The plight of unaccompanied minors and the refugee crisis
This paper reviews previously researched unaccompanied refugee minors (hereafter URMS, focusing on the 2015 refugee crisis.
Greece has played a pivotal role in accommodating migrants within the Mediterranean region, with humanitarian traditions that date back centuries, especially when it comes to taking care of the orphaned. As a result, an estimated 9.6% of its population of persons below the age of 18 are migrants. Currently, 3270 of them are unaccompanied (Buchanan and Kallinikaki, 2018, pp. 1-2). Accurate data on URMS in the world is lacking. However, a study in 2015 revealed that about 95,205 asylum seekers, in Europe as a whole, were recorded as separated or URMS (Eurostat, 2019).Displacement results in a lack of parental care. Jakobsen et al., (2017) and Müller (2018) revealed that URMS faced a huge underlying problem of the amount of attention they got from the society (N/A; p. 152). The government had not foreseen such a crisis, which resulted in massive debates on how to handle the crisis, and improve URMS quality of life, especially in foster care homes (Holen, 2020, p.104736; Mitra, and Hodes, 2019. P. 202.). Hunger and starvation often result in criminal activities by minors due to desperate efforts to have food and water (Lems, Oester, and Strasser, 2020, p. 327). For instance, the Swedish authorities have encountered record high numbers of URMS involved in drug abuse, stating that it is an increasing problem due to migration (Magnusson and Ivert, 2019; Monteiro, 2016, p.20). Liden and Salvesen (2019), and Lelliott (2017) explain that children forced into crime are treated as the first stance as offenders, while they are controlled by cartels who offer them food and shelter (p. 51; p. 243).
The Greece refugee crisis has been a platform for both economic and social problems in that the nation has to come up with emergency strategies that will handle the situation from turning into a humanitarian disaster. The rise of criminal activities related to the unaccompanied minors in the refugee population put the country into the pressure of sprouting out of criminal gangs from the refugees. According to research retrieved from case files in Greece, 50% of the unaccompanied female minors vanish every year. The kidnappings and disappearance of the refugees bring a new challenge to the nation because it’s difficult to run a background check that will give full details about the refugee’s characters and behaviors in their past life. Public pressure rising from the crisis can cause the nation to have an unstable political environment. Meeting the needs of the refugees is a problem, the population keeps on rising every year, and the funds received from aid organizations is not enough to create human conditions in the refugee camps. The burden of refugees drains a country economically as it forces to the involvement of an additional population that is not represented in the annual budget. Research and studies done on the information received about asylum seekers in the asylum seekers’ applications show that most of the refugees have no hope of going back to their places of origin due to the traumatizing situations they left behind( Monteiro, 2016, p.1-17). The inability to bark to their countries of origin places Greece at a position where there is no hope for future progress in terms of the crisis as it will take a lot of time to implement a refugee settlement program.
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