But the sheer magnitude of the toll has been hard to quantify in any detail.
Advertisement
Currently, one out of 200 children in the world is a refugee. The report should offer policy makers a data set off which to design policy recommendations to deal specifically with child refugees and migrants, which this report convincingly makes clear deserve a special kind of attention.
The children have been forcibly displaced from their home countries as a result of violent conflicts or persecution, said Anthony Lake, the UNICEF’s executive director, in a statement on Wednesday.
“Despite extraordinary and generous actions to help them in many places and by many people and organisations, children and their families struggle to gain a foothold”.
Unicef says whether it’s from war, poverty or climate change, young people have been uprooted by crises they are not responsible for.
Children also represent a disproportionate and growing segment of those who have sought refuge outside their country of birth, said the report on Tuesday. Whereas they made up about a third of the world’s population in 2015, they accounted for almost half of all refugees.
In 2015, about 45% of all refugee children under the protection of UNHCR came from Syria and Afghanistan.
The world’s largest refugee population has been forced to leave Syria. By comparison, there is approximately 1 refugee for every 530 people in the United Kingdom; and 1 for every 1,200 in the United States.
At least 31 million of those children have become refugees and another 17 million have been uprooted within their country towards the end of past year.
The report defines a child as any person below the age of 18.
UNICEF Canada wants the federal government to ban the detention of kids by the Canada Border Services Agency – especially if they’re asylum seekers or refugees. But the real figure could be higher, it said. Unicef’s Karin Hulshof said, “Children of refugees and undocumented migrants are more likely to have their rights compromised than other children, including lack of access to health care and education, discrimination and risks to their personal safety”.
This image taken on September 2, 2015 shows the small lifeless body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, after drowning at sea while attempting to flee with his family to Europe.
“It is a chance to get the world to look at this crisis”, he said.
It further notes that more and more children are crossing borders on their own.
Last year, more than 100,000 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in 78 countries – triple the number in 2014. When they arrive in other countries they often face discriminations and xenophobia, the report stated.
Hundreds of unaccompanied child refugees – many of whom have the right to come here under family reunification laws – are languishing in the Calais “Jungle” and other perilous camps.
Advertisement
The worst cases of intolerance towards refugees manifest themselves through xenophobic attacks: in Germany alone, in 2015, authorities monitored 850 attacks against refugees.
