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Children and COVID-19 Research Library

UNICEF Innocenti's curated library of COVID-19 + Children research

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16 - 30 of 243
A pan-European review of good practices in early intervention safeguarding practice with children, young people and families: evidence gathering to inform a multi-disciplinary training programme (the ERICA project) in preventing child abuse and negle

AUTHOR(S)
J. V. Appleton; S. Bekaert; J. Hucker (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice
Child maltreatment has detrimental social and health effects for individuals, families and communities. The ERICA project is a pan-European training programme that equips non-specialist threshold practitioners with knowledge and skills to prevent and detect child maltreatment. This paper describes and presents the findings of a rapid review of good practice examples across seven participating countries including local services, programmes and risk assessment tools used in the detection and prevention of child maltreatment in the family. Learning was applied to the development of the generic training project. A template for mapping the good practice examples was collaboratively developed by the seven participating partner countries. A descriptive data analysis was undertaken organised by an a priori analysis framework. Examples were organised into three areas: programmes tackling child abuse and neglect, local practices in assessment and referral, risk assessment tools.
Remote methods for research on violence against women and children: lessons and challenges from research during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Amiya Bhatia; Ellen Turner; Aggrey Akim (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: BMJ Global Health
Collecting data to understand violence against women and children during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is essential to inform violence prevention and response efforts. Although researchers across fields have pivoted to remote rather than in-person data collection, remote research on violence against women, children and young people poses particular challenges. As a group of violence researchers, we reflect on our experiences across eight studies in six countries that we redesigned to include remote data collection methods.
National COVID-19 lockdown and trends in help-seeking for violence against children in Zimbabwe: an interrupted time-series analysis

AUTHOR(S)
Ilan Cerna-Turoff; Robert Nyakuwa; Ellen Turner (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: BMC Public Health volume

An estimated 1.8 billion children live in countries where COVID-19 disrupted violence prevention and response. It is important to understand how government policies to contain COVID-19 impacted children’s ability to seek help, especially in contexts where there was limited formal help-seeking prior to the pandemic. This study aimed to quantify how the national lockdown in Zimbabwe affected helpline calls for violence against children, estimated the number of calls that would have been received had the lockdown not occurred and described characteristics of types of calls and callers before and after the national lockdown. It used an interrupted time series design to analyse the proportion of violence related calls (17,913 calls out of 57,050) to Childline Zimbabwe’s national child helpline between 2017 to 2021. It applied autoregressive integrated moving average regression (ARIMA) models to test possible changes in call trends before and after the March 2020 lockdown and forecasted how many calls would have been received in the absence of lockdown. In addition, it examined call characteristics before and after lockdown descriptively.

The impact of COVID-19 on women and children in the UK who were victims of domestic abuse: a practitioner perspective

AUTHOR(S)
Charlotte Proudman; Ffion Lloyd

Published: November 2022   Journal: Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research

This study aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on women and children in the UK who were victims of domestic abuse. The authors draw from their experiences of working in the domestic abuse sector to reflect on the impact of lockdown restrictions on women and children, focussing on the impact of government restrictions that created an environment in which abusers could control the movement of victims.

The impact of experiencing severe physical abuse in childhood on adolescent refugees' emotional distress and integration during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Flurina Potter; Katalin Dohrmann; Brigitte Rockstroh (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: Frontiers in Psychology

Accumulating evidence highlights the importance of pre- and post- migration stressors on refugees’ mental health and integration. In addition to migration-associated stressors, experiences earlier in life such as physical abuse in childhood as well as current life stress as produced by the COVID-19-pandemic may impair mental health and successful integration – yet evidence on these further risks is still limited. The present study explicitly focused on the impact of severe physical abuse in childhood during the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluated the impact of these additional stressors on emotional distress and integration of refugees in Germany. The sample included 80 refugees, 88.8% male, mean age 19.7 years. In a semi-structured interview, trained psychologists screened for emotional distress, using the Refugee Health Screener, and integration status, using the Integration Index. The experience of severe physical abuse in childhood was quantified as a yes/no response to the question: “Have you been hit so badly before the age of 15 that you had to go to hospital or needed medical attention?” Multiple hierarchical regression analyses further included gender, age, residence status, months since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and length of stay in Germany to predict emotional distress and integration.

Child sexual abuse survivors: Differential complex multimodal treatment outcomes for pre-COVID and COVID era cohorts

AUTHOR(S)
Matthew Reeson; Wanda Polzin; Hannah Pazderka (et al.)

