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Introduction
Housing insecurity has emerged as one of the most pressing social challenges facing children across Europe. While growing attention has been devoted to housing affordability, homelessness, and residential precarity, significantly less research has examined how housing insecurity affects children who are deprived of parental care or whose families are unable to provide stable housing and protection. This gap is particularly evident in Southern Europe, where welfare systems have historically relied on the family as the primary institution of care and social protection.
The Southern European welfare model has long been characterized by strong familialism, whereby families assume extensive responsibilities for childcare, housing provision, and intergenerational support. Although this arrangement has often functioned as a mechanism of social resilience, it also reveals structural limitations in public welfare provision. When families experience poverty, housing deprivation, unemployment, migration-related challenges, or other forms of vulnerability, children may face heightened risks of exclusion, institutionalisation, and unstable housing trajectories. In this context, child housing insecurity can be understood not solely as a housing problem but also as a broader manifestation of unequal access to care, protection, and welfare support.
This Special Issue will examine child housing insecurity through the lens of familistic welfare capitalism and child protection systems in Southern Europe. It seeks contributions that explore how housing, family, and welfare policies interact with institutional care arrangements, foster care systems, semi-independent living programmes, and community-based support structures to shape children’s housing experiences. Particular attention will be given to children deprived of parental care, whose housing pathways often remain underrepresented within both housing research and social policy debates.
The Special Issue is situated within a rapidly changing socio-political context. The long-term consequences of austerity policies, rising child poverty, increasing housing costs, and growing pressures on welfare institutions have intensified existing vulnerabilities across Southern European countries. At the same time, the governance of migration and the significant presence of unaccompanied minor refugees at European entry points have introduced new challenges for child protection and housing systems. These developments raise important questions about the capacity of existing welfare arrangements to provide secure, rights-based, and sustainable forms of housing and care.
Drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives from social policy, housing studies, childhood studies, migration research, and welfare state scholarship, this Special Issue welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions that advance understanding of child housing insecurity as a critical yet underexplored dimension of social vulnerability in Southern Europe. Contributions may examine the intersections between housing precarity, child protection systems, and familistic welfare regimes, while also engaging with broader debates on social rights, care provision, deinstitutionalisation, welfare state restructuring, and migration governance. The Special Issue aims to foster dialogue across previously disconnected fields of inquiry and to encourage new perspectives on how housing insecurity shapes children’s experiences, opportunities, and trajectories of inclusion or exclusion across Southern Europe.
List of Topic Areas
- Child poverty, familistic capitalism, and the structural contradictions of residual family and housing policies in Southern Europe
- Child protection, institutional care, and deinstitutionalisation processes (foster care, adoption, and semi-independent living)
- Housing insecurity among children with disabilities, special educational needs, and mental health conditions
- Unaccompanied minor refugees and housing precarity at EU entry points, with a focus on Southern Europe
- Transitions from childhood to adulthood: care leavers, independent living, and housing trajectories
- Rural housing contexts and child protection: spatial inequalities and access to welfare services in non-urban areas
- Housing insecurity and educational exclusion: the impact of residential instability on school participation and outcomes
- Hybrid welfare arrangements in child housing provision: the roles of the state, family, housing markets, and the third sector (NGOs and charitable organisations).
Guest Editor
Nikos Kourachanis, Associate Professor of Social Policy and Housing, Panteion University of Athens, Greece, [email protected]
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Key Deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 30th June 2026
Closing date for abstract submissions (approx. 300 words): 31st August 2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31st December 2026
Email for abstracts: [email protected]
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