Universal Children’s Day: Children of the Refugees

World Children’s Day was first established in 1954 as Universal Children's Day and is celebrated on 20 November each year to promote international togetherness, awareness among children worldwide, and improving children's welfare.

November 20th is an important date as it is the date in 1959 when the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It is also the date in 1989 when the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Since 1990, World Children's Day also marks the anniversary of the date that the UN General Assembly adopted both the Declaration and the Convention on children's rights.

Mothers and fathers, teachers, nurses and doctors, government leaders and civil society activists, religious and community elders, corporate moguls and media professionals, as well as young people and children themselves, can play an important part in making World Children's Day relevant for their societies, communities and nations.

World Children's Day offers an inspirational entry-point to advocate, promote and celebrate children's rights, translating into dialogues and actions that will build a better world for children.

It’s one thing to provide welfare and greater opportunities to the children around the world. Imagine what it would be like for the children who do not have access to the basic human needs and rights!

Refugee and migrant children– some travelling with their families, some alone risk everything, even their own lives, in search of a better life. Millions of uprooted families flee their homes to escape conflict, persecution and poverty in countries including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan.

The Great Shift

Vast numbers of children and families are on the move around the world. There are now 30m children displaced by conflict, the highest since World War II, and vastly more unaccompanied child migrants are being recorded than at the beginning of the decade. Besides war, other factors driving child migration include poverty and climate change.

Certainly, there have been achievements in relation to child migrant rights. In Palermo in Sicily, a system has been set up to ensure every arriving child receives a legal guardian from the local community. Mexico is pioneering a system of alternative care for child refugees, providing accommodation and full support and enabling them to become part of the community. In Ethiopia, we filmed impressive work to register lone children quickly to reunite them with families or place them in foster care in refugee camps.

But so much more could be done to help such children. It doesn’t help that much of our evidence relies on first-hand testimonies, since country data is often poor or non-existent. The best information relates to Europe. This report, for example, highlights everything from failures to appoint legal guardians in Bulgaria to increasing detentions in France to patchy accommodation in Germany. But even in Europe it can still be difficult to build up a full picture about any one country, still less to compare them.

In any case, most migration is actually between low income countries. This accounts for 85% of refugees- particularly in Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon and Uganda. These countries receive only minimal assistance from wealthier countries to help fulfil child migrants’ rights. This is despite the fact that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child favours such international cooperation.

All state parties to the convention have to report on progress to the relevant UN committee, which publishes regular reports about each country. The committee does its best to be critical where appropriate, but too many countries are still not prioritising the rights of child migrants to any real extent.

When children and young people feel that they have no choices, no sense of a future, and where there are no safe and legal alternatives for migration available to them, uprooted children will take matters into their own hands, facing even greater risks of exploitation at the hands of people smugglers and traffickers.

"There are far more reasons that push children to leave their homes and fewer pull factors that lure them to Europe. But for those who do aim to come to Europe, the allure is the chance to further their education, find respect for their rights and get ahead in life. Once they reach Europe, their expectations are sadly shattered."- Afshan Khan, Regional Director for UNICEF in Europe and Central Asia.

All children on the move are vulnerable to abuse and other grave forms of violence during and after their journeys. It is estimated that more than one child dies every day along the perilous Central Mediterranean route from North Africa to Italy. Of the almost 100,000 refugees and migrants travelling via this route in the past year, around 15 percent are children.

The vast majority are boys aged 16 to 17 travelling alone from numerous countries in West Africa and the Horn of Africa. For many, Europe may not be their intended destination when they set out on their journey: most head for neighbouring countries at first, but the abuse they experience along the way compels them to push on towards Europe.

"We knew it was dangerous, I knew it was dangerous, but when you have a lion at your back and the sea in front, you take the sea."

Uprooted children travelling from the Middle East to Greece via the eastern Mediterranean tend to arrive with their families, with girls just as likely to arrive as boys. They come primarily from just three countries: Syria (54 percent), Iraq (27 percent) and Afghanistan (13 percent). 

Many people have fled from the brutal six year conflict in Syria and more than three million Syrians now live in Turkey- the largest refugee population in the world. Almost half of these are children. The majority of Syrian refugees in Turkey live in host communities that are often poverty-stricken, and hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugee children are out of school. 

Intended to halt mass flows of migrants into Western Europe, the Balkan border closures and the EU-Turkey statement have also resulted in more people taking greater risks to get to their destinations – and often facing exploitation at the hands of smugglers. 

There are now more than 72,000 refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, including more than 22,500 children unable to move forward, unwilling to go back to their home countries and struggling to fit into their host communities. Children are increasingly showing signs of deep psychological trauma as a result of the suffering they have experienced during and after their journeys.

A roadmap for care and protection

UNICEF has worked with its partners to develop a Roadmap that provides guidelines to improve the care and protection of refugee and migrant children, whether they are travelling alone or with their parents or caregivers.

The Roadmap highlights the need to identify children, register them through child-friendly procedures, and build a relationship of trust with them as early as possible.

Ensuring that a well-trained guardian takes immediate responsibility for the child, engaging cultural mediators, and mobilizing members of host communities are critical measures that can help build a trusting relationship and protect children from smugglers, traffickers or the impact of severe pressures on a family.

At national level, we work with partners to meet children’s immediate needs, including safety, protection, health care, adequate nutrition and education.

 The ‘Blue Dot’ centres, for example, offer psychosocial support and other child protection services- including specific services targeting unaccompanied children and those most seriously distressed by their experiences.

We support the long-term integration of refugee and migrant children into the communities where they now live. In Greece, for example, UNICEF reinforces national efforts to protect more than 20,000 vulnerable refugee and migrant children. 

They help to provide psychosocial services and education for refugee and migrant children. Here and in the other countries with refugee and migrant populations, they help to provide psychosocial services and education for refugee and migrant children while strengthening national child protection systems to benefit all children who are vulnerable. 

In Turkey, we have prioritized the integration of refugee and migrant children into mainstream schools, and in 2016, for the first time since the crisis began, there were more Syrian refugee children in school in Turkey than out of school. Building on this, they have launched cash benefits for more than 230,000 Syrian and other refugee children in Turkey, linked to their school enrolment and attendance. 

Tackling the root causes

People have always migrated to flee from trouble or to find better opportunities. Today, more people are on the move than ever, trying to escape from climate change, poverty and conflict, and aided as never before by digital technologies.

Children make up one-third of the world’s population, but almost half of the world’s refugees: nearly 50 million children have migrated or been displaced across borders. 

While working to safeguard refugee and migrant children in Europe, UNICEF is also working on the ground in their countries of origin to ease the impact of the poverty, lack of education, conflict and insecurity that fuel global refugee and migrant movements.

In every country, from Morocco to Afghanistan, and from Nigeria to Iraq, we strive to ensure all children are safe, healthy, educated and protected.

This work accelerates and expands when countries descend into crisis. In Syria, for example, UNICEF has been working to ease the impact of the country’s conflict on children since it began in 2011.

They are committed to delivering essential services for Syrian families and to prevent Syria's children from becoming a ‘lost generation’. They support life-saving areas of health, nutrition, immunization, water and sanitation, as well as education and child protection. They also work in neighbouring countries to support Syrian refugee families and the host communities in which they have settled.

Unless the world makes concrete commitments to address these children’s rights much more effectively, any celebrations of the Universal Children’s Day would sound shallow. It is due time that the millions of displaced children are treated with the respect, care and support they deserve.