Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Early studies revealed COVID-19ʹs outbreak led to a drastic decline in child maltreatment reports and investigations within child welfare services. However, limited research has documented whether these declines continued throughout the pandemic. Furthermore, our knowledge is limited around whether COVID-19 influenced existing racial disproportionalities given the shock to the child welfare system. This study addresses those gaps by drawing from county-level child welfare data from 2019 to 2020 to examine 1) changes in reporting sources before and during COVID-19, 2) trends in investigated and substantiated reports of child maltreatment, and 3) disproportionality between racial groups.

Covid-19 has now spread to almost all parts of the world which has caused changes in the social order of life for humans. The spread of Covid-19 in Indonesia is relatively high, so the Indonesian government has adopted a policy using social distancing (large-scale social restrictions). Various pressures experienced by residents tend to result in excessive stress and emotions. This can have an impact on the occurrence of violence in families and generally the victims are adolescents. Physical abuse is an act that can cause physical pain such as slapping, strangling, hitting, kicking, stabbing, twisting the arm, threats with sharp weapons or weapons, and murder. The method used in this research is descriptive analytical method. The research sample was 192 people from various provinces in Indonesia aged 10-24 years.

The high number of cases of violence against children has become a big concern, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research purposes to analyze the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) in violence against children during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lowokwaru District, Malang City. Research design a quantitative analytic study with a cross-sectional study primary data. Research instrument used was a questionnaire with Google Form application which was online collecting by 100 mothers. Analysis technique uses Somers’d and Ordinal Logistic Regression. Variables related to the intention to commit violence against children are subjective norms (p=0.00<α=0.05) and behavioral control (p=0.002 <α=0.05), while attitudes are not related to the intention to commit violence against children (p=0.501 >α=0.05). Variables that have a significant effect on the intention of violence against children are subjective norms (p=0.001<α=0.05) and behavioral control (p=0.002<α=0.05). Subjective norms and behavioral control are related and have an effect on the intention to commit violence against children, while attitudes do not.

Insecurities and social isolation resulting from the COVID-19 restrictions, may have elevated tensions at home, consequently increasing the risk of domestic violence. The present study aims to examine changes in the prevalence, nature, and type of reporter of domestic violence following the various restrictions implemented to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the Netherlands. All official domestic violence reports recorded by the 26 Dutch domestic violence agencies in 2019 and 2020 were collected and analyzed. Time-series forecasting analyses, using a SARIMAX model, were conducted to predict the trend of domestic violence reports during the first lockdown and to compare the predicted trend with the observed trend.

This paper discusses the experiences during COVID-19 of mothers who have young children, are survivors of domestic violence and who share parenting to highlight the further unsafe situations survivors of violence and their children were placed in during the pandemic. Part of a larger mixed methods study, these participants (n = 19) from three Canadian provinces, Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario, engaged in virtual individual one-on-one interviews via zoom. Using thematic analysis, four themes emerged from the data: 1) increased use of coercive controlling behaviors; 2) fear of the unknown; 3) lack of supports; and, 4) finding balance.

What happened with child abuse and neglect during the pandemic? Emergency department and child welfare data suggest a decline in reports; however other sources of data suggest that risk for abuse and neglect remained high during COVID-19. In this commentary, the authors highlight the complicated, and at times contradictory, evidence as to what occurred with child abuse and neglect during the pandemic. The commentary concludes with suggestions for future research.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Age- and gender-based violence during adolescence is widespread, and the risks permeate all spheres of adolescents’ lives – family and marriage, schools, peer networks and communities. Yet this violence affects girls and boys very differently within and across low- and middle-income country (LMIC) contexts. Midway through the Sustainable Development Agenda, data from the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) research programme reinforces the urgency of investing in a tailored, adequately resourced package of interventions, coordinated across sectors and development actors. This would allow the global community to make meaningful progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5 and 16 to eliminate all forms of violence affecting young people. This brief draws on data collected in three of GAGE’s core countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Jordan using mixed-methods research. GAGE findings highlight that adolescent girls – and boys – regularly face myriad forms of age- and gender-based violence. Risks are context-dependent, which in some cases means adolescent girls and boys do not perceive what they are experiencing as violence, and in other cases leads them to embrace such behaviour because it demonstrates to their peers and communities that they are conforming to social norms. Critical to tackling this violence is a recognition that age-based violence is often deeply gendered; that gender norms leave girls and boys at heightened risk of different types of violence; and that sometimes the best way to support girls to lead lives free of violence is to ensure that the boys in their environments are also free of violence.

What kind of opportunities can a child expect in life? Every child deserves to be loved, cared for, free from the threat of violence, and have the ability to fulfil their potential through exercising their agency, pursuing their education, and making choices in how to earn and spend money. However, due to entrenched gender norms and societal practices, girls are particularly at risk of living in an environment where many of their God-given rights are taken away from them. Child marriage is perhaps the most blatant sign of this. Every year, approximately 12 million girls are married before they reach the age of 18, robbing them of the opportunity to reach their full potential. Child marriage can result in early pregnancy (with associated serious health risks) and social isolation, interrupt schooling, limit opportunities for career and vocational advancement, and place girls at increased risk of domestic violence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated intimate partner violence and abuse. Incidents of intimate partner violence and abuse have increased as a result of household tensions due to enforced coexistence (multiple national lockdowns and working from home practices), economic stress related to loss of income, the disruption of social and protective networks and the decreased access to support services. This study aimed to understand how female survivors of parental intimate partner violence and abuse have experienced the adapted multi-agency response to intimate partner violence and abuse during the pandemic and consider learning from remote and hybrid working to influence future support. This study adopted a qualitative research design, utilizing semi-structured interviews and a focus group. Data collection took place between March and September 2021. In total, 17 female survivors of intimate partner violence and abuse took part in the project; we conducted the semi-structured interviews via telephone (n = 9) and conducted an online focus group (n = 8).