Over 18,000 Unaccompanied Migrant Children Vanish in Europe, Investigation Reveals

According to Lost in Europe, which brings together investigative journalists from seven different countries, 18,292 migrant minors have gone missing in Europe between January 2018 and December 2020, or 17 children per day. To carry out this investigation, teams from the organization collected and analyzed data on missing minors in 31 European countries - the European Union members plus Norway, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Moldova. But Denmark, France and the United Kingdom did not provide any data to the journalists. The collected data is "often inconsistent or incomplete," says The Guardian, which also participated in the investigation. The number of missing minors could therefore be even higher.

Italy is the country where the largest number of disappearances was recorded (5,775 unaccompanied missing minors). It is followed by Belgium (2,642), Greece (2,118) and Spain (1,889). The investigation report specifies that the missing minors are mainly from Morocco, with nearly 8,000 young people of this nationality having gone missing over the past three years, mainly in Spain. The others come from Algeria (1,460 missing young people), Eritrea (1,171), Guinea (1,116), Afghanistan (952) and Tunisia (822).

According to Federica Toscano, one of the managers of the Missing Children Europe association, the "high number of missing children is a symptom of a child protection system that is not working." This number is also explained by the lack of collaboration between countries on the matter. "Too often, a country assumes that the migrant child is safe in another country, even though cross-border cooperation in these matters is practically non-existent," she says. The manager will add that criminal organizations are increasingly targeting migrant minors. As a result, "many of them are victims of forced labor and are sexually exploited."