Category Archives: Children

UK children will not be offered Covid jab unless vulnerable

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Sajid Javid accepts JCVI advice that jab should only be offered to clinically at-risk children over age of 12

Children in the UK will get a Covid vaccine only if they are over 12 and extremely vulnerable, or live with someone at risk, as scientists raised concerns about inflammation around the heart linked to the Pfizer jab.

Sajid Javid, the health secretary, said he accepted the advice of scientific advisers that only children over 12 with severe neuro-disabilities, Down’s syndrome, immunosuppression and multiple or severe learning disabilities should be allowed to get the Pfizer vaccine. Children over 12 who live in the same house as people who are immunosuppressed will also be eligible for jabs.

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Delays aggravate debate over Covid jabs for UK children

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Analysis: opinion is becoming sharply divided in the absence of official recommendations

The delay in deciding whether to vaccinate children over 12 against Covid is unlikely to help resolve what is already a contentious issue.

A survey by the Office for National Statistics has found that almost 90% of parents in England would favour giving their children a vaccine if offered, and school leaders have also backed jabs for pupils.

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Missing school: how art can help girls in Nepal get an education – in pictures

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Some of the UK’s best-loved illustrators, including Axel Scheffler, Debi Gliori and Jackie Morris, have created artworks telling the stories of children in rural Nepal who struggle to get an education. The pictures are being raffled by the charity United World Schools, which has opened schools in the country.

All photographs by Navesh Chitrakar for UWS

*All girls’ names have been changed

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‘We can do anything’: the Indian girls’ movement fighting child marriage

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At 17, Priyanka Bairwa refused her arranged marriage. Instead, she started Rajasthan Rising to help thousands of others and call for free education

Priyanka Bairwa was 15 when her family began to look for a husband for her. The pandemic sped up the process, as schools shut and work dried up. By October 2020, her parents had settled on a suitable boy from their village of Ramathra in the district of Karauli, Rajasthan.

But Bairwa, now 18, wouldn’t hear of it. “During the pandemic, every family in the village was eager to marry off their girls. You’d have to invite less people, there were fewer expenses,” says Bairwa. “But I refused to be caught in a child marriage. There was a major backlash – constant fights. I finally threatened to run away and, fearing I would do something drastic, my family called it off. My mother convinced them to let me study and I joined a college.”

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First year of pandemic claimed lives of 25 young people in England

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Analysis, showing 4% of 5,830 children hospitalised in 12 months to February entered ICU wards, could inform vaccine policy

During the first year of the pandemic 25 children and teenagers died as a direct result of Covid-19 in England and about 6,000 were admitted to hospital, according to the most complete analysis of national data on the age group to date.

Children seen to be at greatest risk of severe illness and death from coronavirus were in ethnic minority groups, and those with pre-existing medical conditions or severe disabilities.

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Age, sex, vaccine dose, chronic illness – insight into risk factors for severe Covid is growing

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A look at the demographics as 18.5 million people in the UK fall into the heightened risk category

About 18.5 million individuals, or 24.4% of the UK population, are at increased risk of developing severe Covid because of underlying health conditions. It is well known that older people are at high risk, but the understanding of all the risk factors is incomplete. Experts say that this knowledge needs to develop at speed to support policy and planning given that social restrictions will end in England on 19 July.

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Pauline Latham MP picks up bill to end child marriage in England and Wales

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MP to take over private member’s bill proposed by Sajid Javid to raise legal age to 18, after his promotion to health secretary

The MP Pauline Latham will step in to adopt Sajid Javid’s private member’s bill to end child marriage after his promotion to health secretary.

Javid presented a bill raising the minimum legal age of marriage to 18 in England and Wales to parliament earlier this month, but is not able to take it forward because he is no longer a backbencher.

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Spain backs bill allowing teenagers to change official gender without medical checks

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Equality minister says draft law marks ‘giant step forward for LGBTI rights, particularly trans people’

Spain’s government has approved a draft law that would allow anyone aged 14 and over to change their gender on official documents without the need for hormone treatment or a medical report, and which would also ban conversion practices and strengthen the rights of LGBTI people.

The proposed measures – which follow months of wrangling between the Spanish Socialist Worker’s party (PSOE) and its junior coalition partners in the far-left, anti-austerity Podemos party – would abolish existing legislation that requires people wishing to change their gender to obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and undergo hormone treatment.

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The children’s graves at residential schools in Canada evoke the massacres of Indigenous Australians | William Pengarte Tilmouth

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Until there is truth-telling in Australia about the colonisation process, reconciliation remains superficial

First Nations people across Australia are mourning with Canadian First Nations families as evidence mounts of hundreds of deaths of children at residential schools.

We are standing with our Canadian First Nations brothers and sisters on these recent horrific discoveries.

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Recruitment of under-18s to British military should end, ministers told

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Human rights groups call for bar on junior entry, which accounts for quarter of intake to army

Ministers have been urged to stop the practice of recruiting children to Britain’s military by a coalition of 20 human rights organisation as MPs debate the armed forces bill.

The pressure to end the practice also comes as figures showed that girls aged under 18 in the armed forces made at least 16 formal complaints of sexual assault to military police in the last six years – equivalent to one for every 75 girls in the military.

