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David vs Goliath Every year, thousands of unaccompanied children apply for asylum in industrialized countries. But few get refugee status. Many go underground. Who is responsible? - By Judith Kumin “Port lures illegals journeying westward.” “29 illegals bound for Britain detained.” “Fooled Sri Lankans refused refugee status.” Many western newspapers today carry similar headlines, warning of increased clandestine immigration or of ‘bogus’ refugees. But lost amidst the scare-mongering —and the negative tide of public opinion it invariably generates—is the fact that many of these uninvited guests are children, sometimes alone and often fleeing war and persecution. Few of them get anything like the official or media attention which surrounded the telegenic Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez after his mother drowned while trying to escape the island and anti-Castro relatives attempted to keep him in the United States last year. Hardly anyone blinked, for instance, when 16 unaccompanied Afghan children were found shivering among a cluster of adults trying to sneak across Austria’s eastern border shortly before Christmas last year. Or when a group of Somali children landed at Zurich airport, and asked for asylum. The case of a 16-year-old Nicaraguan street child recently granted asylum in Arizona, after having walked thousands of miles alone to the United States, went largely unnoticed. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service was unable to say how many unaccompanied kids such as the Nicaraguan urchin apply for asylum every year— they don’t keep such statistics. Other western governments are in a similar predicament. They acknowledge there is a ‘problem’ surrounding asylum seeking children, but often cannot identify its magnitude. While on paper children's rights are nearly universally recognized, they still face numerous forms of persecution. Even when information is available, it is not necessarily reliable, since it is often difficult to determine a child’s age, and a boy or girl who seems to be ‘accompanied’ on arrival may in fact be with adults neither willing nor suitable to look after the youngster (for this reason, UNHCR and many other agencies prefer to use the term ‘separated children’). FAILING TO COPE Still, it is clear that large numbers of these children seek asylum in industrialized countries and that governments find it difficult to cope. They vacillate between stringent control measures, including locking children up in jail, x-raying them to assess their age or shipping them back to ‘safe’ third countries, and serious efforts to care for youngsters in the spirit of Article 22 of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child which requires signatories to provide adequate protection and assistance to children, whether alone or with their families. During 1999, the most recent year for which at least some numbers are available, more than 20,000 separated children applied for asylum in western Europe, North America or Australia. This is a mere fraction of those who were driven from their homes worldwide by violence and persecution. Experts estimate that half of the world’s refugees and displaced people are children, and that over the past decade, more than two million have been killed in conflicts around the world.

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