Introduction
The disappearance of unaccompanied migrant children in the European Union (EU) is an issue that has been going on for years. In 2021, Lost in Europe, a journalism project investigating the disappearance of migrant children, reported that more than 18,000 migrant children had gone missing in Europe between 2018 and 2020 (Lost in Europe, 2021), an equivalent to nearly 17 children per day (Missing Children Europe). These numbers show an increase in disappearances compared to the period of 2014-2017 when over 30,000 children went missing. In 2020, only 43 per cent of the children reported missing to hotlines were found within the year (European Parliament, 2022).
Recent data from the European statistics office, Eurostat, point out that in July 2022, around 2,000 underage asylum seekers went missing in Europe (Eurostat Data Browser, 2022). According to the data, Austria and Bulgaria have the highest numbers number of missing children. The data, furthermore, shows that among the EU Member States sharing data with Eurostat about sole travelling minors, the Netherlands has the most asylum requests applied for by unaccompanied children, amounting to 17 per cent of the country’s total asylum requests (Eurostat Data Browser, 2021). In 2022, up until August, 85 unaccompanied minors in the Netherlands had their asylum procedure halted because they could not be found, the Eurostat figures show (Eurostat Data Browser, 2021). Putting these numbers into perspective, between 2010 and 2020, from around 11,700 unaccompanied migrant children that applied for asylum in the Netherlands, at least 2,556 disappeared to an unknown destination. It should be noted, however, that the actual number of lost children is likely to be higher, as data from 2011-2014 are missing (Kamerman & Kuiper, 2020). Moreover, additional errors, such as children having been registered as adults in other countries they had passed through on their way to the Netherlands, double registration or lack thereof, make it difficult to produce completely accurate data on the matter (Terlingen, Homolova & Lam, 2021).
The present article aims to shed light on the issue of disappearing unaccompanied migrant children in the Netherlands by looking at recent available data on this group of children. It will assess the underlying reason for this issue, usually human trafficking, which causes the victimised children to end up in harmful situations that severely impede their human rights.
What is an ‘unaccompanied missing migrant child’?
First, it must be established what an ‘unaccompanied missing migrant child’ is. According to Article 2(1) of the EU’s Directive 2011/95/EU, an ‘unaccompanied minor’ means a third-country national or stateless person below the age of 18 years, who arrives on the territory of the (Member) states unaccompanied by the adult responsible for them by law or by the practice of the (Member) state concerned or is left unaccompanied within the territory of the EU after arrival with an adult (Brantl, Michalitsi-Psarrou, Klein, Pertselakis, Ntanos & Vergeti, 2021).
A definition of the term “missing migrant children” has been given by Missing Children Europe, a European organisation aiming to combat child disappearance and protect children from violence, abuse, and exploitation. Missing Children Europe defines the term as follows: “when [the children] are registered with state authorities and go missing from the reception/accommodation centres provided for them” (Missing Children Europe). In addition to this definition, it must be noted that while most missing migrant children are unaccompanied minors, they also include separated children and children who were travelling with their families (European Parliament, 2022).
The Available Shelters for Unaccompanied Minor Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands
When an unaccompanied, underage migrant arrives in the Netherlands and applies for asylum, he or she is initially received at the Application Centre in Ter Apel, a village in the north of the country. At the centre, the child is registered and, while they are waiting for the result of their asylum application, get assigned a guardian from the Nidos Foundation (Stichting), the institution that looks after the interests of minors in the Netherlands. Nidos then decides in which type of accommodation the child will be placed during the asylum procedure and afterwards (Verblijfblog, 2019).
Children older than 15 will go to a Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers (COA) process reception location for unaccompanied minors where they go through the General Asylum Procedure. If their asylum application gets rejected or if they need to go through the Extended Asylum Procedure, they move to a Small Scale Housing Unit. In the housing unit shelter, 16 to 20 children live together under the responsibility of the COA. Children under 15 and vulnerable children usually go to a host family, from where they go through the asylum procedure (Verblijfblog, 2019).
Children who are identified victims of human trafficking, or ‘where there is a real suspicion of premature departure and/or a suspicious situation in advance’, are placed in one of the two protected shelters (‘Beschermde Opvang’) of the COA (Einashe & Terlingen, 2019). The shelters were introduced in 2008 because of the large number of disappearances of Nigerian girls and Indian boys in 2005-2006 and became a structural part of the reception system for unaccompanied minor migrants in 2010. In the protected shelters, there is extra supervision, as well as 24/7 guidance, and the police are also informed of any additional risks. However, since the shelters are not closed, the children can still decide if they want to leave. Staff can only try to convince children not to run away if they suspect they want to do so but the children are, ultimately, free to leave if they want to. If a child disappears, the police are informed and if the child cannot be traced, Nidos files a missing person report (Verblijfblog, 2019).
The Underlying Reason For Child Disappearance: Human Trafficking
There may be several reasons why children disappear from shelters. These include poor reception conditions, a lack of child-friendly information, inefficient family reunification and guardian-appointment procedures, fear of detention or deportation, or the desire to join family or friends in another country (European Parliament, 2022). However, the most concerning, and not least common, of them all is when children are trapped in the hands of human traffickers.
