Why are 10,000 Children Missing in Europe?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 October 2016
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Earlier this year Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, announced 10,000 children had arrived in Europe, part of the wave of migration that has swept through the continent in recent years. They had been registered and identified. And then they had disappeared. Many of these children are travelling alone. Some are as young as six years old. But the authorities across Europe – the police, the border agencies, NGOs and care organisations – have no idea where they have gone. They are at risk from trafficking and exploitation as well as the hazards of the journey across Europe – jumping onto lorries at Calais, sleeping rough in Northern European weather.
Under international and EU law children should be protected. There are various systems and regulations in place to deal with unaccompanied child migrants, whether refugees or not. But the system is failing and children continue to go missing at an alarming rate. Why?
(Photo: A young boy walks past the Jungle Books Cafe in the Jungle migrant camp Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we get going, a big, big thank you. To all of you who listened to our |
| 0:03.6 | podcast last week, heard our requests for feedback and reviewed us. You've made a |
| 0:08.2 | hardworking team of inquiries very happy. If you haven't already, and you're a fan of the inquiry or you're listening for the first time today and you want to rate or review us, please go ahead. You can do that wherever you get your podcasts from. |
| 0:22.0 | And now time for this week's show. |
| 0:27.2 | When Galwale was just 12 years old he left home and never went back. It wasn't his choice, but his mothers. |
| 0:38.0 | She wanted to protect him from the war in Afghanistan. |
| 0:41.0 | In a few weeks they thought he'd be in Europe. But things didn't |
| 0:46.3 | turn out that way. It took him months to get to Greece. In the backs of |
| 0:50.7 | lorries through time in prison on trains and on boats. |
| 0:54.4 | And when he finally arrived, he disappeared. |
| 0:59.8 | He's not the only child to disappear after arriving in Europe. There are thousands of others. |
| 1:06.3 | The EU's Police Intelligence Unit, Europol, thinks that around 10,000 children are missing, |
| 1:12.2 | but that number could be far higher. |
| 1:17.0 | So with the help of Gulwali himself, who you'll hear from later in this program, |
| 1:21.0 | we'll be asking, why are there 10,000 children missing in Europe? |
| 1:28.3 | Part 1 Invisible invisible. as you would really have a very strong smell something between garbage and blood. |
| 1:47.0 | Our first expert witness Delphine Morales, |
| 1:50.0 | she's talking about her visit to one of the refugee camps in Greece. |
| 1:55.0 | Thousands of children live there, alongside mice and rats. |
| 1:59.0 | And so we were also asked not to touch children in these specific camps because they had certain diseases that were not exactly |
| 2:04.6 | cleared yet. |
| 2:06.2 | She was there with the organization she runs, the Belgium-based missing children Europe. |
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