Last month, the UN Day of General Discussion took place. Usually, this happens every two years and it was due last year. However, with the pandemic, it got postponed to this year and was held virtually for the very first time. It had been organised by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and it had been long anticipated by people working in my field. It was considered the next step after the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children.
Continue reading “UN Day of General Discussion: Children in Alternative Care”Tag: #alternativecare
How to Get Better Data
There is an increasing understanding of the essential need for data on children in vulnerable situations, including children on the move, children in alternative care, children without parental care, and children in poverty. The call for adequate data on the number of children in these situations and the support that is or is not available to them is growing day by day, from a variety of large international organisations – such as UNICEF, Lumos, Eurochild, Hope and Homes for Children and SOS Children’s Villages – as well as from people in academia. The more people start to become interested in data on children in vulnerable situations and start looking around for them, the more obvious it is that there is a serious lack in this area.
Continue reading “How to Get Better Data”Understanding Alternative Care
On the international stage and in discussions among child protection experts the term ‘alternative care’, referring to care provisions where children who are unable to live with their parents are placed, is used freely and confidently. On the surface, there seems to be a clear consensus about what we are talking about. However, below the surface, things are far less clear-cut.
Continue reading “Understanding Alternative Care”Orphanage Industry in Myanmar Under the Coup
The news of the military coup in Myanmar and the turmoil there is very worrying in itself. However, when I heard about it, the first thing I thought about was the children. Particularly the children who have been recruited into the orphanage industry – ‘orphanages’ run for profit, something that has boomed in the country, over the past decade. What is going to happen to them?
Continue reading “Orphanage Industry in Myanmar Under the Coup”Cooperation, Not Competition
Over recent weeks and months, several initiatives have been launched to bring together experts in the fields of child protection and alternative care reform. The aim of these global workgroups or committees is to try to get past the current practice of many people/organisations working in parallel in countries, with a similar aim but different approaches. Something that is both inefficient and expensive. Plus it creates a lot of confusion. Getting past this and trying to develop a common approach and increased cooperation is a great, and important, goal. Though unfortunately not one that is within sight just yet.
Continue reading “Cooperation, Not Competition”Community-Based Care
The need for family-based and community-based alternative care has been mentioned often in these blogs. Many decades of research has shown that children do much better when they grow up in a family and as part of a community. However, it is important to understand what community-based care really means because too often there is a misunderstanding about this, with harmful effects on the child.
Continue reading “Community-Based Care”Birthday Traditions
With my birthday coming up this weekend, I guess I had better uphold the tradition created over the past two years of writing a birthday blog (you can read the previous ones HERE and HERE). In the previous blogs, I discussed the many children who do not get to celebrate their birthday, either because they grow up in an institution where no one cares about it, or because they do not know when their birthday is because their birth was never registered. This year I want to look at the significance of birthday traditions.
Continue reading “Birthday Traditions”Mandated Rapid Return of Children
In a previous blog (HERE), I have mentioned the fact that pandemic restrictions have led to some countries requiring children in institutions to be sent home with little or no notice. Recently, the journal Child Abuse and Neglect published an article about research done on children living in institutions who had been rapidly returned to their families due to a government mandate as a result of measures taken to control the spread of Covid-19. The research did a survey on the circumstances of the rapid return of the children and the challenges that were encountered.
Continue reading “Mandated Rapid Return of Children”The Simulation Lab Conference Report
In February this year, I was a co-organiser and facilitator of the conference: Immersive Simulation Lab for Family-Based Care (you can read about the event HERE)in Pune, India. In April, I mentioned the delays in bringing out the conference report, due to the increased and shifted workload due to the pandemic and the lockdown that accompanied it, and I gave a sneak peek at the contents (you can find it HERE). As it turned out, the delays ended up being even longer than expected. However, the moment has finally arrived and the conference report is finally completed.
Continue reading “The Simulation Lab Conference Report”Deinstitutionalisation During the Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has had an enormous effect on the efforts to deinstitutionalise alternative care in many countries. The interesting thing is that there have been two main effects, pulling in opposite directions. There does not seem to be a lot of middle ground at the moment.
Continue reading “Deinstitutionalisation During the Pandemic”