Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Tens of Thousands of Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many
More Are Suffering a Plight Beyond Imagination
________________________________________
Tens of Thousands of Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many More Are
Suffering a Plight Beyond Imagination
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
June 16, 2016
In memory of Jo Cox, 1974-2016, campaigner for immigrants and refugees, MP
from Batley and Spen (Yorkshire).
UNICEFthe United Nations Childrens Emergency Fundhas released two reports
on the tragic situation of refugee children who are fleeing areas of
conflict and poverty for the West. These reportsDanger Every Step of the
Way (June 5) and The Refugee Crisis in Europe (June 16)are written with
great understatement. They tell a few individual stories, accumulate
statistical data of the problem and make pleas based on the international
legal obligations on states. The prose is dry even as the subject matter is
urgent and terrible. The reader is taken to the precipice of rage. Is there
anything that could be done? UNICEF has suggestions, but the worlds leaders
have poured wax in each others ears.
Between January 1 and May 31 of this year, the International Organisation of
Migration and others counted seven thousand five hundred and sixty-seven
children amongst the desperate refugees who crossed the Mediterranean Sea
into Italy. Of them, startlingly, ninety-two per cent came without an adult.
Almost all these childrenin other wordswent alone on the dangerous journey
from Western and Eastern Africa, through the Sahara Desert, into war-torn
Libya and then across the perilous sea. Peace (age 17) from Nigeria recalls
the horrors of the journey, So many people died in the desert. We saw dead
bodies, skeletons. Strikingly, Peacewho is now at Rainbow House in
Sicilysaid, I wish my friend had told me how difficult it is. I would have
continued suffering in Nigeria.
Asylum in Europe is elusive. Children sit in refugee centers or prisons for
months on end as their paperwork stutters through the system. Laws in many
European states only allow children to be unified with their parents, not
their extended families. This means that children cannot be turned over to
aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings. UNICEF finds that ninety-six
thousand children cannot be accounted for in the system. In Slovenia, eighty
per cent of the unaccompanied children are missing, while ten unaccompanied
children go missing each day in Sweden. One in nine unaccompanied refugee
children is unaccounted for or missing although this figure is a low
estimate. The children have vanished into Europe, with fear that some may
have fallen prey to criminal gangs.
When I spoke to Sarah Crowe at UNICEF, she used the term commodities
several times in our conversation children have become effectively a form
of commodity, she said for example. A large number of Nigerian women and
girls have been coming across the Mediterranean. The International
Organisation for Migration has estimated that eighty per cent of them are
victims of trafficking. What data Italian social workers have been able to
accumulate shows that both boys and girls have been sexually assaulted on
their journeysome girls even arrive pregnant. Trafficking is by its nature
invisible, Crowe told me. This is what makes it difficult for international
agencies and social workers to either produce reliable data or find
effective means to help the children.
Few of the refugee children pay their smugglers the entire fare in the home
country. A pay-as-you-go system operates. The children pay one smuggler to
get them to Agadez in Niger, and another to get them to Libya, a third to
get them to Italy, a fourth to their next stop. More often than not there
are many more stages to the process. When the children get to their next
destination, they often have to earn money to hire one more smuggler for the
route to come. This is where they are most vulnerableforced into all kinds
of occupations out of utter despair. Aimamo (age 16) and his twin brother
left Gambia to travel through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya.
He worked on a farm in Libya to pay off his smuggler. If you try to run
they shoot you and you die. If you stop working, they beat you. It was just
like the slave trade, said Aimamo. These boys worked on a farm. Others are
raped. Yet others vanish into shadowy networks and never emerge for the next
transit.
If the children get to Calaisthe camp known the Junglematters do not
improve. The latest UNICEF reportbased on interviews with sixty
childrenpoints to widespread abuse, with cases of debt slavery and forced
criminal activity as well as sexual exploitation and rape of boys, and
rape and forced prostitution of girls. Rape has become currency.
Traffickers charge £4,000 and £5,500 to cross the English Channel a cost
that the unaccompanied children cannot bear. They must take terrible risks
to get to Britain. It is an unimaginable situation.
On 27 May, UNICEF signed an agreement with the Italian government to monitor
the reception of refugeesparticularly unaccompanied minorsinto Italy.
Pleas that countries in Europe hasten to allow unaccompanied children to
either be united with their extended families or be taken in by volunteer
families are as yet unheard. International law forbids the imprisonment of
children for their migration status. This is a common practice in many
countries, includingof coursethe United States.
