10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

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10,000 refugee children are missing, says Europol

It is much much more than 10 000. In September 2015, we reported on a story coming from “Missing Children Europe” which claims that up to 50% of the migrant children go missing within 48 hours of arriving in Europe. Up to 50% of unaccompanied migrant children go missing within 48 hours of being placed in certain reception centres in Europe

How can children disappear without a trace? What happens to them? Who is crying over them?

Children are children and if there are still any men in Europe, it is for the protection of the little ones that they should stand up in arms.


Or is it that their lives don’t count because they are ‘migrant’?

A migrant child walks from the Macedonian border into Serbia, near the village of Miratovac.

At least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe, according to the EU’s criminal intelligence agency. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of organised trafficking syndicates.

In the first attempt by law enforcement agencies to quantify one of the most worrying aspects of the migrant crisis, Europol’s chief of staff told the Observer that thousands of vulnerable minors had vanished after registering with state authorities.

Brian Donald said 5,000 children had disappeared in Italy alone, while another 1,000 were unaccounted for in Sweden. He warned that a sophisticated pan-European “criminal infrastructure” was now targeting refugees. “It’s not unreasonable to say that we’re looking at 10,000-plus children. Not all of them will be criminally exploited; some might have been passed on to family members. We just don’t know where they are, what they’re doing or whom they are with.”

The plight of unaccompanied child refugees has emerged as one of the most pressing issues in the migrant crisis. Last week it was announced that Britain would accept more unaccompanied minors from Syria and other conflict zones. According to Save the Children, an estimated 26,000 unaccompanied children entered Europe last year. Europol, which has a 900-strong force of intelligence analysts and police liaison officers, believes 27% of the million arrivals in Europe last year were minors.

“Whether they are registered or not, we’re talking about 270,000 children. Not all of those are unaccompanied, but we also have evidence that a large proportion might be,” said Donald, indicating that the 10,000 figure is likely to be a conservative estimate of the actual number of unaccompanied minors who have disappeared since entering Europe.

In October, officials in Trelleborg, southern Sweden, revealed that some 1,000 unaccompanied refugee children who had arrived in the port town over the previous month had gone missing. On Tuesday a separate report, again from Sweden, warned that many unaccompanied refugees vanished and that there was “very little information about what happens after the disappearance”.

In the UK the number of children who disappear soon after arriving as asylum seekers has doubled over the past year, raising fears that they are also being targeted by criminal gangs.

Mariyana Berket, of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said: “Unaccompanied minors from regions of conflict are by far the most vulnerable population; those without parental care that have either been sent by their families to get into Europe first and then get the family over, or have fled with other family members.”

Donald confirmed Europol had received evidence some unaccompanied child refugees in Europe had been sexually exploited. In Germany and Hungary, the former a popular destination country for refugees and migrants, with the latter an important transit state, large numbers of criminals had been caught exploiting migrants, he said. “An entire [criminal] infrastructure has developed over the past 18 months around exploiting the migrant flow. There are prisons in Germany and Hungary where the vast majority of people arrested and placed there are in relation to criminal activity surrounding the migrant crisis,” said Donald.

The police agency has also documented a disturbing crossover between organised gangs helping to smuggle refugees into the EU and human-trafficking gangs exploiting them for sex work and slavery. He said that longstanding criminal gangs known to be involved in human trafficking, whose identity had been logged in the agency’s Phoenix database, were now being caught exploiting refugees.

“The ones who have been active in human smuggling are now appearing in our files in relation to migrant smuggling,” said Donald.

Europol will take evidence from organisations working on the Balkans route, which requested a meeting with the law enforcement agency specifically to discuss children vanishing. “Their concern is in relation to the number of unaccompanied minors. They’re asking for help in identifying how these children are identified and then brought into the criminal infrastructure. They’re dealing with this on a daily basis, they’ve come to us because they see it as a big problem.” He warned the public to be vigilant, stating that most child refugees who had gone missing would be hiding in plain sight. “These kids are in the community, if they’re being abused it’s in the community. They’re not being spirited away and held in the middle of forests, though I suspect some might be, they’re in the community – they’re visible. As a population we need to be alert to this.”

Europe’s chaotic approach to the migration crisis led last week to calls for Greece to be removed from the open-borders Schengen zone, a development that a senior UN official has described as a “new nadir” in the EU’s approach.


Writing in the Observer, the UN special representative on migration, Peter Sutherland, said such a move would “effectively transform it [Greece] into an open-air holding pen for countless thousands of asylum seekers. The idea is inhumane and a gross violation of basic European principles”.

