The Huff Post has published our story on the five year old girl fostered by a Muslim household.

You can catch the piece here.

Wishing you a good weekend.

This month for The Huffington Post we chose to write about a new education initiative in Afghanistan co founded by two female students against a backdrop of violent extremism, war and massive gender inequality. These young women are risking their lives to bring about peace in their country, and they’re using education and the internet to do it.

The project was launched in March, but it’s already gone global. Experience what daily life is like for these students in a world where they often find themselves hostages in their own classrooms.

You can read the article here. 

Our article in the Huffington Post this month looks at the phenomenon of rapists who go on to ask for contact with the children they produced out of rape.

This is a particularly difficult area to write about due to the cultural and evidential problems surrounding rape, so the article focuses on incidents of undeniable rape as its starting point.

In the piece we look at the right to contact through the eyes of the children involved and a little explored area which sees fathers asking for contact only after they have been ordered to pay maintenance by a court.

What do you think? Is contact in this context ever justified?

You can read our article here. 

This month for The Huffington Post we decided to write about an unacceptable trend in our Family Courts: violent partners directly cross examining their victims in court.

Whilst this practice is not allowed in England’s criminal courts, it has been allowed in family law proceedings for some time, despite calls to ban this kind of interrogation. The current debate in the media focuses on the alleged abuser’s rights to cross examine in person and the alleged victim’s right to be protected from further harassment during proceedings. A new law to bring the family courts in line with the criminal courts has also been proposed.

But our article focuses on something different. Despite the fact that no law is yet in place to prevent direct cross examination by alleged and convicted abusers, there is a Practice Direction which allows judges to step in and stop abusers from questioning their victims. We talk about this guidance, and ask: why are judges not using it?

You can catch our article here. 

Our article this month for The Huffington Post looks at some of the issues child refugees face as the first few children arrive in England this week. We discuss the topic of dental checks, the real reason why many of the children in the camp at Calais are young men and why we owe these children sanctuary.

You can catch our piece here.

Researching Reform has very kindly been invited to contribute articles for The Huffington Post UK as one of their bloggers, and so for our first monthly article we chose to write about childhood bullying and the real and often lasting effects on mental health.

You can catch the article over on the Huff Post website, and please feel free to comment there, we’d love to hear your views.

Whilst we have our own list of topics and areas of concern we will be writing about, we always welcome article suggestions, so if there is something you would like us to write about, please don’t be shy, we’d love to hear from you.

Future articles can be found in our author archive, but we will let you know when we publish them as well.

We would like to thank The Huffington Post for giving us a platform to share child welfare issues with its readers. We hope that our articles will allow for a wider discussion on child welfare and the ways in which we can improve the lives of children both in the UK, and globally.