Children and COVID-19 Research Library

Rising levels of generalized anxiety among LGBTQ+ youth during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic suggest a need for understanding effective interventions for reducing anxiety, as well as factors influencing youth’s risk perceptions and trust pertaining to mental health-focused programming. The current survey-based study captures generalized anxiety, COVID-19 risk perceptions, and trust in a camp organization among 181 youth ages 12 to 18 who participated in an overnight camp for young LGBTQ+ people.

The COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the ensuing lockdown and political turmoil, ruptured many young people’s experiences and well-being, particularly students who face additional marginalization due to systemic oppression. A national survey conducted by the Trevor Project (2021) found that nearly 70% of LGBTQ youth noted that their health was “poor” most or all of the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Factors contributing to this deterioration include LGBTQ youth being isolated from the supportive communities formed at school, lacking access to social services provided by schools, and being quarantined with family members who were unsupportive (Cohen, 2021; Valencia, 2020). These fissures in support and resource structures curtailed potentially affirming and integral education, social, and emotional experiences, particularly for LGBTQ youth who thrived in traditional schooling settings. However, it is also important to note that even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools were not idealized institutions for LGBTQ youth. K-12 schools, situated in the broader socio-political landscape of the United States, are bastions of homo-, trans-, and queerphobia (Mayo, 2014). Still, many LGBTQ young people employed resilience and ingenuity to create affirming and loving social circles, which were thus interrupted by restrictions, trauma, and isolation during the pandemic. This article details how  a community of readers who worked to analyze young adult literature was structured through intersectional and anti-oppressive lenses.

More than 15.5 percent of Bangladeshi girls had been forced into wedlock below the age of 15 whereas the marriage age in Bangladesh during a pandemic. With the recent reopening of Bangladeshi schools, authorities have been alarmed by the number of girls not attending classes. In Khulna district, North of Bangladesh recorded more than 3,000 child marriages in this district. The paper will assess and estimate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the education of young girls. Some case studies will be conducted in the child marriage-prone district of Khulna. Technology is not the only solution to all problems, it needs infrastructure, access to the internet or mobile, and economic solvency to provide necessary things. Since the majority of schools have moved instruction online because of the pandemic, it is now important to give girls the tools to participate in distance learning techniques. Because thousands of girl brides in southern Bangladesh whose classroom seats have remained empty after reopening of school.

On March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 as a pandemic. On the following day, the Ontario government (Canada’s most populous province) ordered all public schools to close. By Monday, March 16th, 2020, all public schools (and most private schools) in Canada announced plans to physically shutter schools, with a shift to remote and online learning to follow soon after. This unprecedented shift in learning environment for young Canadians came at a time when the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic was creating a challenging environment for the mental health of all Canadians. While all students may have struggled to cope, 2SLGBTQ + students faced an unusually complex shift, as their school and home environments may have contributed differentially to the social supports and acceptance (related to their 2SLGBTQ + identity or identities) that their cisgender heterosexual peers routinely experience in their social surroundings. This paper explores the relationship between school attachment, parental involvement and positive mental health in 2SLGBTQ + youth using data collected as part of the Second Annual School Climate Survey on Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia in Canadian Schools.

Echoing global trends, where the absolute number of displaced persons continues to grow in tandem with the proportion of people living in protracted displacement, the vast majority of both Syrian and Palestinian refugee communities in Lebanon have been there for 10 years or longer. So, how can decision-makers lay the foundations for gender-responsive education systems and economic empowerment for refugee youth in Lebanon? The collapse of Lebanon’s GDP by 58% during recent years has resulted not only in an explosion of demand for humanitarian assistance, but also created growing concerns about meeting SDG targets. Questions arise over how best to support adolescents and young people to transition into adulthood in the midst of such intertwined, and escalating, crises. This ODI Report began with an extensive review of secondary data, and uses primary qualitative data collected from Syrian and Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon over the first half of 2021. Our research aims to identify programming proposals and recommended actions for donor and policy-makers to facilitate the economic and educational success for all young refugees living permanently outside their country's borders.

Adolescent (cisgender) sexual minority males (ASMM) face multiple mental health disparities. Yet surprisingly little is known about use of mental health care among ASMM. The current study examined mental health care use among ASMM, both lifetime use and during the COVID-19 pandemic. ASMM (N = 154, ages 14–17 years) enrolled in Spring 2020 for a pilot randomized controlled trial of an online sexual health intervention. Participants were assessed at baseline and 3-month follow-up.

