One in six refugee children travel to Europe alone. Many of them first arrive in Greek or Italian “hotspots” where they are identified, registered and fingerprinted. From there, refugees are (in theory) distributed among EU member states to be rehoused and integrated.

However, many children stay in the reception centers for much longer than then they are supposed to. In the camps, these children risk being exposed to abuse, rape, poor hygiene and disease. They are also easy targets for criminal networks that want to use them for drug smuggling, pickpocketing, and human trafficking.

Shockingly, Europol has estimated that as many as 10,000 unaccompanied minors have gone missing upon their arrival in Europe. The situation is so bad that Catherine Woolaard, the Secretary General of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, has called the EU’s treatment of unaccompanied minors “one of the most shameful aspects of the refugee crisis”.

In order to take a closer look at the local impact of the refugee crisis, we launched our ‘Cities & Refugees‘ project – aimed at fostering a Europe-wide dialogue between citizens, refugees and asylum seekers, NGOs, politicians, and European leaders. The emphasis will be on connecting local, everyday life at the city level to decisions made in Brussels and national capitals.

This week, we are looking at Vienna, Austria. As both a transit and a destination country, Austria receives around 2,000 asylum applications per month. Around 10% of these come from unaccompanied minors, most of them coming from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. The majority are unaccompanied boys aged between 15 and 17.

Curious to know more about unaccompanied refugee children? We’ve put together some facts and figures in the infographic below (click for a bigger version).

What is the scale of the problem? To get a bit of background, we approached Dr. Claire Healy, Research Officer at the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), which is headquartered in Vienna. What would she say?

In 2015, we had around 1 million people in total arrive along the migration routes into Europe, most of them in order to apply for asylum. In 2016, the numbers reduced significantly: just under 400,000. And within that you of course have a lot of children; around 30% of all the people arriving are children (a child is anyone under the age of 18 years, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). But the majority of them arrived with their families, so this is something that’s been overestimated in a way, and sometimes there’s less attention going to the children who’ve actually arrived with their families. They’re generally also younger children.

Then there are the children who are unaccompanied; in 2015, that was around 90,000 children. So, that’s how many unaccompanied children we need to respond to throughout the whole European Union. Then it reduced to about 60,000 last year, in 2016. So, it’s a very significant number; it’s definitely a very serious child protection concern that 150,000 children arrived in those two years unaccompanied. But when you consider, of course, that we’ve got 28 EU Member States with a total population of over 500 million. So, that’s the scale of it.

So, what are reasons why they become unaccompanied? It’s not that they are somehow “born unaccompanied”, but rather that they’re in a situation where they’re separated from their parents or customary guardians; and we often refer to them as ‘separated children’. Then, among those 150,000 children, most of them are teenagers, some of them are younger. Most of them are boys, around 85-90% of them are boys. Among their families of origin there is a certain awareness, maybe not full information, but there is an awareness of what the journey will be like, and so it is very rare for families to send girls.

The major risk is that taking that migration route is so dangerous, it’s very risky even for adults; the idea of a child doing it – if you imagine teenagers you know going through that experience of the migration route, and dealing with smugglers, and taking dangerous journeys across the sea or land. But there are additional risk for women and girls, of sexual violence, rape, and sexual exploitation. So, of course, it’s also extremely dangerous for the few girls who take that trip. The boys, of course, are also still children and they’re also very vulnerable.

We had a comment from David, who asks how unaccompanied children are able to make the trip to Europe in the first place. What would Dr. Claire Healy say?

Each child’s situation is different, and it’s very interesting for us when we do research talking to children and individual migrants, to try and understand the different motivations and situations. And, of course, they’re very diverse. It depends on which country they come from. Those coming from countries like Syria, Iraq, Eritrea have experienced conflict, war and, in some cases they may be orphans, they may have lost their parents in the war or they may have simply lost track of them and become separated from them.

In other cases, for various different reasons, the parents are not able to travel. Whether it’s for health reasons or whether it’s responsibilities they have in their country, which mean that they cannot leave. It may also be because as a child you receive better care and better rights when you arrive in Europe. So, in some cases I think certain families are making a decision that if the child goes first, when they make it to a European Union country they will have an array of rights as children that the adults wouldn’t have. They have a better chance of being protected and taken care of, and then they can also apply for family reunification for their immediate family members…

However, the vast majority of families don’t take that option. I think that’s very important to remember. We’re talking about 150,000 children in a context where about 1.4 million people arrived during 2015-2016. For those children who are unaccompanied, their individual family situation, the situation in the village, town, city or country where they live – and a number of other factors, contribute to the decision. Whether they’re immediately escaping conflict, or whether they’re trying to seek a safer future with more prospects. Or maybe there is no access to education where they are, and therefore it’s very important to their families that the teenager who’s going gets a proper education. So, really there’s no one answer to that question. Even in the case of one individual child it’s a combination of factors.

Finally, we had a comment from Theoni, who wonders if Austria has the resources it needs to address the refugee challenge in general. To get a response, we put this question to Peter Hacker, Refugee Coordinator of the City of Vienna. What would he say? Does the city of Vienna receive enough financial support from the federal government to receive and integrate refugees?

Well, you must know that I’m the Director-General of an organisation that is part of the city government, and I’m responsible for elderly care, disabled people, homeless people, and on top of all that also for refugees. And actually, being Director-General of an organisation like that, you never have enough money.

So, clearly, I can’t say ‘No’ to more money, because I never have enough money. But, besides the joke, actually yes, we have a lot of money. And so we feel it’s our duty also to demonstrate and explain the results we get, and also to explain that we are successful. We had so many people arriving in 2015, and they are today already working, starting with teachers who came as refugees and are working now in schools teaching refugee children, as well as specialists and doctors, but also including ordinary people that have no highly sophisticated jobs, now they’re in work.

So, we see they are successful. We always said, from the beginning, that it’s a challenge. It’s not a crisis. I think a crisis is something else. It was a difficult situation, no doubt about that. It was a serious situation, and a challenge. But the point where it was a major challenge is now gone. In fact, I have communicated also to the people of Vienna that we are now in a consultation situation, because there are not as many refugees coming these days. So, the most challenging time is over. But it’s still hard work; we always said that this would need time, concentration, and – as your question suggests – it also needs money.

How can European countries protect unaccompanied refugee children? Is the EU doing enough to protect unaccompanied minors? Let us know your thoughts and comments in the form below and we’ll take them to policymakers and experts for their reactions!

The Debating Europe “Cities & Refugees” project is co-funded by the European Union’s “Europe for Citizens” program.

IMAGE CREDITS: CC / Flickr – MaximilianV

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