There are now two hundred and fifty immigrant detention centersa
euphemism for prisonin the United States. These centers house unknown
numbers of children. About a hundred thousand unaccompanied children were
arrested at the US-Mexico border last yearmany of them are held in these
centers. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in favor of the
deportation of these childrenagainst international law, whose principle of
non-refoulement suggests that refugees cannot be sent back to their
countries if they may face serious human rights violations.
Last week, seven childrenall refugeeswrote a joint letter to the Home
Secretary of the United Kingdom. We are the children you see on the
dangerous boats to Europe, they wrote, torn from our families by war.
Were the children you see living through hell in The Jungle in Calais. We
will never forget those horrific months. These children arrived in the UK
and are now with their families. They want the other children across Europe
to have the same outcome. Some people have a negative view of refugees,
they write, but we just want a second chance of living a happy life with
our families and away from war. A letter like this to Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton might be a good idea. It would let them know that the
unaccompanied children who cross the Rio Grande are children eager for a
better life, not a threat to the United States of America.
UNICEFs Sarah Crowe listed the reforms of the system that would be needed
in the short-term. But she was also quite clear that unless the drivers of
migration are addressed, then this is going to be an unending saga. What
are these drivers of migration? War and poverty: with one in ten children
living in countries torn by war, and with four hundred million children
living in extreme poverty. By May 2016, over sixteen thousand five hundred
people had already left Agadez for Libya. The flow from war and poverty
continues. It is unabated by the dangers that await the refugeeswhether
children or not.
Any policy that does not look deep into the roots of the crisis will fail.
The scale of the crisis will overwhelm all good intentions. Not enough
social workers can be hired, not enough asylum centers opened up.
Frustration with the scale will lead to xenophobia. It will turn a
humanitarian crisis into a security oneand make the police and army the
first line of defense instead of charity groups and social workers. Morality
is fragile. Only a deeper look at the problem and a serious international
effort to address questions of poverty and war can provide the path out of
the current madness.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death of a Nation and
the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).
His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [3]
[4]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/horrifying-unicef-report-refugee-children
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Tens of Thousands of
Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many More Are Suffering a Plight
Beyond Imagination
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Tens of Thousands of Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many
More Are Suffering a Plight Beyond Imagination
Tens of Thousands of Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many More Are
Suffering a Plight Beyond Imagination
By Vijay Prashad [1] / AlterNet [2]
June 16, 2016
AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to Google+More
AddThis Share optionsShare to Email
In memory of Jo Cox, 1974-2016, campaigner for immigrants and refugees, MP
from Batley and Spen (Yorkshire).
UNICEFthe United Nations Childrens Emergency Fundhas released two reports
on the tragic situation of refugee children who are fleeing areas of
conflict and poverty for the West. These reportsDanger Every Step of the
Way (June 5) and The Refugee Crisis in Europe (June 16)are written with
great understatement. They tell a few individual stories, accumulate
statistical data of the problem and make pleas based on the international
legal obligations on states. The prose is dry even as the subject matter is
urgent and terrible. The reader is taken to the precipice of rage. Is there
anything that could be done? UNICEF has suggestions, but the worlds leaders
have poured wax in each others ears.
Between January 1 and May 31 of this year, the International Organisation of
Migration and others counted seven thousand five hundred and sixty-seven
children amongst the desperate refugees who crossed the Mediterranean Sea
into Italy. Of them, startlingly, ninety-two per cent came without an adult.
Almost all these childrenin other wordswent alone on the dangerous journey
from Western and Eastern Africa, through the Sahara Desert, into war-torn
Libya and then across the perilous sea. Peace (age 17) from Nigeria recalls
the horrors of the journey, So many people died in the desert. We saw dead
bodies, skeletons. Strikingly, Peacewho is now at Rainbow House in
Sicilysaid, I wish my friend had told me how difficult it is. I would have
continued suffering in Nigeria.
Asylum in Europe is elusive. Children sit in refugee centers or prisons for
months on end as their paperwork stutters through the system. Laws in many
European states only allow children to be unified with their parents, not
their extended families. This means that children cannot be turned over to
aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings. UNICEF finds that ninety-six
thousand children cannot be accounted for in the system. In Slovenia, eighty
per cent of the unaccompanied children are missing, while ten unaccompanied
children go missing each day in Sweden. One in nine unaccompanied refugee
children is unaccounted for or missing although this figure is a low
estimate. The children have vanished into Europe, with fear that some may
have fallen prey to criminal gangs.
