Unaccompanied Child Migrants

"The implications of this surge in the proportion of children and women on the move are enormous -- it means more are at risk at sea, especially now in the winter, and more need protection on land."
Marie-Pierre Poirier, special coordinator, UNICEF

"A [humanitarian crisis] is occurring in countries of Europe] especially in Greece. We call on all countries and actors along t he route to prepare the necessary contingency planning to be able to address humanitarian needs, including reception capacities."
European Commission

Over 100,000 migrants have arrived in Europe since the start of 2016, after the earlier flood that brought over a million Syrian refugees, and migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia to seek haven on the continent the year before, a huge proportion of them burdening open-armed Germany to document, settle them and care for their needs.

The International Organization for Migration estimates that greater numbers have reached Europe in the first six weeks of 2016 than those that arrived in the first six months of 2015. This, irrespective of the fact that it is the winter season, when migration  was expected to grind to a halt due to rough seas and inclement weather overall.

Greece alone has seen 102,500 people gaining its territory since January 1, while another 7,500 have reached Italy; whereas a combined total of 11,834 reached Europe during the months of January and February of 2015. On the frontier between Greece and Macedonia, 8,000 Afghan refugees have been stranded since Macedonia closed its border to further refugee flows.

The $4.5-billion deal that the European Union advanced with Turkey to stem the flow, giving as incentive an additional visa-free access to Europe for Turkish tourists and businessmen appears to have done little to accomplish the goal intended. A number of European authorities accuse Greece of having "waved through" close to a million migrants last year, so Greece's fury leaves the EU unmoved.

Crisis: The children are offered places in safe centres. But half walk out within days. There is nothing authorities can do to stop them because of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

But a new issue has been raised, that of unaccompanied children now representing the majority of migrants, where last year it was young single men who represented the majority of migrants. According to Europol, the European police agency, over ten thousand children who breached Europe's borders last year are nowhere to be found, simply vanished as a result of the overwhelmed chaotic system of documenting and dealing with the needs of refugees and migrants.

Many of those children are believed to have left detention centers because of unsafe conditions. Teenage boys, many from Syria and Afghanistan sent abroad by their families with plans to join them at a later date are feared to have been recruited into the traffic of the sex trade by organized criminal gangs. The profit that is realized from human smuggling is enhanced by the additional profit to be had by fencing vulnerable migrant children for illegal sex.

When children find themselves  unprotected, on the streets with the need to be resourceful in coping for themselves they readily fall victim to the promises of security and accommodation which turns out to be working for drug dealers, for pimps, or for petty theft groups. Adolescent girls and younger children are ripe for all manner of abuse. Many among them may have become separated from their families, or are among the 26,000 having arrived unaccompanied last year, according to Save the Children.

Courage: Nafisa from Khartoum travelled in a migrant boat alone last week. She hopes to make it to Sweden and go to school and become an engineer or a doctor. Nafisa doesn't to talk about the life she left behind

Their numbers are huge, and being added to daily. Over a third of refugees now crossing the Mediterranean by boat toward Europe are now children, reveals the United Nations. This, in comparison to 2015, when 70 percent of refugees arriving in Europe were young single men. Britain is setting up a $14-million fund in support of refugee and migrant children through its Department of International Development, but it is not intending to offer any of these children actual refuge in Britain itself.

In an editorial, The New York Times has waxed indignant that the EU has not increased its funding to ensure that services are improved for these homeless children, emphasizing that the trafficking networks must be thwarted and those involved in the criminal acts targeting children should be severely punished, but this in fact is what security and the laws that uphold it are charged to do. The Times goes on to rail against Europe for not fulfilling its obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

That Europe, as the paper puts it, has failed to protect "these most vulnerable among the desperate people arriving on the Continent is unconscionable". But the very magnitude of the ongoing influx of human beings clamouring for haven with all their needs looked to, from housing to food, education to social services of every description, including medical aid, places a dreadful burden on any society absorbing the refugees and migrants.

And the United States clearly isn't one of them; from a distance it is easy to criticize the determination and methods used by others attempting to do justice to the needs of those who flee conflict, deprivation and fear, but when an influential news source of a country responsible in large part for some of the dysfunction of the Middle East through its questionable intervention leading to societal collapse chooses to find fault in other countries' coping mechanisms in attempting to rise to the occasion, it reeks with naked sanctimony bleeding  hypocrisy.