Child Silhouette (Natasha Hanova, Flickr / Some rights reserved)
Karim arrived in the UK aged 16, alone and fleeing terrible hardship. He’d left his native Morocco four years earlier after a childhood filled with beatings and rape. When he arrived in the UK he was put into local authority care, but would regularly go missing. Karim would run away to meet men who would exploit him sexually and encourage him to steal to buy drugs. According to UNICEF, who supported the teenager, the police failed to investigate claims raised by his social worker due to the “difficulty in locating the culprits”. He is just one of hundreds of asylum seeking children to drop off the radar into danger.
The number of unaccompanied asylum seeking children going missing from care has more than doubled in the last year sparking concerns about systemic failures and the abilities of local authorities to handle the vast increases in the numbers of children coming to them.