Published: November 2022   Journal: Child Abuse & Neglect

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a form of early-life trauma that affects youth worldwide. In the midst of the current COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative to investigate the potential impact of added stress on already vulnerable populations. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a multimodal treatment program on mental health outcomes for youth CSA survivors aged 8–17. Secondary to this, we explored the potential impact of the COVID-19 on treatment outcomes. Participants of this study were children and youth aged 8–17 who were engaged in a complex multimodal treatment program specifically designed for youth CSA survivors. Participants were asked to complete self-report surveys at baseline and at the end of two subsequent treatment rounds. Surveys consisted of measures pertaining to: (1) PTSD, (2) depression, (3) anxiety, (4) quality of life, and (5) self-esteem.

Islam and human dignity: the plights of Almajiri street children during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria

AUTHOR(S)
Uche Uwaezuoke Okonkwo

Published: November 2022   Journal: Cogent Arts & Humanities
This study examines the plight of Almajiri children during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria within the context of religion, child rights, and human rights. Under the cover of being placed under an Islamic scholar for purposes of learning the Koran, the future of the Almajirai children has been mortgaged by the absence of proper care and denial of their rights. As a check to community spreading of the deadly coronavirus, the Almajiri children, notorious for street begging and largely found in Northern Nigeria were billed to be evacuated to their respective home states. Rather than moving these children to their home states in northern Nigeria, the majority of them were taken to the southern part of the country thus leading to intergroup disharmony and suspicion. Worried by the above, the study thus interrogates the nexus between the forceful removal and infringement of the rights of children, the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, questionable parenting, and failed governance. The rancor generated from evacuating these children to other parts of Nigeria raises the question of what has gone wrong with parenting and leadership. Sources for writing this paper have been derived from newspapers, journals, and online sources using the descriptive method of analysis.
The effect of COVID on child maltreatment: a review

AUTHOR(S)
Ami Rokach; Sybil Chan

Published: October 2022   Journal: Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy Research
This article addresses child maltreatment during the period where COVID-19 entered our lives in 2020. Repeated lockdowns kept children at home, away from school, from their support systems, and from their daily routines. Parents have also been plagued by the economic challenges associated with remote living. This not only places additional stress on the quality of their livelihoods but also, renders their caregiving duties as exceedingly onerous. This article explores the reasons that ACEs increased during that time, and highlights what can parents, teachers, and the educational system do about it.
Secrets from the children's room: new understandings of inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior among siblings after the COVID-19 crisis in Israel

AUTHOR(S)
Limor Golan

Published: September 2022   Journal: Trauma, Violence, & Abuse
This article discusses the COVID-19 crisis’s impact on inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior among siblings (IASBAS) and how perceptions of this phenomenon affect construction of the post-crisis reality in Israel. Sibling sexual abuse, the most frequent type of sexual assault against children, does not occur in a vacuum; it is affected by the environment in which children live and develop. The pandemic created situational risk factors and a “germination substrate” for risk of abuse in “normative” families and escalation in families in which it had previously occurred. The first part of the article, based on research data and reports, reviews the objective reality that emerged in Israel and worldwide due to the pandemic. Part two describes situational risk factors converging to a new dangerous situation for children’s abuse and victimization that resulted from this crisis: domestic violence (direct, indirect, and sexual), at-risk children returning and staying at home, increased exposure to online sexual content, parental dysfunction, and lack of formal and informal support sources.
Child protection and welfare during the COVID 19 pandemic: revisiting the value of resilience-building, systems theory, adverse childhood experiences and trauma-informed approaches

AUTHOR(S)
Susan Flynn

Published: September 2022   Journal: Child Care in Practice
The purpose of this paper is to present a reading of child protection and welfare practice in the recent covid 19 pandemic, with reference to several popular concepts in social work. The focus is on the relevance of these concepts to the contemporary circumstances in which child protection and welfare social workers often now find themselves. The specific intention is to extract learning from four traditionally popular approaches in social work, namely, resilience-building, systems theory, ACES and trauma-informed approaches. This will be achieved by first introducing, and then explaining key ideas and conventions of each approach. Here, relevant and established literature will be referenced to inform explanations. As the utility of the systemic perspective for child protection work is already well established, the paper considers how this perspective can be extended to assist in work with children and young people in the pandemic who have Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). In this paper, exploration of the detail of that extension lies in resilience building and trauma-informed practice. Whilst concepts of trauma-sensitivity and resilience are variously embedded in ACEs literature, their mutual treatment tends to be deficient in one regard. Specifically, these concepts are often not thought about in a systemic manner, necessitating the inclusion of a systemic lens.
US shelter in place policies and child abuse Google search volume during the COVID-19 pandemic

AUTHOR(S)
Corinne A. Riddell; Kriszta Farkas; Krista Neumann (et al.)

