Earlier this month, the bodies of 26 teenagers were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. The corpses were sent to Salerno, Italy, where autopsies are being conducted to determine the details of their deaths. The girls were probably victims of sex trafficking, originally picked up in southern Nigeria, held in Libya and then sent to Italian shores in dinghies. Aid workers suspect that, like many African girls trafficked before them, they were tortured and raped.

“We will see if they have family members,” Marco Rotunno, the communications officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy, told me. “Most of the Nigerian girls travel alone, part of a huge trafficking network, and no one knows exactly who they are.”

We have read many terrible stories in the past few years about refugees from countries like Syria and Yemen found dead or near death at sea while making the perilous trip to Europe. Who can forget the photograph of the body of the 2-year-old Syrian boy who washed up on Turkish shores in September 2015? Within days we knew many details about this child: His name was Alan Kurdi. He was of Kurdish descent. His family was trying to reach Canada.

But we have read next to nothing about the African girls who have made similar journeys. More than a week after the bodies of these 26 girls were found, we know only that they were 14 to 18 years old — nothing about the lives they led. The horrible reality is that they will most likely remain nameless, never identified or claimed.