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Orphanage volunteers may have the best of intentions - but they may unwittingly be doing more harm than good, as one ex-volunteer discovered.
At the age of 17, the idea of volunteering in an orphanage seemed like a rewarding, ethical and helpful thing to do. She found an organisation to travel with and booked on a trip to Kenya.
Looking back, she now questions the ease at which was able to sign up to volunteer in an orphanage, and the unsupervised access, without any child protection checks, to vulnerable children. Today, she feels that her trip was form of exploitation -…
One of our partner organisations and creator of the orphanage volunteering alternative Rok Kern programme, Children in Families was invited to speak about volunteering at an International School in Phnom Penh.
Following, this one student, Annie*, shared her thoughts in a blog about the 'buzz' you get from volunteering in an orphanage. She invites other volunteers to think beyond the 'buzz' to consider the emotional impact on the children and to channel their good intentions and excitement about volunteering into being catalysts for change.
"The important thing to remember is…
When Eliza was a teenager, her dream was to volunteer in orphanages all over the world. So when she turned 18, she packed her bags and headed to Guatemala to volunteer in an orphanage. Her first task was to sort through a container of goods that had been donated to the orphanage from the USA. Inside the container was a pair of snow skis. She remembers realising in that moment that she was a bit like the skis: very well intentioned, but not much use in the context of a Guatemalan orphanage. At the time, she spoke very little Spanish and had minimal experience working with children.
This was…
Ethical volunteering abroad and alternatives to orphanage volunteering
If you’re reading this it is probably because you’re aware that sometimes volunteering abroad can cause more harm than good. But with thousands of volunteering programs available in countries across Africa, Asia and South America, it can be very difficult, as a prospective volunteer, to know which one to choose.
The debate around the pros and cons of international volunteering has been raging for the past decade. With hundreds of articles, blog posts and exposés out there, both in favour and against…
ReThink Orphanages is a global cross-sector coalition working to prevent family separation and child institutionalization by shifting the way volunteers and donors support vulnerable children overseas.
Decades of research show that growing up, separated from family, in a residential care institution, such as an orphanage, is harmful to a child's development and well-being. This has led to a global effort to shift away from institutional care towards family-based care.
But well-meaning support for orphanages – through donations, volunteering, tourist trips…
Application of scientific findings to effective practice and informed policymaking is an aspiration for much research in the biomedical, behavioural, and developmental sciences. But too often translations of science to practice are conceptually narrow, ethically underspecified, and developed quickly as salves to an urgent problem. For developmental science, widely implemented parenting interventions are prime examples of technical translations from knowledge about the causes of children’s mental distress. Aiming to support family relationships and facilitate adaptive child development, these…
This is the monthly update of the Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Learning Platform published in January 2024.
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When teaching in or around the subject of care-experienced young people, it is important for information to be presented in a way that not only creates an understanding of the prevalence of care experience but also emphasises the myriad of life challenges associated with experiences of being involved in the care system.
It is known that out of the 12 million children living in England, just under 400,000 (3%) are known to the social care system at any one time and just over 82,000 of these children are ‘looked after’, under the legal guardianship of local authorities in England.
It will…
This advocacy brief provides an overview of promising practices and lessons learned to end child immigration detention in the U.S. and sets out a range of policy actions needed to scale up efforts to end this form of violence.
This is a corporal punishment country report for Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Law on Protection of Child Rights 2019 prohibits corporal punishment in alternative care settings and in penal institutions.
However, corporal punishment is still lawful in the home, day care and as a sentence for crime. In the home, the new Law protects children from "any forms of physical and mental excruciation” but does not extend to prohibiting corporal punishment.
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