O n 2 September 2015, a three-year-old Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, drowned in the Mediterranean while his family was attempting to cross the short distance from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. ​Alan’s death sparked an international debate about how to deal with refugees and migrants making their way across Europe, many via dangerous means.



Four years later, organisations working with displaced people in northern France are concerned about how the lack of available legal routes into Britain are pushing unaccompanied children to risk their lives crossing the English Channel. In August two people, an Iranian woman and an Iraqi man, drowned on separate attempts to cross to the UK.

“We know that children should be arriving in trains and not under them; and sat on a ferry not underneath a lorry inside a ferry; and that’s what the kids are wanting. They would rather have a safe way into the UK,” Maddy Allen, the field manger for Help Refugees in northern France tells The Independent.