Over 7,000 unaccompanied minors arrived in Italy in the first five months of 2016, double the number that arrived over the same period past year, according to a new UNICEF report on children and migrants published Tuesday.
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More than nine out of 10 refugee and migrant children arriving in Europe this year through Italy are unaccompanied.
The children’s agency says 92 percent of some 7,600 children who made the risky and often deadly crossing between January and May were unaccompanied minors, up from 68 percent in the same span past year, when 4,566 children crossed. The report “Danger every step of the way” documents the “growing threats of abuse, exploitation and death” facing minors fleeing from their home countries.
Children in the camps also told researchers they have been forced to work and commit crimes such as opening lorry doors to enable adults to be smuggled across the Channel.
Others fall prey to sexual exploitation.
But the latest numbers of children on the Central Mediterranean route may be “just the tip of the iceberg”, UNICEF said, adding that “another 235,000 migrants are now in Libya, tens of thousands of them unaccompanied children”.
One woman told stunned charity workers: “All girls receive proposals to engage in prostitution – the weakest ones accept but if you refuse they do not force you”.
Children hold placards asking for help at the Moria detention camp for refugees at the Greek island of Lesbos on May 24, 2016.
“We know this has been a long running problem for over a decade but it’s got much more extreme and severe in the a year ago with the increase in the global refugee crisis”, said Melanie Teff, senior humanitarian advocacy and policy adviser at UNICEF UK.
Christopher Tidey, a UNICEF spokesman, said girls from Nigeria told him they fled to Europe to escape early marriage, while a boy from Somalia said his family sent him away after militant group al-Shabaab threatened to recruit him.
“Every step of the journey is fraught with danger, all the more so for the almost one in four children travelling without a parent or guardian”, UNICEF said.
The minister noted that according to the most recent figures, more than 30 children have come from France to Britain as of April 2016.
The children, who described themselves as the lucky ones, wrote that they will never forget the “horrific months” they spent in northern France or the friends they have left behind.
“We welcome the government’s sentiment that the numbers of children being brought to the United Kingdom to be with their families will be increasing, and that there will be more of these cases processed within two weeks or less”.
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Once in Europe, migrants and refugees are often housed in sports halls, former military barracks or other temporary shelters, sometimes without access to schooling and psychological support, it said.