Nearly 40% of African-American children living in poverty – study

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Nearly 40% of African-American children living in poverty – study

A new study found the percentage of American children living in poverty has declined slightly since 2010 as the economy has improved, but the rate for African-American children remains extremely high, at nearly 40 percent.

More than 45.3 million people are considered to be living in poverty in the United States, given a poverty line of $24,000 for a family of four. Some 14.7 million of these, or 20 percent, are children.

READ MORE: 20% of US school children living below poverty line, report says

While that figure has declined from 16.3 million in 2010, it still comprises one-fifth of the total number of American children under 18, and one-third of Americans living in poverty, according to Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.

Pew said that for the first time since the US Census starting collecting data in 1974, the number of African-American children living in poverty outnumbers the number of white children. Poverty rates declined for white children from 4.9 million in 2010 to 4.1 million in 2013, but for African-American children it only decreased from 4.4 million in 2010 to 4.2 million in 2013.

While Pew said the difference is not statistically significant, it is still notable since white children outnumber African-American children by three to one, with two out of five African-American children living in families with total income below the poverty line.

There are also stark differences for Latinos. In 2013, one out of three Latino children, or 30.4 percent of the 18 million Hispanic children in the country, was living in poverty, compared to 1 out of 10 white and Asian children, according to Pew.

READ MORE: Over 14 million low-income older Americans are food insecure - gov’t report

The poverty rate for African-American children can be explained, in part, by the employment status and level of income of their parents, according to Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center. Blacks are more likely to be unemployed and earn less than people of other races.

“The labor market has recovered, but the recovery has been uneven,” Lopez told CNN.

Last month, the Department of Labor said the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 9.5 percent, compared to 6.6 percent for Hispanics, 4.6 percent for whites and 3.8 percent for Asians.


“Even though many black parents may be working they may not necessarily be earning as much as their white or Asian counterparts,” Lopez said.

Pharma Exec Turns Philanthropist to Rescue Orphans Worldwide

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Pharma Exec Turns Philanthropist to Rescue Orphans Worldwide

Millions of kids depend on orphan care facilities, but homes are struggling to stay open as donor support decreases.

When Emily Glover traveled to Kenya in the summer of 2014 to visit the Agape Hope Children’s Home, an orphanage in the capital of Nairobi, she was struck by the story of two young sisters. The girls, ages nine and six, had been abandoned by their father when they were both younger than five years old. Their mother was addicted to a highly potent bootlegged brew called changaa, a Swahili word that translates to “kill me quick.”

Every morning, the mother would lock her children in the house before heading out to drink in the slum where they lived. The children only survived because the older sister climbed out the window each day to find food in trash bins nearby.

“One night, the mother committed suicide in a drunken stupor,” says Glover, who works for Serving Orphans Worldwide. The nonprofit organization, located in the mountainous town of Bristol, Tennessee, funds and supports 43 orphan care facilities in more than 20 countries on five continents, including Agape Hope.


The sisters were severely malnourished when Kenyan authorities brought them to the orphanage, but within a few years, the girls were nursed back to health and are now “well enough to be adopted in Kenya or abroad,” Glover says.

So, Why Should You Care? There are more than 153 million orphans around the world, 14.5 million of whom turn 16 every year with no family to belong to and no place to call home, according to the United Nations. However, many orphanages have seen increasingly less funding since the 2009 economic downturn, according to SOW. Its goal: to keep at-risk orphanages from closing, with the motto to rescue, train, and sustain. “We’re keeping an orphanage’s doors open,” says Glover. “For many of these children, if the doors of an orphanage weren’t open, they would be street children.”

Serving Orphans Worldwide is the brainchild of John Gregory, the owner of a Tennessee-based pharmaceutical company who initially provided medicines to organizations assisting orphanages. But he soon noticed that the efforts of many organizations to build or invest in residential care facilities for children were being hampered by prohibitively high project costs. In 2009, Gregory decided to create a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a worldwide network of donor groups that could help support the operational costs of orphanages.

RELATED:  Millions of Kids Never Had Their Births Registered—and That’s a Major Problem

SOW’s rescue phase focuses on elevating the quality of care at each of the homes, which the organization does primarily by funding special projects and ongoing operational costs. Each year, one of the organization’s six full-time staff members travels around the world to assess the facilities it supports. “We look for any urgent needs and whether any elements of care are being improperly executed,” says Glover.

During a recent visit to Agape Hope, for example, Glover discovered that because of the high cost of soap in Kenya, children were being given detergent soap to use for both laundry and bathing.

