Guardian investigation reveals death toll over 12 months with many desperately trying risky routes into UK to escape makeshift camps without sanitation at French port

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At least 15 migrants in and around the French port of Calais have died in the past year as an influx of young men and women from east Africa take ever greater risks to get the UK, according to an investigation by the Guardian.

Growing numbers of young families, some with children as young as three, have also arrived in the French town in the past few months and are living in makeshift camps without sanitation or running water.

The European director of the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) described the situation as shameful and warned more people will die in the refugee camps in the coming weeks as temperatures plummet.

“The conditions are totally unacceptable and are not consistent with the kind of values that a democratic society should have,” Vincent Cochetel from the UNHCR told the Guardian. “This is a shameful situation to witness in the heart of the Europe Union.”

The French authorities do not generally keep a record of the migrants who die in Calais, but local charities and the UNHCR say at least 15 people, including young women and teenagers, have died in the past 12 months.

Last month one man died after attempting to jump from a motorway bridge onto a moving lorry, and two more were killed in nearby Dunkirk when the truck they were hiding in caught fire. Earlier this month an Eritrean man was knocked down and killed as he looked for a lorry to board.

Cochetel said he believed conditions in Calais were now worse than those at refugee camps in Turkey, where hundreds of thousands of people arrive each month to escape the bloodshed in Syria. He said the British and French governments had yet to appreciate the severity of the situation.

“You will have people dying of cold and even more desperate people taking even more risks,” he said. “Some of the people there are becoming so tired and desperate that they are ready to do very dangerous things.”

The French port has repeatedly hit the headlines in the past year, amid an increasingly hostile debate in the UK around immigration and asylum. As more people arrived in Calais – and conditions deteriorated – clashes erupted between different groups of migrants and politicians on both sides of the channel called for ever tougher measures to secure the port.

Despite this the harsh reality of life for the people in the camps has been largely ignored. Today a Guardian investigation also reveals:

• More and more teenagers and young children – some just three years old – have arrived over the past few months, mainly from East Africa.

• Young women living in the camps are being sexually exploited often by trafficking gangs which are offering a route into England in exchange for sex.

• New camps are springing up along the coast and around the entrance to the Euro Tunnel as French and British authorities step up security at the Calais port.

Juliette Delaplace, who works for Secours Catholique, a charity that has been assisting migrants in Calais for 10 years said: “No other year has seen as many migrants die. They are jumping on lorries and taking more risks.” Most – but not all – of these deaths in the Calais area happened as migrants attempted to make the perilous journey to the UK.

In the event of a migrant death the charity helps to raise money from local community groups to repatriate the body. The charity receives no support from local authorities in this process. Those families and friends who can not raise enough money to repatriate their bodies are buried in unmarked graves in cemetery plots usually reserved for the homeless.

Migrants, mainly from Eritrea, have gathered their tents in an abandoned warehousein Calais. Many try to hop on trucks to get to England. Photograph: Etienne Laurant/EPA

Hussain, an agricultural engineer who left his wife and two young children in Egypt to try to find work to provide for his family, said a friend of his, a 32-year-old from Sudan, died earlier this year after holding onto the underside of a lorry for three hours. “He just couldn’t hold on any longer,” said Hussain who has been in the camp nicknamed “the jungle” for two months and tries every night to get onto a lorry bound for the UK.

Cochetel said it was typical of the growing risks people were prepared to take.

“We are seeing more and more people taking crazy risks because they feel they have nothing to lose so they take whatever chance they can to get to a place where they feel their life is going to be better or to where they think they will be protected.”

Migrants also told the Guardian that trafficking gangs were openly operating in Calais and offering to smuggle people into the UK for between £800 and £2,500. Some said traffickers were coercing vulnerable young girls into having sex in return for being smuggled into the UK.

Cochetel said: “We know that it is going on. For a few of them it might be what is termed “survival sex”, a sort of strategy, for others yes it is in-kind exploitation by smugglers in exchange for getting them on the back of a truck.”

A 23-year-old Eritrean woman who has been living in Calais for two months told the Guardian she was fearful: “I am not safe living in the jungle. There is a lot of drinking in the camp and this creates problems. It is very dangerous for a woman living here.”

Earlier this year more than 100 migrants broke through port security in an attempt to force their way onto ferries bound for the UK. There have also been clashes between different groups of migrants in the town. The UK government has pledged £12m to help secure the port but Cochetel said that was not enough, arguing that people would “always find a way around fences”.

He said the UK – along with other northern European countries - had to “provide a mechanism” that allows those with legitimate claims to seek asylum when they first arrived in southern EU countries.

And he warned that until there was concerted EU-wide action the situation in Calais was likely to deteriorate further. “There will be more deaths and more tension… in the mid term it is just bad news coming for these people,” Cochetel warned.

• Additional reporting: Anne Penketh

Escaping from Calais camp: ‘I risk my life – whatever if takes’

With his face lit by the flames from the small campfire Mohammed, a 23-year-old who fled the conflict in Gaza earlier this year, quietly explains how he ended up in a squalid camp just 20 miles from the English coast.

“I had no choice but to leave and try and find something better,” he says. “Our house was destroyed …we had nothing, I just wanted to feel one moment of safety, one moment when I am not cold, when I am not treated like an insect.”

Migrants in Calais gather food and supplies during the day, waiting for the night or a traffic jam to hop on trucks on their way to England Photograph: Etienne Laurent/EPA

Tonight, as on every other evening for the past month, Mohammed and his four friends – two Syrians and two Egyptians, who met on a smugglers’ boat crossing the Mediterranean – will set off on their nightly quest; pitting themselves against the French police and private security guards protecting Calais’s lorry parks and motorways in an attempt to find their way onto the back of a truck and what they hope will be a better life in the UK.

