‘no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.’

Warshan Shire (2015).

Reading the new UNICEF report – Uprooted: the growing crisis for refugee and migrant children (September 2016) – on child refugees is a sobering experience. The main statistic that informs the report should be on the lips of everyone on the planet: there are fifty million children who have been uprooted worldwide. Fifty million.

Children make up a third of humanity. Yet, half of the refugees on the planet are children. When we hear politicians talk of ‘refugees’ with venom, keep in mind that one in two of those whom they pillory are children who have been thrust out of their lives of relative stability to lives of total uncertainty. Life on the run and in refugee camps will leave these children without the elements of human development – decent nutrition, shelter, education and leisure. They live lives at the edge, bare lives, lives of great distress and trauma. The world that is being produce is a world with large numbers of displaced people who have been denied social goods.

UNICEF’s report shows that an increasing number of uprooted children cross borders on their own. In 2015, over a hundred thousand unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in seventy-eight countries. This is triple the number of unaccompanied minors who were in the same position in 2014. European governments report that there are at least ten thousand children lost in Europe. They were logged at the border, but then they disappeared from any monitoring. It has been found that half the unaccompanied children that arrive at European border posts vanish from the refugee centers. Europol reports that there is ‘tremendous amount of crossover’ between those who smuggle people into Europe and the gangs of traffickers for forced sexual and labor exploitation. Brian Donald of Europol said that ‘modern, enterprising, organized criminal gangs go where the opportunity is high and the risk is low.’ Child sexual and labor trafficking is one such area.