No room?
John Lampen argues that refugee children deserve better
Ioften feel proud to be British – and occasionally very ashamed. One such occasion was when our government said they would only admit 350 unaccompanied refugee children into Britain, instead of the 3,000 pledged and enacted in law in an amendment to the Immigration Act 2016. Alf Dubs, author of the amendment, had come to Britain on the Kindertransport, widely acclaimed as an achievement of British generosity and tolerance. What a contrast to the recent announcement!
Even 3,000 was not a generous figure. Apart from the many who came overland from the Middle East, we know that 28,223 children crossed the war-torn Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean last year, and 700 more died on the journey. Nine out of ten children who crossed the Mediterranean last year were unaccompanied. A total of 25,846 children made the crossing, which is double the previous year. The latest UNICEF report, called A Deadly Journey for Children, tells that:
- Three quarters of the migrant children experienced violence, harassment or aggression from adults on the journey. Many were detained and abused in camps set up by the warring militias in Libya.
- Most children and women had to rely on smugglers under ‘pay as you go’ arrangements and so were vulnerable to sexual and other abuse, abduction and trafficking on arrival in Europe. Many of them were sent by the smugglers to ‘connection houses’ and forced to work for undefined periods to pay off the price of the journey.
- Most reported verbal or emotional abuse, while about half had suffered beating or other physical abuse. Girls reported a higher incidence of abuse than boys. Several also said they did not have access to adequate food on the way to Libya.
- The central Mediterranean Sea route is now a thoroughly criminalised enterprise with children and women bearing the cost. The smugglers and traffickers are winning, because there are no safe and legal alternatives.
Arriving in Europe, even if they were not still in the grip of the smugglers, the countries that should have been welcoming them were little more kind. All too often they were put behind bars – in detention facilities or in police custody – because of a lack of space in child protection centres. Determining a child’s asylum request is complex and lengthy – up to two years – and processes for family reunification are equally slow. Children often spend long periods of time uncertain of what their future holds and have been out of school for months or years. Fears of being prevented from continuing the journey, mistrust in the authorities, or the long wait for decisions have led many of them not to register, or even to hide.
Conservative MPs were among those who protested at the broken promise, claiming that the Home Office had not seriously tried to find out what places were available. Labour MP Allison McGovern said: ‘It is not true that there is no space left for Dubs children in local authority care… Let us consider Lewisham. It said that it can take twenty-three children, but it has received just one.’
Did the government only accept the Dubs amendment because it was a popular move after the death of the three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi, which aroused huge compassion? And when the Brexit vote showed diminishing sympathy for refugees, were they happy to curtail it?
Helping a few thousand children is not going to remove the causes of this vast human tragedy; but nor will it cause serious inconvenience to our country. I have no doubt that this is a question of life and death.
As the Qur’an and the Talmud both say: ‘Whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all men.’
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