When I spoke to Sarah Crowe at UNICEF, she used the term commodities
several times in our conversation children have become effectively a form
of commodity, she said for example. A large number of Nigerian women and
girls have been coming across the Mediterranean. The International
Organisation for Migration has estimated that eighty per cent of them are
victims of trafficking. What data Italian social workers have been able to
accumulate shows that both boys and girls have been sexually assaulted on
their journeysome girls even arrive pregnant. Trafficking is by its nature
invisible, Crowe told me. This is what makes it difficult for international
agencies and social workers to either produce reliable data or find
effective means to help the children.
Few of the refugee children pay their smugglers the entire fare in the home
country. A pay-as-you-go system operates. The children pay one smuggler to
get them to Agadez in Niger, and another to get them to Libya, a third to
get them to Italy, a fourth to their next stop. More often than not there
are many more stages to the process. When the children get to their next
destination, they often have to earn money to hire one more smuggler for the
route to come. This is where they are most vulnerableforced into all kinds
of occupations out of utter despair. Aimamo (age 16) and his twin brother
left Gambia to travel through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Libya.
He worked on a farm in Libya to pay off his smuggler. If you try to run
they shoot you and you die. If you stop working, they beat you. It was just
like the slave trade, said Aimamo. These boys worked on a farm. Others are
raped. Yet others vanish into shadowy networks and never emerge for the next
transit.
If the children get to Calaisthe camp known the Junglematters do not
improve. The latest UNICEF reportbased on interviews with sixty
childrenpoints to widespread abuse, with cases of debt slavery and forced
criminal activity as well as sexual exploitation and rape of boys, and
rape and forced prostitution of girls. Rape has become currency.
Traffickers charge £4,000 and £5,500 to cross the English Channel a cost
that the unaccompanied children cannot bear. They must take terrible risks
to get to Britain. It is an unimaginable situation.
On 27 May, UNICEF signed an agreement with the Italian government to monitor
the reception of refugeesparticularly unaccompanied minorsinto Italy.
Pleas that countries in Europe hasten to allow unaccompanied children to
either be united with their extended families or be taken in by volunteer
families are as yet unheard. International law forbids the imprisonment of
children for their migration status. This is a common practice in many
countries, includingof coursethe United States.
There are now two hundred and fifty immigrant detention centersa
euphemism for prisonin the United States. These centers house unknown
numbers of children. About a hundred thousand unaccompanied children were
arrested at the US-Mexico border last yearmany of them are held in these
centers. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in favor of the
deportation of these childrenagainst international law, whose principle of
non-refoulement suggests that refugees cannot be sent back to their
countries if they may face serious human rights violations.
Last week, seven childrenall refugeeswrote a joint letter to the Home
Secretary of the United Kingdom. We are the children you see on the
dangerous boats to Europe, they wrote, torn from our families by war.
Were the children you see living through hell in The Jungle in Calais. We
will never forget those horrific months. These children arrived in the UK
and are now with their families. They want the other children across Europe
to have the same outcome. Some people have a negative view of refugees,
they write, but we just want a second chance of living a happy life with
our families and away from war. A letter like this to Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton might be a good idea. It would let them know that the
unaccompanied children who cross the Rio Grande are children eager for a
better life, not a threat to the United States of America.
UNICEFs Sarah Crowe listed the reforms of the system that would be needed
in the short-term. But she was also quite clear that unless the drivers of
migration are addressed, then this is going to be an unending saga. What
are these drivers of migration? War and poverty: with one in ten children
living in countries torn by war, and with four hundred million children
living in extreme poverty. By May 2016, over sixteen thousand five hundred
people had already left Agadez for Libya. The flow from war and poverty
continues. It is unabated by the dangers that await the refugeeswhether
children or not.
Any policy that does not look deep into the roots of the crisis will fail.
The scale of the crisis will overwhelm all good intentions. Not enough
social workers can be hired, not enough asylum centers opened up.
Frustration with the scale will lead to xenophobia. It will turn a
humanitarian crisis into a security oneand make the police and army the
first line of defense instead of charity groups and social workers. Morality
is fragile. Only a deeper look at the problem and a serious international
effort to address questions of poverty and war can provide the path out of
the current madness.
Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in
Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring,
Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of
the Global South (Verso, 2013) and the forthcoming The Death of a Nation and
the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016).
His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [3]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[4]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/world/horrifying-unicef-report-refugee-children ;
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/vijay-prashad
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Tens of Thousands of
Child Refugees Are Missing in Europe, and Many More Are Suffering a Plight
Beyond Imagination
[4] http://www.alternet.org/
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
