Forgotten children of Idomeni

April 17, 2016

Forgotten children of Idomeni

More than one million people fleeing conflict poured into Europe, mainly through Greece, last year. The number of children on the move in Europe has been rising and children now account for more than one-third of all refugees and migrants – compared with just one in 10 in June 2015 – and many are travelling alone, according to UNICEF figures. Some 10,000 refugees and migrants remain camped out at an informal site at Greece's northern border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The makeshift home is also home to an estimated 4,000 children, the majority of whom are under the age of five. Doctors warn conditions in the camp are becoming dangerous for children. At least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, EUROPOL claims in a recent report and many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking networks.
Without some reliable registration system is not possible to identify how many children are traveling alone. Most unaccompanied children claim that they are travelling with relatives, and probably that’s what they have been told to say so as not to show that they are travelling alone. Only the voluntary organizations are trying to locate these children, while the state is totally absent.
The United Nations first warned over a year ago that more people around the world had been forcibly displaced than at any time since World War II.