The process of data analysis provides, undoubtedly, some of the major challenges facing organizations during the implementation of interventions in emergencies. The challenges are primarily due to the lack of direct access to beneficiaries and the rapidly evolving nature of emergencies. This paper outlines how Plan International’s Making Ghanaian Girls Great! (MGCubed) project used phone-based surveys to assess the uptake of a Ghana Learning TV (GLTV) programme implemented in partnership with the government. Due to the emergency context and the need for real-time information to guide the implementation of this intervention, there was little time to undertake a major statistical analysis of survey data. This paper discusses how the MGCubed project adopted a simple data disaggregation method using a logic tree technique to gain valuable insights from the survey data. The method allowed for exploring the insights of the data set in real-time without requiring more complex and time-consuming analysis.

This year’s State of the World’s Girls report, The Truth Gap, explores how adolescent girls and young women deal with misinformation and disinformation when engaging with political, civic or social topics online. 26,000 girls and young women from 26 countries were interviewed and alarming findings, including that 9 out of 10 have been harmed by false information and lies online were discovered.

The overlapping impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating climate disasters, and geopolitical conflict are a threat to gender equality and women’s rights across the globe. This report from UN Women and UNDP shows what governments can do now to prevent further rollbacks and recover lost ground, while enhancing resilience and preparedness for future shocks. Drawing on a unique global dataset of close to 5,000 measures adopted by 226 countries and territories in response to COVID-19, the report finds that, overall, government responses paid insufficient attention to gender dynamics. At the same time, instances of innovation and learning hold important lessons for gender-responsive policymaking in times of crisis.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering effects of the crisis are multidimensional, even in countries where the virus did not spread widely. For women and girls, existing gender inequalities and socioeconomic barriers have only been exacerbated. To assess the gendered consequences of the pandemic, UN Women and the Asian Development Bank worked with national governments to roll out Rapid Gender Assessment Surveys in seven countries in Asia and the Pacific. The survey findings showcase that women have been more likely than men to quit their jobs to take up unpaid family responsibilities, have been disproportionately affected by food hardship and, in some countries, have been less likely than men to receive vaccines. The data provided in this report is useful for governments, civil society and international institutions to continue to design targeted crisis response and recovery programming to support women and girls across Asia and the Pacific. The report is a follow-up publication to “Unlocking the Lockdown”, which UN Women published in 2020.

This brief was developed to support the dissemination of key messages in Mind the Gap 2: Seeking Safe and Sustainable Solutions for Girls’ Education in Crises. It provides an overview of evidence and gaps in girls’ and women’s access to distance education and recommends actions for gender-responsive planning and design of distance education policies and interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant effects on service delivery for transgender and gender diverse youth. Many in-person services were suspended in response to the need to follow quarantine and social-distancing guidelines, at both the state and national levels. In response, our pediatric gender clinic adopted a rapid implementation of telehealth services to provide access to gender affirming care. However, there exists little guidance on how to provide gender-affirming care via these platforms. This article provides a narrative review of the development of a full-scale model for delivering telehealth services to transgender and gender diverse youth and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of telehealth services for transgender and gender-diverse youth and focuses on the continued need for advocacy around systemic barriers to care.

To hear talk of it, you might think educating girls is a silver bullet to solve all the world’s ills. A large and still growing collection of research demonstrates the wide-ranging benefits of girls’ education. Recent research has nuanced some of those findings, but the fundamental result stands: Educating girls is good for girls and good for the people around them. This report goes beyond what works to get girls in school and learning—still very important questions—to probe how education can work together with other societal systems and structures to provide better lifetime opportunities for women.

Adolescence is a crucial stage for health behavior development, which is associated with health in adulthood. School closures caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic have exposed adolescents to an increased risk of obesity due to a lack of physical activity. Although social network interventions provide an effective approach for promoting health-related behavior, current practices neglect gender differences in adolescent behavioral patterns and emotional preferences. The aim of this study was to examine the effectiveness of centrality-based methods integrated with of gender contexts in a social network intervention to improve adolescent's health behavior.

In the United States, the cost of cancer treatment can lead to severe financial burden for cancer survivors. The economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic compound cancer survivors’ financial challenges. Financial burden may be particularly challenging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQIA+) survivors. LGBTQIA+ survivors who are adolescent and young adults (AYA) may face elevated financial burden due to multiple, intersecting identities. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was applied, beginning with a survey of AYA cancer survivors in the Mountain West region of the United States. Survey measures included demographics, COVID-19 impacts, the COmprehensive Score for financial Toxicity (COST), Perceived Stress Scale-4 (PSS-4), and PROMIS anxiety and depression scales. Two-way t-tests were used to analyze differences in outcomes between LGBTQIA+ and non-LGBTQIA+ AYAs. All LGBTQIA+ survey participants were invited to complete an interview, and those who agreed participated in descriptive interviews about financial burden due to cancer, COVID-19, and LGBTQIA+ identity. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Dedoose.