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.

This paper focuses on the role of the managers of child protection services in a region of Northern Italy during the Covid-19 pandemic. In most child protection services, there is a manager who is responsible for supporting social workers and collaborating with directors and policymakers. The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly impacted welfare organisations, professionals, service users, and families. Given the exceptional situation, an online survey was conducted on child protection services and the functions performed by managers during the first phase of the pandemic (March-May 2020). This paper presents the findings of a research survey involving 85 child protection managers.

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.

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.

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.