Better Care Network highlights recent news pieces related to the issue of children's care around the world. These pieces include newspaper articles, interviews, audio or video clips, campaign launches, and more.
According to this article from the Japan Times, Japan places around 85 percent of children and babies who need care into institutions, and "British-based experts on the welfare and rights of vulnerable children" are calling for increased provisions for foster care in the country.
In this story for the March 2020 issue of the Atlantic, David Brooks writes about U.S. society's "shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families" and the "devastation it has wrought," including how it "ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor."
This article from the Guardian shines a light on the "nearly one million 'left-behind' Venezuelan children whose parents have been forced to migrate, leaving their offspring in the care of grandparents, aunts, siblings, neighbours or sometimes even completely alone."
"Children in Maryland's foster care system are languishing in psychiatric hospitals even when they no longer require hospital care," says this segment of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. "The state doesn't have enough space to place them elsewhere."
This article from the Irish Times features interviews with several care leavers, ahead of the fifth annual Care Day on 21 February 2020, an international celebration of children and young people with care experience celebrated in Ireland, the UK, Spain, Finland, Croatia, Australia and New Zealand.
A fire tore through a children’s group home in Haiti Thursday night, killing at least 15 children at a facility run by a U.S.-based Christian organization, according to UNICEF.
In this opinion piece for Youth Today, Benjamin Bencomo - an assistant professor of social work at New Mexico Highlands University - writes about his experience as a social worker supporting an Indigenous young person as he aged out of foster care and how he learned to allow the young person to define his own goals for a successful transition to adulthood.
"Putting children under the age of 16 in unregulated accommodation will become illegal, under new plans announced today by Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to drive up the quality of children’s social care," says this press release from the UK Department for Education.
In this article for the Conversation, Wendy Sims-Schouten describes her research looking at how the Victorian idea of who does and doesn’t deserve help from the state persists in the modern era, including how some children are considered "problematic" and beyond help.
This article from the Marshall Project describes how thousands of U.S. children are removed from their homes each year to be placed in foster care for only a few days and later returned to their families.