Consequences of infant maltreatment on child wellbeing

Child maltreatment is a major public health and social welfare problem. Evidence consistently shows that infants under one are more at risk of fatal injury, physical abuse and neglect than any other age group, mainly because they are almost completely dependent on others for their overall wellbeing and development. This article discusses the impact of infant maltreatment on children's health and wellbeing. It highlights the sizeable body of literature on the relationship between types of infant maltreatment and a variety of negative developmental, health and mental health consequences

Parental Disputes, Religious Upbringing and Welfare in English Law and the ECHR

This article assesses the position of English law concerning parental disputes about the religious upbringing of children. Despite the strong emphasis on both parents being able to direct their child’s religious upbringing, courts have interpreted the child’s welfare to restrict the exposure of the child to parental religious beliefs or practices in some circumstances: preserving the child’s future choice of religion, the physical integrity of the child, the child’s contact and relationship with both parents, the child’s educational choices, and the child’s relationship with both parents’ religious community. It is suggested that courts should have a wide understanding of welfare and should be wary to prohibit parents teaching their minority beliefs. This article also compares the position of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and suggests that, despite the stronger emphasis by the ECtHR on parental rights, English law is generally not that much at odds with the ECtHR.

Multiple barriers to obtaining child support : experiences of women leaving violent partners

This article reports on a study which explores how policies and practices shape the experiences of single parents when seeking and using child support from violent ex-partners. The findings of this and similar research studies on violence, child support and poverty indicate that the receipt of child support is a multi-step process plagued with multiple barriers.

Child labour and supply chain : profitability or (mis)management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a realistic assessment, with an historical perspective, of the current practises and progress made by organisations towards elimination of child labour in global supply chains.

Design/methodology/approach – Literature review in the area of use of child labour within the global supply chain was combined with additional information obtained from the company searches of the GRI database, company ranking tables, and other sources.

Findings – Child labour is one of a number of areas of concern in global supply chains. Continued exploitation of child labour indicates an imbalanced state and consequently forces can be unleashed through standardization, collaboration and communication amongst all stakeholders to ensure protection of the vulnerable. This paper is part of the broader analysis informing incremental changes to supply chain management to preserve the rights and welfare of children in the present and future generations. Research/limitations/implications – The analysis is based on secondary data sources and further research is thus needed to verify the individual weightings of the criteria used in the primary ranking of the companies.

Practical implications – The findings provide encouragement for policy and decision makers to implement incremental changes to global supply chains in order to protect the rights and welfare of children, according to the standards of Social Accountability (SA) 8000, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and other world trade stakeholders.

Originality/value – This paper questions the view that child labour incidences have diminished proportional to economic development. A swinging fulcrum with hidden traps for developed and developing nations in light of cross border transactions through supply chains has been proposed.

Domestic violence and the exemption from seeking child support : providing safety or legitimizing ongoing poverty and fear

This article examines the experience of low-income women on welfare in Australia and the process of seeking child support from a violent ex-partner, contrasting this with research from the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Australia who fear ongoing or renewed abuse as a result of seeking child support are eligible for an exemption. However, the exemption policy does not necessarily provide the intended protection of women and children from ongoing abuse and poverty. The exemption policy route also produces an unintended outcome whereby the perpetrators of violence are financially rewarded as they do not have to pay child support. These outcomes are shaped by a complex interaction of personal, cultural and structural forces that make the process of seeking child support for women who have experienced violence extremely problematic. The article demonstrates how in Australia, as in the US and UK policy contexts, the needs of women and their children are compromised by the details of policy specification and the way policies are implemented within the different systems.

Discrepancy between expected and actual child support payments : predicting the health and health-related quality of life of children living in low-income, single-parent families

Objective Although the amount and frequency of child support payments received by single parents are often erratic and fluctuate, no study to date has quantitatively explored how the discrepancy between expected and actual payments relates to child health. This study aims to examine whether the discrepancy between expected and actual child support payments predicts a range of child health outcomes, including global health, health-related quality of life, involvement in activities and parental psychological distress.

Methods This study used results from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, which included a sample of parents of children aged 4–5 years (n = 4983). The questionnaire was completed by the parent who spent the most time with the child and knew the child best. From the 4983 families, 332 low-income single parents reliant on welfare with a formal or informal child support order in place were identified.

Results After controlling for income, the discrepancy between expected and actual child support predicted school functioning, conduct problems, total mental health problems and involvement in activities. Discrepancy between expected and actual child support payments did not predict the remaining health-related quality of life domains, mental health domains, global child health or parental psychosocial distress.

Conclusion This was the first study to examine how the discrepancy between expected and actual child support payments relates to child health, providing important data on the effectiveness of the child support system for children's well-being. These findings highlight the potential impact of the discrepancy on school functioning, conduct problems, total mental health problems and involvement in activities.

Institutional processes and the production of gender inequalities: the case of Australian child support research and administration

This article analyses the administrative and research capture of child support data as a case study of how institutional data collection processes are performative in perpetuating gendered inequalities. We compare interviews with 19 low-income single mothers and their longitudinal survey responses from the same research to reveal how low-income women strategically or inadvertently ‘smoothed’ their experiences when responding to data collection processes. This directly resulted in material and symbolic costs in the form of reduced welfare benefits and limited evidence with which to lobby for policy reform. These processes in turn provided benefits to fathers and the state in the form of reduced child support liabilities and enforcement action, and welfare outlays, respectively. We conclude that current administrative and research data collection practices provide a limited and gendered evidence base for administrative justice and policy reform.

Conditional cash transfers, schooling and child labor : micro-simulating bolsa escola

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design, such as benefit levels or the choice of the means-test, on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. This paper proposes a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior, based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil’s recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, we find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of current poverty and inequality levels.

The long-term effects of conditional cash transfers on child labor and school enrollment

This paper investigates the long-term e ects of conditional cash transfers on school attainment and child labor. To this end, we construct a dynamic heterogeneous agent model, calibrate it with Brazilian data, and introduce a policy similar to the Brazilian Bolsa Fam lia. Our results suggest that this type of policy has a very strong impact on educational outcomes, sharply increasing primary school completion. The conditional transfer is also able to reduce the share of working children from 22% to 17%. We then compute the transition to the new steady state and show that the program actually increases child labor over the short run, because the transfer is not enough to completely cover the schooling costs, so children have to work to be able to comply with the program's schooling eligibility requirement. We also evaluate the impacts on poverty, inequality, and welfare.

Comparative Analyses of Child and Youth Services in Europe

This paper contains a comparative evaluation of the reactions of welfare states to the isomorphic pressures emanating from the European Union based on two case studies taken from the Child and Youth Welfare System. In the European Community different concepts of welfare policy exist. In the unification process every member state has to find answers to the pressure of assimilation invoked by the legislation. The objective of this explorative study is to show that countries can learn from each other in order to improve their own system of social services.

Analyses of maternal and child mortality rates of five West African countries: Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, Sierra Leone

After traveling to a small country in West Africa last summer, I became interested in learning more about the maternal, infant, and child death rates of that particular region of the continent. For the purposes of this paper I limited the number of countries that would be included in this research to five: Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. There are three hypotheses that were considered when conducting the research for this paper. The first was that there is no difference in the under five mortality rates for Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The second hypothesis was that there is no difference in the female literacy rates for Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The final hypothesis was that there is no difference in the male literacy rates for Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. The data used were collected from publicly available sources that include the CIA World Factbook, the WHO website, the UNICEF website, the Penn World Data table, and the World Bank website. The p-values that were calculated for all three hypotheses were found to be very significant, and all three of the null hypotheses were rejected. ^