MSF:
“They are playing now, they smile and befriend each other, they seem like any other young people,” says Julie Melichar, humanitarian affairs officer on board MSF’s search and rescue vessel Geo Barents. “But they are no longer just children or teenagers – not after what they have been through.”
Melichar is talking about the youngest survivors rescued by MSF in our most recent mission in the central Mediterranean, when teams saved 367 people in less than two days. More than 40 per cent of them were under the age of 18 and 140 of them were travelling alone.
Such a high number of young people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea – considered to be the world’s deadliest migration route – is alarming in itself. But travelling without a parent or trusted adult makes unaccompanied minors one of the most vulnerable groups of people on the move.