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.

These researchers conducted a systematic review to explore interventions that prevent or respond to intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against children (VAC) by parents or caregivers, aiming to identify common intervention components and mechanisms that lead to a reduction in IPV and VAC.

This systematic literature review searched for studies published in any language between 1st January 2000 to 16th February 2021 and identified 33 studies that provided findings for co-occurring IPV and VAC in 24 low- and middle-income countries.

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 study was conducted with focus groups in Kenya and Guatemala.

There are several studies that provide evidence for the negative effects of residential care for children. This chapter applies system analysis and child-centric approaches to assess the Children Alternative Care System (CACS) deinstitutionalization in Egypt.

CarINg aims at helping girls and boys in the alternative care system (care leavers) become protagonists of their own future by making them feel part of a welcoming community.

The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate the relationship between agency and well-being in a group of care leavers (N = 48) recruited from the alternative care services offered by the cities of Florence and Prato in Italy and involved in the Caring project.

Foaia de parcurs pentru încetarea plasamentului copiilor din grupa de vârstă 0-6 ani în îngrijire rezidențială este un instrument care asigură toate componentele îngrijirii protectoare ale copilului: sănătate, alimentație adecvată, îngrijire, siguranță și educație timpurie, prin colaborarea intersectorială dintre Ministerul Muncii și Protecției Sociale, Ministerului Sănătății, Ministerul Educației și Cercetării și autoritățile administrației publice locale.

This is a tool that ensures all components of child protective care: health, adequate nutrition, care, safety and early education, through the intersectoral collaboration between the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and Research and local public administration authorities.

The survey results presented in this report highlight increasing efforts by states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to promote kinship care and support the caregivers of children who are known to the child welfare system. At the same time, the report calls on states to do more to help willing kin caregivers access and benefit from foster care licensing. 

A comprehensive survey of kinship care policies identifies increasing efforts by states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to promote kinship care and support kinship caregivers of children and youth who are known to the child welfare system.

Child Maltreatment 2021 is the latest edition of the annual Child Maltreatment report series. States provide the data for this report via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS was established as a voluntary, national data collection and analysis program to make available state child abuse and neglect information.

Child Maltreatment 2020 is the latest edition of the annual Child Maltreatment report series. States provide the data for this report via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS was established as a voluntary, national data collection and analysis program to make available state child abuse and neglect information. Data have been collected every year since 1991 and are collected from child welfare agencies in the 50 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

Child Maltreatment 2020 is the latest edition of the annual Child Maltreatment report series. States provide the data for this report via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS was established as a voluntary, national data collection and analysis program to make available state child abuse and neglect information. Data have been collected every year since 1991 and are collected from child welfare agencies in the 50 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.

Child Maltreatment 2022 (the report) is the latest edition of the annual Child Maltreatment report series. The report is used by researchers, practitioners, and advocates throughout the world as a source for national child welfare data. Jurisdictions provide the data for this report via the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). NCANDS was established as a voluntary, national data collection and analysis program to make available state child abuse and neglect information. Since 1991, child welfare agencies in the 50 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia have collected and submitted data for NCANDS.

This report provides an updated data-driven assessment of female genital mutilation (FGM) around the world. It narrates through numbers the stories of millions of girls and women who have survived the practice and the millions more who remain at risk.

In this episode Amanda Griffith of Family for Every Child is joined by representatives of three member organisations who are working to support children's mental health and wellbeing across three continents.

In this video, Tamara Mwale of Alliance for Children Everywhere (ACE) Zambia shares a story of reintegration. At ACE, whenever possible, the team seeks to reintegrate children with biological family.

On 26 April 2024 the International Dialogue on Better Care Reform was held in Kyiv as part of the International Summit of Ministers of Social Policy. The Government of Ukraine is currently working on establishing an International Advisory Group to serve as a platform for collaboration, guidance, and ongoing support to strengthen its child care and protection systems.

Disability Rights International, as part of the Global Coalition on Deinstitutionalisation (GC-DI), organized a series of thematic workshop on the UN Guidelines on Deinstitutionalization, including in emergencies.