You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (August 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 2,153 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Jugendamt]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Jugendamt}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Jugendamt (German: Youth office) is a German and Austrian local agency set up to promote the welfare of children. Each district (Kreis) or district-free city (kreisfreie Stadt) has its own Jugendamt. Its structure is flat, with no centralised (state or federal) coordinating office. In Germany the youth offices were created during Weimar Republic by the Reich Youth Welfare Act (Reichsgesetz für Jugendwohlfahrt) of 1922, in force since 1924. Since the local organizations function independently there is no federal administrative supervision.

The Federal Statistics Bureau (Statistisches Bundesamt) shows^[1] a steep rise in the number of children with problems taken by Jugendämter yearly into safeguarding.

• 23,432 in 1995
• 25,664 in 2005
• 77,645 in 2015
• 61,383 in 2017

The main reason for this is the high number of unaccompanied child refugees,^{[citation needed]} who are by law required to be taken into safeguard by a Jugendamt (e.g. 45,000 in 2016). Among the children (age 0–13) more than 50% return to their parents within two weeks.

• Children's rights
• European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights
• Human rights in Germany
• Parliamentary Petitions Office
• Helmut Kentler

• Bureau Jeugdzorg [nl] and Raad voor de Kinderbescherming [nl] Netherlands
• Child Protective Services USA
• Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service England and Wales
• Norwegian Child Welfare Services

• General Jugendamt website in German language with an English brochure Jugendamt - What youth welfare offices do (pdf)
• The Bamberg Declaration Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine, adopted in the framework of the international symposium on "German youth welfare offices and the European Convention on Human Rights" Bamberg, 20/21 October 2007, Chair: Annelise Oeschger, President of the International Nongovernmental Organizations Conference of the Council of Europe (INGO)
• Individual UPR Submission by the League for Childrens' [sic Rights] Archived 2021-10-03 at the Wayback Machine