The ‘disappearance’ of 10,000 migrant children after arriving in the EU made recently headlines in British newspapers and across the world. The Observer reported data from Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, drawing an explicit link between the fact that thousands of young migrants had vanished after registering with EU state authorities and the alleged intervention of a ‘sophisticated pan-European criminal infrastructure’ that is ‘targeting minors for sex abuse and slavery’. But does this speak to the reality?
Children are arriving in unprecedented numbers on the shores of Greece and Italy, about 270,000 in 2015. According to UNHCR data, children make up 10 per cent of those arriving in Italy by sea, and 26 per cent of arrivals in Greece. Since September 2015, two children have drowned every day on average since trying to cross the eastern Mediterranean to find safety with their families in Europe. There is a lack of disaggregated data from the Greek arrival route but of the 15,000 children arriving in Italy 29 per cent are from Eritrea, 13 per cent from Syria, 11 per cent from Egypt, 9 per cent from Somalia, and 7 per cent from Nigeria.
These children are among the most vulnerable of those embarking in dangerous sea journeys across the Mediterranean and the unaccompanied ones among them are particularly so. Unaccompanied and separated children are at record level in comparison to previous years. According to the IOM and Unicef briefing Migration of Children to Europe, in 2014, more than 23,000 unaccompanied children made applications for asylum. In contrast, in 2015 Sweden alone has received 23,300 asylum claims from unaccompanied children. Crucially, the report notes that it is very difficult to get accurate numbers for unaccompanied children as formal registration procedures in some European countries do not allow their identification.
