A new mapping exercise has revealed the extraordinary difficulties and dangers faced by refugee children trying to reach the UK. It traces the routes of 22 children who travelled 11,800 miles (19,000km) in eight weeks, sustaining injuries, sleeping rough or even going missing.

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The project, by the Refugee Youth Service, has been carried out with children who arrived in Ventimiglia, Italy, close to the French border. They came to Italy after crossing the Mediterranean from Libya. The organisation gave the children mobile phones so their progress could be surveyed and tried to connect them with local support groups as they travelled.

The children made drawings that showed the reasons for their journeys and the difficulties they had faced – from an image of violence in Sudan to a sketch of stick figures shouting “help” on a flimsy, overcrowded dinghy.

They have faced concerted efforts from border forces across Europe to keep them out. Many of the children are illegally pushed back into Italy by border police after making it into France.

The children, 19 of whom are under 16, have told RYS they have travelled extraordinary distances. At least 12 are trying to reach the UK and they have passed through countries including Spain, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Only one has made it to Britain since the exercise began eight weeks ago. Another, a 12-year-old girl from Chad who is believed to have crossed the border from Italy to France, has now gone missing.



The children also include:

a 14-year-old Eritrean boy who has been travelling for a year. He has been pushed back from the Italian-French border six times, but has now reached La Chapelle in Paris and is hoping to travel on to Calais and then the UK.



a 14-year-old boy from Sudan, entitled to family reunion with his uncle in the UK, who has given up on the legal process because it is taking so long and is now trying to enter the UK illegally.



a 15-year-old boy from Ethiopia who crossed from Italy to France on 3 May and has spent the past two months sleeping in the woods in Calais. He is trying to get to the UK and says he has been harassed by the French police.

According to Benjamin Teuten, project coordinator of RYS, many of the children have suffered injuries on their journeys. He warns that the broader picture for the many children travelling from Ventimiglia is bleak.



“Sadly, a number of children have died crossing the border from Ventimiglia into France,” he says. “We are asking the authorities to guarantee safe passage for children crossing borders. One of the crossings is over a mountain range and sometimes in the dark the children slip and fall and break bones.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An artwork by another of the refugee children. Photograph: Refugee Youth Service

If they are not put in danger by the elements, the children face other risks. Police on the French-Italian border have recently been using drones and dogs to hunt down migrants crossing the border by night along woodland paths.

“We are trying to monitor the most vulnerable children outside of state protection. These are Europe’s most vulnerable and marginalised groups,” says Teuten. “If the children manage to cross the border from Italy to France, they often travel from Marseilles to Paris. They have been on the road for a long time and they stay in some pretty miserable places.”

Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, said last year there were 10,000 missing refugee children across Europe. According to Oxfam, 28 children a day are going missing from Italy’s weak reception system.

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Teuten says conditions for children who arrive at the Italian-French border are becoming increasingly difficult. RYS had previously offered them sports and arts activities at St Antonio’s church in Gianchette, Ventimiglia. But this facility has now been forced to close because the Italian authorities want to relocate refugees to a new camp further away. Many children don’t want to go there, so the church closure has led to an increase in homelessness.

“There is a huge amount of despair among these children. They feel that the world has turned its back on them,” says Teuten. “RYS Italy is the only known service to provide a monitoring system for unaccompanied children on the move in Europe. These children live outside of European state protection. No one knows exactly how many of them there are in Europe, but each statistic represents a child and we are trying to put a human face on these statistics.”