Published: September 2022   Journal: Preventive Medicine

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unemployment, school closures, movement restrictions, and social isolation, all of which are child abuse risk factors. This study aimed to estimate the effect of COVID-19 shelter in place (SIP) policies on child abuse as captured by Google searches. It applied a differences-in-differences design to estimate the effect of SIP on child abuse search volume. It linked state-level SIP policies to outcome data from the Google Health Trends Application Programming Interface.


Psychosocial impact of lockdown on children due to COVID-19: a cross-sectional study

AUTHOR(S)
Mahdi Alnamnakani; Shuliweeh Alenezi; Hani Temsah (et al.)

Published: August 2022   Journal: Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health

Quarantine measures during the COVID-19 lockdown had a negative impact on children’s psychology and development. This study aimed to evaluate the psychological impact of quarantine on children due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Saudi Arabia and to assess types of reported child maltreatment before and after the pandemic. A cross-sectional survey among parents was performed along with a retrospective data review for anonymized data from the National Family Safety Program, Saudi Arabia. 436 children participated in this survey during June-November 2020.

Relationship among child maltreatment, parental conflict, and mental health of children during the COVID-19 lockdown in China

AUTHOR(S)
Yashuang Bai; Mingqi Fu; Xiaohua Wang (et al.)

Published: August 2022   Journal: Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma
Children are more likely to experience maltreatment and parental conflict in a pandemic context, which can exacerbate their vulnerability to psychological disorders. The purpose of the present study was to examine mental health symptoms in children aged 0 to 10 years and consider related factors from the perspectives of maltreatment and parental conflict during the COVID-19 lockdown. Participants were 1286 parents aged 18 years and over with children aged 0 to 10 years were included. Several multivariable linear regressions were used to analyze the data.
Ending violence against children during Covid-19 and beyond: second regional conference to strengthen implementation of the INSPIRE strategies
Institution: World Health Organisation, *UNICEF
Published: August 2022

UNICEF and WHO jointly organized Ending Violence Against Children During COVID-19 and Beyond: Second Regional Conference to Strengthen Implementation of the INSPIRE Strategies, held virtually on 1–5 November 2021. The Conference comes under the umbrella of the 2021 Solutions Summit series of the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children (GPEVAC).  Over 1700 delegates gathered for the Conference virtually, representing governments (including from the health, social welfare, education and justice sectors), youth groups, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international NGOs, faith-based organizations and religious leaders, academic institutions, private sector and development partners, as well as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence Against Children. The purpose of the Conference was to identify actions needed to ensure effective prevention and response to VAC during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery, utilizing the strategies outlined in INSPIRE: Seven strategies for ending violence against children.

Injuries and child abuse increase during the pandemic over 12942 emergency admissions

AUTHOR(S)
Quentin Hennocq; Célia Adjed; Hélène Chappuy (et al.)

Published: August 2022   Journal: Injury
A strict lockdown was decided from 17/03/2020 to 11/05/2020 in France in order to tackle the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic. In the Great Paris region, several areas are severely affected by overcrowding, creating difficult conditions for children and their families during a period of nearly two months. The objective was to assess the effects of the 2020 spring lockdown on injuries, child abuse and neglect. The central medical data warehouse was screened for all pediatric admissions at emergency and critical care departments of 20 hospitals, in a cohort of 12942 children. Specific keywords were used to screen for both injuries and child abuse and neglect.
16 - 30 of 243

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COVID-19 & Children: Rapid Research Response

UNICEF Innocenti is mobilizing a rapid research response in line with UNICEF’s global response to the COVID-19 crisis. The initiatives we’ve begun will provide the broad range of evidence needed to inform our work to scale up rapid assessment, develop urgent mitigating strategies in programming and advocacy, and preparation of interventions to respond to the medium and longer-term consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The research projects cover a rapid review of evidence, education analysis, and social and economic policies.