Institutions: accountability as a key to reforming children’s alternative care

Institutional care for children is harmful by definition and violates children’s human rights. Ending institutional care has been a key item on the international agenda for several decades, profiled in the Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty and elsewhere. Much has become known about the lifelong harms of institutional care, more recently revealed through compelling testimonies of victims and survivors of institutional care which have been the driving force behind effective movements advocating for change, bravely holding governments and children’s service agencies to account. The possibilities and scale of the systems change efforts to reform children’s alternative care is increasingly better understood, through examples of positive reforms underway globally.

Key UN resolutions on children out of parental care assert clear and detailed guidance on children’s human rights in the context of alternative care, which in turn reinforce and complement the Global Study, not least by clarifying the expectations on States to end institutionalisation of children in care. This UN guidance emphasises the importance of pursuing a human rights-based approach to children’s care, applied not solely to a single care setting of institutions, but across the whole of an alternative care ecosystem. This chapter recognises this whole system approach that is required for change. Ending the institutionalisation of children for care purposes demands a deinstitutionalisation of the whole system.

Thus, this effort must incorporate:
• Preventing family separation,
• Promoting family-based care,
• Promoting family reunification for children in institutions, alongside
• Concerted and sustained efforts to reduce reliance and eventually eliminate institutional forms of care for children globally.

Importantly, human-rights-based approaches are founded on accountability as a mechanism to protect, to compel change and to accelerate and sustain reform efforts. The role of accountability for children’s rights and more specifically children’s access to justice is an essential - and to date underestimated - lever for sustained change, not least in the drive for children’s care reform to end to institutional care of children.

Drawing on the panel and discussions at the Global Study’s Global Conference on Justice for Children Deprived of Liberty 2024 Geneva event, this chapter outlines key elements required for deinstitutionalisation for effective children’s care reforms that are accountable to children. It proposes a two-pronged approach of systems change reforms reinforced by accountability mechanisms to achieve this for children in institutions specifically for care purposes. It outlines critical components of systems transformation approaches and outlines approaches to achieve accountability for children’s rights to pursue and secure crucial human rights-based changes. It concludes by offering a set of Roadmap accelerator actions to advance the pace of change, framed within active global policy contexts and opportunities.