Human traffickers force children to “repay” them for travelling through or to Europe and force them to conduct all sorts of harmful activities, including sex work, labour exploitation and forcing them to engage in crime and begging (Defence for Children). As the children often get threatened by traffickers to start working, who say that harm would be inflicted upon them or their families, they usually try to leave the shelters as soon as they can. Global Human Rights Defence has spoken to Sanne Terlingen, an investigative reporter at the Dutch radio programme Argos and part of Lost in Europe, who has done extensive research on the disappearances of migrant children and the trafficking of this group. According to Ms Terlingen, almost all migrants (and, therefore, also unaccompanied minors) embark on their journey through a smuggling network. States do not allow them to cross their borders, so they often have to rely on smugglers, who are often part of a network. The migrants sometimes use separate networks on parts of their route that work together or a network that facilitates the entire journey from starting point to the destination. Ms Terlingen explained that the fact that people are dependent on a network that is involved in illegal activities makes them vulnerable to trafficking, especially if this network claims that they have (fictitious) debts to the network that they have to repay.
Data from the COA from October 2022 show that most unaccompanied minors come from Syria (1,486) and Eritrea (477). Other countries include Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Morocco, Ethiopia, Algeria, and ‘others’ (COA, 2022). Among the ‘others’ category, Vietnamese children form a prominent group. Between 2015 and 2019, at least 96 Vietnamese children went missing (Terlingen, 2020). Investigations from 2019 by the Dutch partnerships Expertise Centre on Human Trafficking and Human Smuggling and Analysis Pilot Migration Chain show that 97 per cent of the Vietnamese children residing in protected shelters, disappear from the shelters (Expertisecentrum Mensenhandel en Mensensmokkel, 2019). Only a few of them were found back but, subsequently, disappeared again (Expertisecentrum Mensenhandel en Mensensmokkel, 2019).
Ms Terlingen explained that trafficked children end up in different exploitive situations depending on where they are from. The country they are leaving determines what route they are taking to cross to reach their final destination, but it also usually determines where they will end up working. According to Terlingen, human traffickers usually let children work in existing migrant communities from the same country they are from. For example, Vietnamese children, who mostly report being in transit to the United Kingdom (UK), are often used to work on cannabis plantations, in nail salons, and in illegal prostitution circles, run by fellow Vietnamese persons. Vietnamese children are also found in Germany in restaurant kitchens or street trading (Defence for Children).
Not only do the children get exposed to harm upon leaving shelters, some of them even die from the way they were trafficked after leaving asylum shelters. In October 2019, the bodies of 17-year-old Tran Ngoc Hieu and Dinh Dinh Thai Quyen, who just turned 18, were found among 37 other dead bodies in a refrigerated truck in Essex, the UK. All persons had died of overheating and suffocation. Twelve days before, Hieu and Quyen were staying in a protected shelter in the south of The Netherlands from which they had run away (Terlingen & Jaspers, 2021).
Combatting the Problem
Unaccompanied migrant children have an increased risk of going missing and being victimised. The children disappear with a frighteningly high frequency and their recovery often starts delayed, which poses an imminent threat to their mental and physical safety. Needless to say, their increased risk of victimisation should be counteracted time-efficiently (Brantl, Michalitsi-Psarrou, Klein, Pertselakis, Ntanos & Vergeti, 2021). As Ina Hut, the director of CoMensha, the coordination centre against human trafficking in the Netherlands, said: “There is more needed to combat the disappearances of minors from shelters. The Netherlands is responsible for these children.” (CoMensha, 2020).
In the past, CoMensha proposed that measures should be tightened, cooperation in the migration chain improved, and concerning the disappearance of Vietnamese children, criminal investigations on the matter should be given higher priority (CoMensha, 2020). In addition, Ms Hut has said that we should remain alert to signs of human trafficking, in particular the professionals working in the shelters, and also stressed the importance of preventive education in the countries of origin of the minors (CoMensha, 2020). To that end, good cooperation with the countries in question is essential, she said (CoMensha, 2020).
Ms Terlingen pointed out that from her experience talking to the staff of asylum shelters she figured that the staff sometimes succeeded in keeping the children safe when they could build a bond with them. This would encompass being there for the children as a constant figure in their lives and providing them with education on site of the shelter, which ensures that they arrive at school. According to Terlingen, having staff members close to the children makes it more likely that some of them will notice their problems or that the children will trust them enough to share their problems with and ask for help in solving them.
However, the current practice of the Dutch government makes achieving the above rather demanding. Terlingen explained that the government aims to run asylum reception as efficiently as possible for financial reasons. This means, for example, that there are only a few shelters since empty spaces cost money. However, the COA cannot quickly scale up and get new locations if the asylum influx increases, resulting in overcrowded shelters. In addition, the flow of asylum seekers from the COA to municipalities falls short, partly because of the limited number of available dwellings due to the ongoing housing crisis, which results in too few places for asylum seekers (Obbink, 2022).
As Ms Terlingen observed, the Dutch government’s drive for efficiency in asylum reception has come at the expense of the safety of unaccompanied migrant children. The Netherlands must, however, consider that it is, in fact, responsible for the security of these children.
Sources and Further Reading
Brantl, I., Michalitsi-Psarrou, A., Klein, B., Pertselakis, M., Ntanos, C., & Vergeti, D. (2021). Towards examining and addressing the danger of unaccompanied migrant minors going missing. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 267(8). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00958-9.
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