95,000 unaccompanied children claimed asylum in Europe in 2015, many of whom suffered exploitation and horrific abuse in countries such as Greece, where children were detained alongside adults. In 2016, more than 63,200 unaccompanied minors were registered in the EU (half of them Syrian and Afghan refugees). Among them, more than 25,000 reached Italy via the central Mediterranean sea route, with just over 6,000 children kept in the asylum system in Italy that year. The rest of them had apparently gone “missing”.
In 2017, 31,400 unaccompanied minors were registered in the EU. 18,500 of them were in Italy, where more than 6 in 10 young asylum seekers were unaccompanied minors. Their number went down to 11,300 in 2018 and then 6,300 in 2019 (only 1,500 minors arrived by sea) when Italy’s hard-right government closed the ports. For years, the majority of these children in the profit-making reception system were rotting their lives away, with little opportunity for education and proper healthcare. All these numbers don’t include children who are not registered in the system.
Meeting the children
Over the past two years, I’ve met children in minors’ shelters in Italy who are trapped in the extremely exploitative informal economy with no protection nor rights. They serve as an irregular army of casual labour in agriculture, filling the gaps for the interests of farmers and multinational supermarket chains.
I’ve also met children who wander the streets or are in permanent transit. Since the beginning of 2018, 60% of children had run away from around sixty minors’ shelters and camps in Palermo, Sicily, according to activist Alberto Biondo of Borderline Sicilia. In 2019, half of these shelters had been closed. Many of the children stayed homeless for a short while, and then moved north, either to Germany or further north to Scandinavian countries, or France. Their journey across Europe has been endless moving-on and escaping from misery.
Many children end up sleeping rough in the streets of Paris as they can’t qualify for the bed space in temporary shelters – many have not passed the random age assessment. I met a seventeen-year-old who tried to lose weight in order to pass the assessment which involved measuring the width of his wrist. Also another seventeen-year-old who failed the assessment because he “looked too tall to be underage”.
Some of these destitute minors eventually find shelter in the makeshift camps in Dunkirk and Calais. I met Vietnamese children of 14 and 15 in the former La Linière camp in Grande Synthe, Dunkirk, who had attempted entry to Britain by hiding in lorries more than a dozen times. Children and youths from Sudan, Iran and Iraq did the same, some of whom lost their lives jumping desperately onto lorries, as documented by Calais Migrant Solidarity. Today, many children remain in Calais and Dunkirk; they are still living rough, and prone to abuse, exploitation and police brutality on a daily basis.
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Hsiao-Hung Pai | Radio Free (2020-01-21T13:18:35+00:00) There should be no hierarchy of rights for displaced children. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/01/21/there-should-be-no-hierarchy-of-rights-for-displaced-children/
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