Children and COVID-19 Research Library

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.

The significant increase in the existence and exploitation of self-generated sexual images and videos by boys and girls, is the focus of the new monitoring Report presented by the Council of Europe´s Lanzarote Committee in Rome. In 2017, exploitation of boy and girls self-generated sexual material was already perceived as a potentially serious risk. Later, in 2019-2020, a large increase in the existence of sexual material generated by minors was observed. The pandemic situation derived from Covid-19 exacerbated this reality. The Report examines 43 European States Parties to The Lanzarote Convention, with special mention to the fact of preventing this particular form of sexual exploitation of boys and girls, investigating and prosecuting it, improving the identification and protection of victims and and likewise, an improvement of the framework law in this matter with the consequent guidelines to the respective governments.

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.

This paper provides insights and evidence on how the COVID-19 pandemic and related policy responses to curb its spread influence the risk of child labour in agriculture through different pathways.It draws on case studies from seven countries covering different production systems: Côte d’Ivoire (cocoa), Ethiopia (cattle keeping and farming), (Lebanon (horticulture and greenhouse farms), the Philippines (municipal fisheries), and Viet Nam (crop farming, livestock, and citrus fruit chains). Based on these evidence, the document provides concluding reflections and recommendations on priority areas regarding knowledge generation and data collection, policy responses (social protection, education), and household- and community-level responses.

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.

This report, focusing on evidence from Brazil, Dominican Republic, and El Salvador, forms part of Plan International’s ongoing research, Real Choices, Real Lives – a qualitative, longitudinal study following the lives of girls living in nine countries* around the world from their birth (in 2006), until they turn 18 (in 2024). Through annual data collection, Real Choices, Real Lives captures unique insights into what it means to grow up as a girl across different contexts, including how families and communities shape expectations of what girls can do, and be, right from the moment they are born.

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.