Alwaght-Young and vulnerable refugees in Europe are facing sexual exploitation, compelled to engage in crimes by human traffickers and arbitrary detention, a UN agencies have revealed.
According to a UNICEF document slated for publication on Thursday, unaccompanied children in northern France refugee camps of Calais and Dunkirk camps are being subjected to sexual violence by traffickers who promise passage to Britain.
Children in the camps say they have been forced to work and commit crimes such as opening lorry doors to enable adults to be smuggled across the Channel.
According to UNICEF researchers, refugee children are traumatized on their way to Europe and later face exploitation in refugee camps.
In January, EU’s criminal intelligence agency, Europol, revealed that at least 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees have disappeared after arriving in Europe.
Europol’s chief of staff said 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.
Human rights groups say governments and aid agencies are failing to provide even basic protections to children and women refugees traveling from Syria and Iraq.
Women and girls travelling alone and those accompanied only by their children felt particularly under threat in refugee camps especially in transit areas and camps in Hungary, Croatia and Greece. In some camps Women are forced to sleep alongside hundreds of refugee men.
Meanwhile, The UN human rights chief on Monday decried a "worrying rise" in detentions of migrants in Greece and Italy and urged authorities to find alternatives to confining children while asylum requests are processed.
More than one million migrants, many fleeing Syria's war, have arrived in Europe through Greece since last year. More than 150,000 have come in 2016 so far - 38 percent of them children, according to United Nations refugee agency data. Italy has also set up mandatory detention centers.
"Even unaccompanied children are frequently placed in prison cells or centers ringed with barbed wire. Detention is never in the best interests of the child – which must take primacy over immigration objectives," Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
