STUDY FINDS MORE THAN 18,000 CHILD MIGRANTS MISSING IN EU

▶ Lost in Europe researchers say minors who vanish on the continent are vulnerable to abuse

More than 18,000 child migrants have gone missing after arriving in Europe in the past three years, an investigation found.

The data was gathered by the Lost in Europe project, which said missing children were vulnerable to being exploited by human traffickers and drugs gangs.

The true number is likely to be higher than the estimated 18,292 because figures were unavailable for some countries, including France.

No figures were included for the UK, which last month set out plans to overhaul asylum laws and bring in age checks to prevent adult migrants posing as children.

Many of the disappearances were reported in Mediterranean countries on the EU’s frontier, such as Italy, which accounted for about 6,000 of the total.

More than 2,000 migrant children were reported missing in Greece from 2018 to 2020, and about 1,900 in Spain.

There were about 2,600 such cases in the Netherlands and more than 1,000 in Belgium, where police last month launched a major new operation against drug traffickers.

The breakdown was published by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, one of several European news outlets that reported the findings in collaboration with Lost in Europe.

Reports of missing children continued last year, when more than 5,500 cases were registered in 10 countries.

“This number might be a lot higher, since a solid record of these cases is missing,” Lost in Europe said.

Unicef said last year that Covid-19 threatened to exacerbate the “already precarious existence” of migrant children, who would struggle to access health care.

It said displaced children were also more likely to face xenophobia and discrimination because of misinformation about the coronavirus.

Separate EU findings showed more children missing in Europe originated from Afghanistan, Morocco and Algeria than other countries.

In Italy in 2018 and 2019, Tunisian children were the largest group among missing unaccompanied minors. The vast majority across Europe were boys, and most were aged over 15.

Last month, the European Commission published a new “strategy on the rights of the child”. It said that young refugees were “very often exposed to risks of abuse”.

The risk was particularly high when children travelled without their parents or became separated from their families, the EU report said.

But it said there were also dangers when children were “obliged to share overcrowded facilities with adult strangers”.

The EU said children should only be put in detention facilities “as a last resort and for the shortest appropriate time”.

The advocacy group Missing Children Europe said it welcomed the EU’s call for “viable and effective, non-custodial measures”.

It said it would monitor the EU on the problem to “make sure that these commitments do not remain words on paper”.

About 12 per cent of migrants, or 33 million, globally were estimated to be children in 2019.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration previously said children in Europe sometimes slipped under the radar and avoided health or education services to evade detection.

Children sometimes went to ground because of pressure to send money home or to repay debts incurred on their journey to Europe, the IOM said.

Migrant children struggling to support themselves could become “dependent on work performed in informal and dangerous settings”, it said.

Others were prone to leaving refugee shelters because of poor living conditions and their inability to gain access to education.

Unicef said the pandemic would make the children’s lives more precarious because they struggle to access health care