Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brings new worries about the welfare of children, particularly those of families living in poverty and impacted other risk factors. These children will struggle more during the pandemic because of financial pressures and stress placed on parents, as well as their limited access to services and systems of support. In this commentary, we explain how current circumstances reinforce the need for systemic change within statutory child welfare systems and the benefits that would accrue by implementing a continuum of services that combine universal supports with early intervention strategies. We also focus on promising approaches consistent with goals for public health prevention and draw out ideas related workforce development and cross-sector collaboration.

In this article, we explore the pandemic’s impact on child protective services in Estonia and survey a representative sample of child protection workers (n = 81), asking three open-ended questions designed to explore child protection practice. These questions concern the impact on organisational design, the workers’ ability to conduct a diagnosis of a child’s care context, and what knowledge they could draw upon, as well as the decision itself.The overall findings indicate that the organisational design left practice unprepared; there was a general lack of ability to act upon referrals and also to conduct investigations to evaluate care contexts. Furthermore, there is a general lack of knowledge of how to deal with protective practices and conduct decision-making during crisis situations.

The risk of child maltreatment is heightened during the pandemic due to multiple COVID-19 related stressors, such as physical and mental health concerns, economic stress, challenges in homeschooling, marital conflicts and intimate personal violence, and intensified child–parent relationships. Both parental internal (e.g., parenting styles) and external resources (e.g., social support), and parental perceptions toward stressors will affect how parents cope with these stressors, which may exacerbate or mitigate the risk of child maltreatment. Guided by family stress theory, this article identifies COVID-19 related stressors at the family level, and further elaborates on how these stressors are associated with child maltreatment via parents’ resources, perceptions, and coping strategies. Implications for future practice and research are discussed.

This paper is focused on answering the following questions: How are poor families surviving in this era of COVID-19? What is life for children from poor families? What has become of their reality? To understand the realities of poor families and children during COVID-19, specifically in Ghana, this paper aims to analyze how COVID-19 has affected children from poor families in Ghana and how welfare institutions can work to provide rapid help to such families.

This report is an overview of the gendered impact of COVID-19 on the livelihoods, income and employment of women, men, girls, and boys in different countries affected by humanitarian crises. Children can be victims of economic violence during the pandemic. If they are involved in child labor, subjected to child marriage, and/or are withdrawn from school as their parents try to get some economic relief and further income through any of these measures, children’s livelihood chances and long-term economic prospects are deeply impacted, limiting their access to decent jobs and wages and endangering their mental and physical fitness for work for years to come.

This thematic report provides global analysis on the gendered impact of the pandemic in key areas of humanitarian programming such as livelihood, income and employment or health and protection. Children who are exposed to the secondary impacts of the pandemic, such as reduced household income or closed schools, and who live in areas with reduced oversight mechanisms may face increased likelihood of child marriage, forced labor, or female genital mutilation.

This briefing has three specific aims: 1) to assess the latest developments in government expenditure and revenue trends in low and lower-middle income countries, to understand how the protracted crisis is impacting; 2) to review latest available information about government budgetary allocations to education, health and social protection; 3) to provide recommendations for governments, international agencies and the private sector.

The Initiative for Child Rights in the Global Compacts is a multi-stakeholder partnership bringing together over 30 UN, civil society and philanthropic organizations around a shared agenda: to ensure that children’s rights are at the heart of the two global compacts on migration and on refugees in practice and to create a continuum of care, protection and support for all migrant and refugee children.

The health, social, political and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are disproportionately affecting girls and women by exacerbating existing systemic gender inequalities at all levels, with potential implications for the incidence of child marriage. This brief describes how the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage has adapted its interventions to ensure we continue to reach and protect girls at risk of child marriage and already married girls during the pandemic.

 

UNICEF in Argentina carried out the Second Round of the Rapid Assessment as part of its Response Plan to COVID-19 in order to acquaint itself with the perceptions, habits, attitudes and changes caused by the pandemic among the population. The survey also investigates its economic and social effects on households with children and the implementation of the social protection system, as well as the implications of the pandemic and various response measures related to social and emotional wellbeing, focusing on early childhood and adolescence.

UNICEF in Argentina carried out the Second Round of the Rapid Assessment as part of its Response Plan to COVID-19 in order to acquaint itself with the perceptions, habits, attitudes and changes caused by the pandemic among the population. The survey also investigates its economic and social effects on households with children and the implementation of the social protection system, as well as the implications of the pandemic and various response measures related to social and emotional wellbeing, focusing on early childhood and adolescence.

Domestic violence against children and adolescents is widespread in Haiti, and it takes many different forms. This survey provides a current snapshot of the situation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, children and youth were facing unprecedented challenges caused by quarantine measures and school closure policies in nearly every country in the world. At the same time these challenges emerged, child-focused organizations found it harder than ever to communicate with children, needing to adapt their methods of hearing children’s voices and ensuring children’s participation to virtual and physically distanced realities. These adaptations are seemingly harder for adults and their organizations than for children, who are creative, innovative, and tech-savvy. Despite the COVID-19 challenges, children around the world have found meaningful ways to s upport and protect their peers, families, and communities. Children are on the frontlines of innovative responses and are working closely with their adult allies. The leadership demonstrated through these child-adult partnerships is the underlying inspiration for this guide.

This report is one in a series presenting findings from the Global COVID-19 Research Study. The results presented here focus on the implications for Child Protection issues, drawing on data from our representative sample of 17,565 parents/caregivers and 8,069 children in our programme participants group. Comparisons with our general public sample have been made in some places.Topics investigated include violence occurring in the home, the separation of children from their caregivers, mental health and psycho-social well-being of caregivers and children, child labour, online safety and child protection support and services. Available data was analysed and presented considering the socio-ecological model in order to highlight the interconnectedness of the broader socio-ecological environment which places children within their households and communities. This enabled the detailing of the range of associated risks and protective factors in relation to these child protection issues as well as drawing attention to the complexity of their interrelationship. Differences in impact and the needs of children by region, age, gender, disability, minority group, indicators of poverty, and more, were explored.

Knowledge of child victimization among school staff is believed to affect the detection and reporting of potential cases in the school environment, but the current evidence is scarce and contradictory. Interventions should aim to provide more detailed and concrete information about reporting procedures and to explore ways of recreating the experience of detecting and reporting, particularly in a context in which detection procedures may have to be carried out online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This would help to overcome fears and barriers to identifying children at risk and to notifying the corresponding authorities about their situation.