Migrants: teenage victims of abuse

Rape, sexual abuse, forced labor, exploitation… The list is long and worrying. The dangers are extremely serious for unaccompanied adolescent refugees and migrants fleeing to Europe.
In one report (1), Unicef ​​reveals that more than nine out of ten migrant or refugee children arriving in Europe are unaccompanied. A situation that increases the risk of “abuse of exploitation and death, which they are increasingly confronted with”, firmly denounces UNICEF. In addition, 7,009 children alone undertook the crossing of the Mediterranean (linking North Africa to the Italian coasts).
“It is a silent and hopeless situation. However, tens of thousands of children are in danger every day and hundreds of thousands more are ready to risk everything,” laments Marie-Pierre Poirier, coordinator at UNICEF.

Rape, abuse, exploitation

Unicef ​​reveals that single teenagers generally come into contact with smugglers, “often under a ‘pay as you go’ system, which opens them up to exposure”. “If you stop working, they beat you,” 16-year-old Aimamo told UNICEF.
With his brother, the teenager worked for two years on a Libyan farm to be able to pay the smugglers. “If I took even a five-minute break, a man would beat me with a cane. And after working, he locked us up,” confides Aimamo with emotion.
But quantifying the number of deaths of adolescents and children in forced labor conditions, to pay the smugglers, remains very complex. At issue: its illegal nature.
But Unicef ​​assures him, some teenagers would be sexually “abused” and “exploited”. In Italy, for example, social workers have confessed to witnessing the sexual abuse and abuse suffered by many refugees and migrants on their own. At the edge of the Italian coasts, young adolescent girls would even arrive pregnant, in deplorable conditions, after being raped. “We urgently need to protect these children. Of all the abuse and exploitation from which some benefit,” concludes Marie-Pierre Poirier.

(1) – Danger Every Step of the Way