Asylum requests accepted by EU down 5%, Eurostat
ROME – Nearly 17 child and teen unaccompanied migrants have vanished every day since 2018 in European countries including Italy, Greece, and Germany, according to an investigation by the Guardian published on Wednesday.
The report by the Guardian and cross-border journalism collective Lost in Europe highlighted how many of them become victims of labor and sexual exploitation, are forced to beg or end up in the hands of human traffickers. The authors of the study said that at least 18,292 unaccompanied child migrants have disappeared from January 2018 to December 2020.
In 2020 alone, 5,768 children vanished in 13 European countries, the Guardian said. Most of the children who have disappeared over the past three years hailed from Morocco, although many also left from Algeria, Eritrea, Guinea, and Afghanistan. A reported 90% were boys and one in six was under 15.
The investigation, which is based on data on missing unaccompanied minors from all 27 countries, as well as Norway, Moldova, Switzerland, and the UK, discovered that the information provided was often inconsistent or incomplete, meaning the number of missing children could be significantly higher, the newspaper noted.
Federica Toscano, of NGO Missing Children Europe, was quoted as saying by the Guardian that “criminal organizations are increasingly targeting migrant children, especially unaccompanied ones and many of them become victims of labor and sexual exploitation, forced begging and trafficking”.
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