By Martin Banks - 24th September 2009
A conference on the plight of street children has been told much more effort is needed at EU level to tackle a problem that is growing at an alarming rate.
Speaking on Thursday, Reinhold Muller, of the European Federation for Street Children (EFSC) said children as young as five were flocking to rich European countries like France and Spain in search of a better life.
But, all too often, he said most ended up in a downward spiral of homelessness, shoplifting and prostituting themselves.
In some cases, children vanished and are never seen or heard of again.
The two-day conference, in Budapest, has been jointly organised by the EFSC, a Luxembourg-based umbrella body for 33 NGOs, to raise public awareness of the problem of street children and unaccompanied minors.
It comes ahead of the European year against poverty and social exclusion in 2010.
Muller said the problem of street children is global and is increasing.
"Although most of us would connect the issue with developing countries, Europe itself is facing one of the biggest challenges for its social policy - migration of unaccompanied children to and from central and eastern Europe," he said.
"The European dimension of the phenomenon is increasing and requires a joint policy action of a trans-national nature.
"Street children are increasingly migrating on their own from new member states to the old member states while these countries are faced at the same time with the challenge of street children of third country origin.
"In spite of high expectations during the pre-accession process, child rights NGOs in new member states are still confronted with insufficient support from their national authorities in tackling this problem."
Although the absence of reliable data made it difficult to assess the full scale of the problem, he estimates there are between 150,000 and 250,000 street children in central and eastern European member states.
In addition, he told the conference that some 1.7 million Roma children are not registered in central Europe.
Many, he said, are socially excluded from mainstream healthcare and education and effectively "live in the shadows of society".
He said this makes them particularly vulnerable to traffickers and criminals, one of the reasons Muller said parliament last year called on member states to introduce sanctions against those who force children to beg on the street.
The problem, he said, had been made worse by relatively poor controls at the new eastern borders of Europe and also the economic downturn which has seen many governments cut back on social welfare programmes.
Another keynote speaker, Niraj Nathwani, of the Fundamental Rights Agency, said future EU legislation should ensure that victims of child trafficking are not detained or treated as criminals.
He said few if any member states had actually pursued prosecutions against child traffickers and that much of EU law on the issue was deficient.
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