“It is dangerous and difficult when you have not had food or sleep but every night we must try,” Mohammed says with a smile as he pulls his hat down against the biting cold. “We have left our homes to find a better life. We can not stay here and put up with this.”

He gestures behind him to the muddy field stretching into the distance, spotted with campfires and covered with makeshift shelters. Beyond the tents are piles of rubbish, and beyond that, the strip of wasteland used by the hundreds of people who live here as a toilet.

Mohammed and his friends are among thousands of people who, having fled war, persecution and poverty beyond Europe’s borders, are living in increasingly precarious conditions in makeshift camps across northern France – waiting and hoping for their chance to make it to the UK.

Many more people seek refuge in other European countries but the concentration of those waiting here and the conditions in which they are living set Calais apart.

According to local charities and the UN’s refugee agency at least 15 people, including young women and teenagers, have died in the past 12 months.

As first light spreads over the largest camp in Calais – known as the jungle – Mohammed and his friends make their way back to their shelter along a disused railway track after another fruitless night. During the early hours they were chased by police and one of Mohammed’s friends, Hussain from Egypt, was pepper sprayed, before falling into a ditch. His plight prompts gentle mocking from his friends but the atmosphere is sombre. The men have just been told another of their friends – a 32-year-old from Sudan – has died.

The group, exhausted and cold from a night tramping the dual carriageways and lorry parks that surround the French port, falls silent. They know it is a fate that could befall any of them.

Over the past few months it is not just the numbers of people arriving in Calais that have caused alarm among politicians and aid workers – it is their age. Following the chaos in Libya since the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime thousands of young people have used the failed state to flee oppressive regimes in east Africa in search of a better life in Europe.

Among the dirt and makeshift shelters of the jungle, three-year-old Adiam watches her mother Winta, 18, cooking over a small fire of twigs. In one pan are two potatoes, in the other coffee. Adiam plays on a filthy plastic trike as her father Ataklti, 24, explains how he left Eritrea to escape compulsory military conscription and a brutal regime that Amnesty says is responsible for widespread human rights abuses.

He takes a battered picture from his wallet of himself smiling next to another man. “He killed himself rather than stay or get locked up and so I knew I had to leave,” says Ataklti quietly.

The family left their home in Eritrea a year ago, heading first to Sudan before paying smugglers to take them across the Sahara desert, through Libya and onto another smugglers’ boat bound for Europe.

Like many of those in the camp he is reluctant to reveal too many details in case the Eritrean authorities take action against his remaining family. But in a halting voice he says the worst part of the journey was crossing the Sahara, where they had little water and seven of the people they were with died. He says the gangs in Libya “treated them like dogs”.

And now sitting in the camp in northern France in the cold he admits he faces a fresh challenge: getting onto the back of a lorry with his three-year-old daughter and young wife. If he does not succeed, the family – who have never experienced a north European winter – face months of freezing conditions sheltering in a derelict sports hall at the centre of the jungle with little food.

“It’s very difficult here with a young child because we are trying to get onto lorries which is very dangerous, but I would do anything for her, for her future. I will risk my life whatever it takes,” says Ataklti.

According to the UNHCR Adiam and her family are among about 3000 migrants in and around Calais – three times the number at the beginning of the year – who are taking greater risks to try To get to the UK. Most of them live in makeshift camps like the jungle or in squats scattered around the town and survive on one meal a day provided by local charities.

The French authorities have pledged to open a new day centre in January to help the most vulnerable people. Opponents have claimed this will only attract more migrants to the town. Those in the camps are sceptical it will ever open and say even if it does it will be too little, too late.

Whether the centre does help or not it is clear the problem is no longer confined to Calais. The Guardian spent time with truck drivers who say their lorries are regularly targeted by smugglers in car parks more than 125 miles (200km) from the French port. Migrants have also set up smaller camps across the region from the fields near the entrance to the Channel tunnel to a small wood near a shopping centre in Dunkirk.

At one lorry park about half way between Calais and Paris, Matthew, who works for a UK-based furniture removal company, checks his lorry for the final time before turning in for the night. He seems overly paranoid as he points to the hedge surrounding the car park. “They will be in there now watching and waiting to see which lorries look the best bet.”

But as dusk settles he is proved right. There is a movement in the hedge and Matthew goes for a closer look in time to see three young men in their late teens or 20s sitting in the bushes.

“Even here so far from the coast they are trying to get on now. It is getting beyond a joke.” Two weeks later his firm decide to stop using Calais altogether.

For many UK politicians the answer to the unfolding crisis in Calais seems to be two-fold: build bigger and higher fences and make life for those who do make it through to the UK as uncomfortable as possible. Others suggest that only closer co-operation at EU level – with countries from northern Europe working much more closely with those in the south to offer asylum to refugees and return others when they first arrive – can the problem be addressed.

However, as record numbers of people flee poverty and war in the Middle East and Africa it seems unlikely that people will stop leaving their homes in search of a better, safer life in Europe for the foreseeable future.

“When I get to England I will study and then get a job and work so my daughter can have a better life,” says Ataklti, who a few weeks after we spoke discovered his wife was pregnant with their second child.

As he settles down to his one meal of the day as the night closes in on the Jungle he remains sure he is doing the right thing, despite the risks. “We did not have a life at home and we do not really have one here. So we must keep trying.”