RELATED:  A Saudi Prince Is Giving Away His Entire Fortune to Charity—and It’s a Lot

“That wasn’t good for their skin, so we helped supplement the facility’s budget so that proper skin care could be provided for the children,” Glover says. “That might seem like a small thing to us in America, but using the right soap meant that the children were less susceptible to diseases that could infect them through cracked skin on their feet or sensitive areas such as elbows.”

Next, the organization works closely with orphanages to train caregivers, administrators, and directors on how to be more effective in their roles, with the ultimate goal being for each home to be sustainable and independent in the near future. Across the board, the priority is for every orphanage to help children get placed into foster care or with adoptive families as soon as possible.

Right to fatherhood Written by NIVEDITA CHOUDHURI Friday, 17 June 2011

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On Father's Day (June 19), like every year, a group of men will gather in  Bangalore to

draw attention to the plight of single dads who are denied access  to their children and

the joys of shared parenting.

  

Desperate emails and phone calls from fathers who have been denied  access to their children

pour in each week for Kumar Jahgirdar, president of  Children's Rights Initiative for Shared

Parenting (CRISP). He replies to all the  mails promptly, but with Father's Day (June 19) just round the corner, his plate  is full. He is making plans, like every year, to organise a rally in Bangalore  to highlight the grievances of single fathers, some of whom haven't seen their children in years.

      

Jahgirdar says Indian courts hearing child custody cases tend to  be biased towards the

mothers even when they may not be the more suitable  parent. He says the adversarial

approach to divorce law turns children into the  spoils of marriage and there is too much focus on a father's responsibility to  make alimony payments and not enough on his right to visit his child.

  

Bangalore-based NGO CRISP was founded around five years ago as a  forum to support and

fight on behalf of single dads. The organisation wants  divorced/ separated parents to be

granted equal access to their children, and  punishment for those who misuse the anti-dowry

law (Section 498A IPC) and the  Domestic Violence Act to deny fathers access to their kids.

  

Jahgirdar shares several heartrending tales of hapless fathers. He  mentions a dad for whom

the only contact with his daughter is watching her from  behind the school gates. Then there is Sunil*, who talks of the “emotional  desolation” after his wife moved out of the family home with their two children,  aged five and two, in February last year.

  

“It was really dreadful. The worst thing, practically, was finding  the house so quiet because it was always so full of laughter and rampaging and  stampeding,” he adds. “There were many times when I felt suicidal.” “It's important to emphasise that family breakdown is a nightmare  for everyone. Mothers suffer, and so do grandparents and even close friends.  Most crucially, the children suffer. Not only are they deprived of having two  parents living in the same house, quite often they will lose a parent altogether,” says Jahgirdar. This, in effect, amounts to, as singer Bob Geldof  once put it, “a form of child abuse”.

  

Many fathers lose all contact with their children when they are  separated from their partner or after divorce. “This is often put down to the  indifference of the father, but it's actually about the barriers that are put in  the way of contact. They are erected by the courts or the mother, or both,” says  Vijay*, a SIFF (Save Indian Family Foundation) activist.

  

Vijay last met his two children, a boy aged 12 and a girl aged  six, nearly 18 months ago. His wife had suddenly decided two years ago that she  didn't want him in her life, but neither did she want a divorce. She threw him  out of his own home, along with his belongings, and threatened him saying he  could do nothing as the laws of the land favoured women where marital disputes were concerned. A despondent Vijay, who has all along been supporting his wife  and children financially, sought a divorce. His wife responded by invoking the  draconian Domestic Violence Act against him and his father. As the legal tangles  take time to straighten out, Vijay's children have been unfairly deprived of  their father's company.

  

CRISP has more than 1,000 members across India and is adding more  each day. It holds

weekly meetings, and has established several centres in the  country to counsel fathers, provide support and educate them on the laws of the  land. Its Web site, www.crisp-india.org, receives hundreds of visitors who  access the information posted there. Jahgirdar and the other members of CRISP  are determined to carry on, with greater vigour than ever, the struggle to  ensure a fair deal for dads and guarantee that no child is unfairly deprived of  his/ her father's love.

  

CRISP, which is part of the Save Indian Family Foundation  (SIFF), favours educating couples

going through a divorce on the benefits of  shared parenting, and setting up special courts to speedily deal with child  custody cases in a just and sensitive manner.

  

Its demands include

settling all child custody cases within three months from  the date of filing; 

an end to the practice of interviewing very young children,  especially when they haven't had adequate access to the non-custodial parent;punishment for parents who don't comply with court orders;a separate ministry for children that is delinked from the  present Ministry for Women and Child Development;

setting up evening courts so that litigants are not forced  to take leave from work to attend the proceedings; employing mediators who have been trained by child  psychologists