Institutionalised Children Explorations and Beyond

Each year, thousands of young people leave child care institutions (CCIs) in India upon turning 18, often without adequate preparation for independent adult life. Despite the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, mandating aftercare support, implementation remains inconsistent, and the transition experience is poorly documented. This article draws on data generated through a structured participatory programme design process with 25 care-experienced youth across 5 Indian states, subjected here to retrospective analytical scrutiny within a participatory action research orientation and informed by Sen’s capability approach. Through problem tree analysis and structured deliberation, participants identified 11 post-care challenge areas and prioritised 6 for action: psychosocial support, pre-aftercare, medical support, protection, rights entitlement and documentation, and entrepreneurship. Root cause analysis revealed that poor transition outcomes stem from systemic failures—particularly the absence of sustained mentorship, family support networks, and rights preparation before age 18. Participants consistently identified relational rather than material support as most meaningful, pointing to a capability deficit that policy frameworks rarely address. A distinct finding was the compounded vulnerability of transgender youth and young people with disabilities. These findings directly shaped Miracle Foundation India’s four-pillar youth transition framework, spanning mentoring, life skills, peer networks, and a Youth Ambassador Programme through which care-experienced youth move from receiving support to exercising leadership. The article acknowledges limitations including selection bias and the absence of longitudinal outcome data, and calls for early systemic intervention within CCIs and future research into relational dimensions of well-being.

Sex work is arguably considered one of the most marginalised occupations. Sex workers are discriminated against as the cheapest people, and mostly they are degraded and isolated by society. The main objective of this study is to explore the socio-psychological condition of sex workers, how they manage the dual identities as working women and mothers, and the impacts of their work on their children. The study is qualitative and explorative in nature and used a thematic approach to explore the objectives based on 10 respondents who were mothers. Research findings were placed from the analysis, with 3 main themes and 12 sub-themes; most of the findings were related to the socio-psychological condition of sex workers and the challenges faced when they played dual identities. Given the difficulties that they encounter as mothers and sex workers, widespread services include those for unfavourable living conditions, community conflict, abuse from the madams, past experiences of facing sexual violence and exploitation of children, health, education of children, social collaboration, obstacles, and pressure of family maintenance. This research suggested that the governmental and non-governmental authority should pay more attention to ensure the fundamental rights of sex workers.

Kinship care is widely promoted as a culturally appropriate and protective form of family-based alternative care and is endorsed by global policy frameworks that prioritise family-based over institutional provision. However, evidence increasingly highlights that kinship care requires adequate support, oversight and investment to ensure children’s safety and well-being. In Thailand, kinship care presents a complex paradox. Formal kinship care remains rare and under-resourced, while informal arrangements are widespread, involving an estimated 3 million children. These arrangements frequently arise not from assessed child protection need, but from poverty, migration and limited public investment in parental and social protection systems. In this context, widespread unsupported informal kinship care contributes to continued reliance on residential provision, helping to explain why deinstitutionalisation efforts stall despite policy commitment. Drawing on national mapping exercises, child protection investment analysis and population-level survey data, this article examines the scale, drivers and implications of kinship care in Thailand. It argues that while kinship care remains a valued family-based option, its protective potential is compromised when separation is structurally driven, and placements are unregulated and unsupported. The article advances a dual reform agenda: strengthening formal kinship care within the child protection system, while reducing reliance on large-scale informal arrangements by addressing the structural and socioeconomic factors that separate children from their parents. Thailand’s experience offers lessons for other middle-income countries seeking to align family-based care reform with sustainable deinstitutionalisation.

This article examines compassion as a relational institutional ethos within alternative residential child care in Nepal. Drawing on qualitative case study research conducted in a children’s home operating in collaboration with local and international non-governmental organisations, the study explores how Tibetan Buddhist ethical principles intersect with contemporary safeguarding and governance frameworks. Situated within debates concerning institutionalisation, deficit-oriented child welfare paradigms, and humanitarian governance, the article employs Arts-Based Engagement Ethnography within a constructivist research paradigm. Compassion is conceptualised not as a therapeutic intervention nor as an internalised psychological trait, but as a patterned relational attentiveness enacted in everyday institutional micro-practices. Findings suggest that compassion may mediate peer mentoring structures, communal routines, and reflective approaches to behavioural regulation without displacing regulatory compliance. Rather than advancing causal claims regarding psychosocial outcomes, the study offers a theoretically grounded and methodologically transparent account of how culturally embedded ethical traditions may shape the enactment of governance within South Asian residential care contexts.

This article focuses on support structures for care experienced young people (CEYP) in the context of education. It follows the question of what suitable support services for CEYP on their (educational) pathway might look like. Therefore, it first takes a closer look at the educational situation of CEYP by a narrative literature review to identify factors that promote or hinder their educational pathway. Further, ways to set up such support structures, taken from Germany, are presented. In conclusion, it is pointed out that there is a need for local, structurally anchored, cross-jurisdictional services to support CEYP on their (educational) pathway. Based on this, potential for additional research work and ideas for further developing supportive infrastructures for CEYP are suggested as a conclusion of this article.

Daily life in a child and youth home is created jointly by staff, children, youth and leaders. However, three important resources often remain unavailable for the development of the organisation and its promotion of the young people: (1) the knowledge of the organisation, and different perspectives on the organisation, that these persons hold, (2) the energies freed when they perceive the quality of the child and youth home as a matter of shared interest and join forces to develop it, and (3) the organisation and the processes of shaping it as learning opportunities in themselves, especially for children and youth. By participating in shaping the organisation that they live in, they not only make a contribution to its quality that only they can make, but also strengthen important competences for their independent lives. Examples from practice and research in Brazil, Hungary and Switzerland illustrate the three resources and how they can benefit both the organisation and all the persons in it, especially the children and youth. Readers are encouraged to harness the ‘hidden treasure’ that these resources represent, for the benefit of the child and youth homes as well as the children and youth in their care.