Invisible children and non-essential workers: Child protection during COVID-19 in Israel according to policy documents and media coverage

Abstract

Background The protection of children from maltreatment has become extremely challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic. The public's gaze is focused on the urgent health crisis, while many children are at risk due to social isolation and reduced social services. Objective Examine child protection in Israel during COVID-19, as portrayed in mainstream news media and government policy documents. Participants and setting The study analyzed all policy documents and mainstream media reports published in Israel from March to May 2020, during the initial mandatory nationwide quarantine. Methods (1) Search of relevant articles in mainstream news websites; (2) Search of documents in official websites of relevant government ministries and agencies. Results 28 government policy documents and 22 media articles were found relevant. When examined chronologically, what stood out was the initial decision to shut down social services, including some of the residential care units for youth at risk, and declare social workers “non-essential”. These decisions were revoked a few weeks into the quarantine, following persistent media pressure by child advocates, resulting in minor changes in policy. Conclusion Children were initially invisible to Israeli policymakers facing the pandemic, highlighting the centrality of advocates promoting children's rights and of mainstream news media in disseminating the discourse of protecting children from maltreatment, especially in times of crisis. Moreover, the study points to the heightened threat to at-risk children due to inadequate policies, and to the urgent need to develop child protection policies in order to avoid further risk in future global crises.

What Happened to the Prevention of Child Maltreatment During COVID-19? A Yearlong into the Pandemic Reflection

“…While previous studies have indicated how the children's rights movement provided a grounded rationale for a public health approach in the prevention of CM (Prinz, 2016), the focus of policy-makers during COVID-19 was to limit the spread of the virus. This resulted in health restrictions with a blind spot for children's basic rights (e.g., Katz & Cohen, 2020) and the four related principles: non-discrimination, the best interests of the child, the right to survival and development, and the views of the child (Children's Rights Alliance, 2021).…”

“…This created a situation in which children's access to mandated reporters was greatly reduced. Various countries severely limited community services and institutions (e.g., Katz & Cohen, 2020) responsible for fulfilling many children's needs (Bérubé et al, 2020). The mandated restrictions highly affected families' abilities to benefit from community resources (Campbell, 2020), such as nonurgent healthcare (Wong et al, 2020) and social services (Katz & Cohen, 2020).…”

“…There is an accumulation of knowledge with respect to the dramatic decrease of CM reports to formal systems worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, researchers have been stressing that this decrease should not be attributed to an increase in the safety of children but rather due to the adverse impact of the lockdown on the system's ability to see and protect children (e.g., Baron et al, 2020;Katz & Cohen, 2020). In addition, there is growing evidence that during COVID-19, various CM risk factors significantly increased (Conrad-Hiebner & Byram, 2020;Proulx et al, 2021;Rodriguez et al, 2020;Wu & Xu, 2020), such as parental job loss (Lawson et al, 2020), parental social isolation (Lee et al, 2021), and mental health issues (Russell et al, 2020).…”

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Behavioral and Emotional Aspects and Daily Routines of Arab Israeli Children

“…In addition, given that there are already mental health implications associated with the COVID-19 health crisis, children in families with more risk factors may be more vulnerable to child maltreatment [ 23 ]. Arabs in Israel are usually disadvantaged and excluded also in child protective service resources and this situation was worsened during COVID-19 with fewer resources targeted towards them [ 26 ]. Thus, it has been expected that the Arabs in Israel, which is demographically considered to be less affluent, having bigger families, higher population density, cultural habits and traditions, living in environmental peripheries, and a superior prevalence of comorbidities, would demonstrate larger rates of infection and more difficult disease course in comparison with the general population [ 27 ].…”

Strengths and problems of families in contact with child protective services during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…As contact restrictions were introduced, most sorts of support measures for families in contact with child protective services were reduced (Jentsch & Schnock 2020) while demands on families rose. Although there were concerns about maladaptive processes within all families, this applied in particular to families with prior risk factors in Germany (Fegert, Clemens, Berthold et al 2020), but also in other countries (Katz & Cohen 2020). German survey data indicates that family stress has increased and family well-being decreased (Andresen et al 2020a(Andresen et al , 2020bHuebener, Waights, Spiess et al 2021), which has led to concerns about an increase of violence in families.…”