Children now make up more than one-third of the migrants making the perilous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece, the UN said yesterday as two more babies drowned off Europe’s shores.
The figures emerged as Europe struggles with its biggest migration crisis since World War II, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, violence and poverty risking life and limb to reach its shores.
“Children currently account for 36% of those risking the treacherous sea crossing between Greece and Turkey,” the UN children’s agency Unicef said.
And for the first time since the start of the migrant crisis in Europe, there are now more women and children crossing the border from Greece to Macedonia than adult males, spokeswoman Sarah Crowe said.
“Children and women on the move now make up nearly 60%,” she said.
It marks a significant shift since last year when figures from June showed 73% of migrants were adult males and only one in 10 were under the age of 18, she said.
“The implication of this surge in the proportion of children and women on the move are enormous,” said Marie Pierre Poirier, Unicef’s special co-ordinator for the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe.
“It means more are at risk at sea, especially now in the winter, and more need protection on land,” she said in a statement.
Underlining her point, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said yesterday that one in every five of those who drowned last month while trying to sail from Turkey to Greece was a child, with minors accounting for 60 of the 272 deaths.
The January death toll raised to 330 the total number of children who died in those waters over the past five months, many of them metres from shore, the organisation said.
The drownings continue a grim trend that accelerated last year when nearly 4,000 people died trying to reach Europe by sea.
The worst month was December, when 82 children under the age of 18 died in the Eastern Mediterranean, many of them infants and toddlers, IOM figures show.
The bodies of two more babies were recovered by the Turkish coastguard in the Izmir province yesterday along with the bodies of seven adults, just days after another 37 people drowned off another part of the coast.
Among the dead were a number of children, an AFP photographer said, although the exact number was unclear.
Large numbers of minors have also arrived in Europe unaccompanied, leaving them vulnerable to abuse and trafficking.
In January, almost 62,200 migrants and refugees entered Europe through Greece, most of them from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, the IOM said.
Of that number, around a third – close to 20,000 – were unaccompanied minors.
On Sunday, the Europol police agency warned that youngsters arriving alone were particularly vulnerable to exploitation, saying more than 10,000 unaccompanied children who were registered after arriving in Europe over the past 18 months to two years had disappeared.
Speaking to AFP on Monday, Unicef’s Crowe said European mechanisms for protecting children had not worked.
This “is really a failure of child protection systems across the region”, she said.
“Procedures need to be a lot faster and children need to be part of that process so they don’t fall through the cracks and they do not fall prey to smugglers and traffickers.”