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Under-18s could be ‘reservoirs’ for virus when all adults are jabbed, expert warns

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Unvaccinated children have potential to drive third wave of highly transmissible Delta variant, says virologist

The drive to vaccinate all adults over the age of 18 in the UK could lead to the concentration of Covid-19 cases in schoolchildren, a leading British virologist has warned.

Under-18s would then become reservoirs in which new variants of the virus could arise, said Julian Tang, of Leicester University.

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‘It’s not easy’: seven working parents around the world – photo essay

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Photographers Linda Bournane Engelberth and Valentina Sinis document the lives of working parents from Botswana to the UK for Unicef

If investing in family-friendly policies is good for business, then many companies are missing a trick. Giving parents and families adequate time, resources and services to care for children, while staying in their jobs and improving their skills and productivity, pays off according to employers. But for many, in all parts of the world, paid parental leave and childcare are not a reality. And that can compromise the first critical years of life – a time when the combination of the right nourishment, environment and love can strengthen a developing brain and give a baby the best start.

Evidence suggests family-friendly policies pay off in healthier, better-educated children and greater gender equality, and are linked to better productivity and the ability to attract and retain workers. Momentum for change is growing with an increasing number of businesses beginning to see the value.

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Voluntourism: new book explores how volunteer trips harm rather than help

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‘Don’t do as we did,’ says Pippa Biddle, who highlights colonial structure of industry where unqualified Western tourists pay to volunteer abroad

Seven years ago, Pippa Biddle wrote a blog post about volunteering abroad. She recounted her struggles speaking Spanish to children living with HIV in the Dominican Republic and how local people in Tanzania would spend all night redoing the construction work she and her classmates had done poorly.

“Taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign,” Biddle wrote. “It’s detrimental.”

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Covid distancing may have weakened children’s immune system, experts say

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End of social distancing and mask-wearing could leave children vulnerable to common bugs

Scientists are concerned that measures to combat Covid-19 have weakened the immune systems of young children who have not been able to build up resistance to common bugs, leaving them vulnerable when mask-wearing and social distancing eventually end.

Contact with viral pathogens happens on a fairly regular basis and although it does not always lead to sickness, the exposure helps shore the immune system against the threat should the bugs be encountered again.

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Other countries need Covid vaccine before British teenagers, ministers told

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Teaching leaders call for rollout of vaccination programme for pupils but joint committee says issue needs further debate

The government’s official advisers on vaccines will not be rushed into launching an immunisation programme for teenagers despite demands from teaching leaders to prioritise secondary school pupils.

It is understood that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) regards the ethical issues involved in vaccinating children to be delicately balanced and will require a complicated series of judgments about how to proceed in coming weeks.

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Search for boy in Thames two miles from where woman’s body was recovered

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Emergency services are seeking a teenager who was seen getting into difficulty in the water

Emergency services were searching the Thames on Monday for a teenage boy who was seen getting into difficulty in the water, hours after the body of a woman was recovered from the river two miles away.

Thames Valley police said on Twitter that officers were at the river between Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, and Cookham, Berkshire on Monday, following a report of a fear-for-welfare incident.

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‘Sponsor a child’ schemes attacked for perpetuating racist attitudes

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Using individual children to ‘sell’ schemes to rich donors is similar to ‘poverty porn’ images of past, say experts, as calls grow to decolonise aid

International child sponsorship schemes have come under attack for perpetuating racist thinking, as an apology by a charity to thousands of children in Sri Lanka has sparked a debate over the money-raising schemes.

Plan International last week admitted it had made “mistakes” over its exit from Sri Lanka in 2020, following criticism from donors and former employees that it had failed 20,000 vulnerable children in the country.

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‘I was losing my mind’: can baby sleep gurus really help exhausted parents?

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Growing numbers of frazzled parents are paying a fortune to people who claim they can help them get a good night’s rest. Are they being taken for a ride? Plus a doctor’s top tips for children of all ages

By the time her baby was four months old, Zara, a psychologist and executive coach from Surrey, was able to open a bottle of wine and have “a bit of an evening”. He was sleeping in four-hour stints, waking twice in the night. Then, at four and half months, his sleep pattern changed: “It was five wakes, then six, then eight,” Zara says. She was so exhausted she ended up Googling “can you die from sleep deprivation?”.

“I was broken, emotional, confused, sleep-deprived and catastrophising,” she says. “He wouldn’t be down for longer than 20 minutes, and I was losing my mind. Using a sleep consultant was the best money I’ve ever spent; £250 to give me the confidence to trust my child to get himself to sleep without me.”

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‘One name in a long list’: the pointless death of another West Bank teenager

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Obaida Jawabra was weeks from turning 18 when he was shot by an Israeli soldier, after a life shaped by arrests and imprisonment

Route 60, the north-south artery that carves its way through the West Bank, is both the lifeblood of the region and a source of daily fear.

Flanked in parts by 2.5-metre-high (8ft) separation barriers, military checkpoints and watchtowers crewed by Israeli snipers, the 146-mile highway that starts and finishes in Israel but passes Hebron and Bethlehem in the West Bank, has been the scene of many fatal attacks and violent clashes.

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After the inferno: Sierra Leone’s poorest struggle to recover from slum fire – in pictures

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A blaze ripped through the overcrowded settlement of Susan’s Bay in Freetown in March, injuring hundreds. British photographer Henry Kamara, of Sierra Leone descent, documents the aftermath in this coastal community as people try to rebuild their lives

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