Where Are the Refugee Children?

Why, you may ask, am I suddenly looking at a blog about refugee children? That is rather a different subject than institutional childcare or alternative care, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. It is its own, vast and complicated subject. But it is definitely tied in with institutional childcare and alternative care as well.

As part of research data that I have gathered, I have statistics on refugee flows for 2015. This is information on how many people left a particular country as refugees, how many refugees were being hosted by the country and how many people were internally displaced, and for some countries I also have information one what percentage of this group consists of children.

It was quite shocking to me, to see how large a proportion of the streams coming out of countries and being hosted by neighbouring countries are children. This is not quite as visible in the groups of refugees who arrive in Europa and North America, there the proportion of children is usually much smaller.

When you look at the refugees leaving various African countries and being hosted in various African countries, the percentage of children is often more than 50%, and in one case even 64%. That is an enormous group of children, tens of thousands, who are either traveling with family members or unaccompanied, very vulnerable to all kinds of abuse and exploitation.

The numbers of refugees hosted in European countries are far, far lower than those hosted in neighbouring countries in Africa and Asia. In Europe we are talking about tens of thousands of refugees per country, at the most, rather than hundreds of thousands, quite a difference. The percentage of children among the refugees arriving in various European countries varies between 1-20%, so only a fraction of those who have left their countries. This can easily blind us to the scale of the problem of child refugees.

The reason why this information is relevant for the research I am doing, is that it gives a lot of inferred information about a country. If hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing a country, it is not likely to be safe or politically stable, which will impact the attention paid to child protection. If a country is hosting enormous amounts of refugees, this is likely to create a drain on resources and may impact child protection policy.

What is most worrying, however, and to me surprising, is the way refugee children in several Western European countries and in the USA are received. These are countries that have put an end to large scale institutions two or more decades ago. These are countries that have done or seen the research and know that institutionalisation has serious harmful effects and that it is not a cost-effective way to care for children. And yet….

In various of these countries unaccompanied refugee children are now placed in institutions, not small group homes, but larger ones. And in the USA, recently children who arrive with their parents are even separated from them in order to place them in large scale institutions. Reports of inadequate care and abuses have already emerged from these. The kinds of things that are to be expected when placing children in large-scale institutions.

So it seems that while in the rest of the world gradual progress is being made, away from institutional care and towards family-based solutions, countries that had left institutional care behind them might be moving towards it again. This is something to keep an eye on and to stand up against.

Refugee children are children too, just like any others. What is good enough for the children of the country, is good enough for the refugee children it receives. What is not considered good enough for the children of the country, is not good enough for the refugee children.

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