evolving and non-homogeneous nature of transnational agency in the area of childcare deinstitutionalization, and offers insights into the complex relationship between transnational agency and national policymaking.

This paper explores the efficacy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Convention, UN General Assembly, 1989) through the lens of the over-representation of First Nations children placed in out-of-home care in Canada and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia.

This document provides interim guidance for child protection and health actors in the context of quarantine and isolation measures to mitigate related child protection risks, minimize family separation,and promote family unity and social cohesion.

This study selected children who remained in kinship care (N = 267) for three waves from nationally representative data and examined the longitudinal associations among poverty, economic pressure, financial assistance, and children’s behavioral health outcomes in kinship care.

This study uses secondary data analysis of the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect 2008 to explore what case and worker factors predict the provision of ongoing child welfare services.

This Policy Brief by the United Nations highlights the impact of COVID-19 on persons with disabilities and in doing so, outlines key actions and recommendations to make the response and recovery inclusive of persons with disabilities.

This Policy Brief offers four basic tenets to guide our collective response to human mobility and the COVID-19 crisis, including the response to children on the move and children who are separated or unaccompanied in particular.

Each “case study” chapter in this book provides a rich description of the development, current status, and future of residential care in countries from Brazil to Botswana.

The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of residential care from the perspectives of a group of young people who had lived in residential childcare institutions in Bangladesh with a view to making improvements in residential childcare in the future.

In the context of COVID-19, this manual focuses on psychosocial care of children and prevention of violence in spaces where children stay (child care institutions, families, temporary isolation facilities, NGO shelters, etc.)

This issue brief addresses the following questions: What are family resource centers? What are the defining characteristics of a family resource center? What do we know about the effectiveness of family resource centers in reducing child welfare involvement? What is the return on investment? What is missing from the research literature?

Abstract

Background

This TACTYC funded research highlights the role that Maintained Nursery Schools (MNS) play in supporting families within areas of extreme social deprivation in the UK.

This rapid assessment was conducted with 12,100 respondents across 13 countries, aimed at understanding the needs and gaps in assuring assistance for affected children and communities during the COVID-19 crisis.

Ce rapport souligne que, bien que les enfants ne représentent pas un groupe à haut risque en terme de mortalité directe due à la COVID-19, la pandémie a des impacts secondaires de grande envergure qui augmentent les risques pour les droits et le bien-être des enfants africains.

This policy paper by Save the Children outlines some of the main threats the COVID-19 pandemic poses to children in Africa and suggests some of the political and programmatic responses to protect children’s rights.

This open letter calls on national governments and multilateral institutions to work immediately to strengthen ‘child protection in COVID-19’ response frameworks and to provide sufficient donor support to implement these responses effectively.