Children face hard road on way to Sweden

About 700 refugee children are arriving in Sweden every week without their parents, many injured in accidents and some bearing the physical and psychological scars of beatings or rape by their smugglers.

The minors, mainly teenage boys, usually complete their long journey from the Middle East, Africa and Asia by crossing the Oresund Bridge from Denmark, and seek help in the first Swedish city they reach - Malmo.

Employees at a Malmo transit center, who care for unaccompanied children during their first few days in the country, describe how some arrive with head injuries or broken bones.

The children often get the injuries when they fall from trucks on which they are trying to stow away. But the injuries can also be inflicted by the very smugglers that their parents have paid to take them to safety in northern Europe.

Some children, for example, suffer from hearing loss after they have been slapped over the ears during a journey that includes a lethally dangerous sea crossing to Europe on rafts or in boats, many of which are not seaworthy.

"We have also received many who came via Libya, including people who have been on the capsized boats," said the center's manager, Kristina Rosen.

One unaccompanied child saw his brother drown in the Mediterranean; staff at the center estimate more than half the children need psychological care at some point.

In proportion to its population, Sweden receives more asylum seekers than any other European nation, and numbers are rising sharply, with many fleeing the civil war in Syria.

The country, which has welcomed refugees since the 1970s, also takes in about a third of all unaccompanied minors arriving in the European Union, and their numbers are expected nearly to double this year to 12,000.

Officials said parents can often afford the cost of smuggling only one family member. So they send one child to Sweden, often to avoid recruitment as fighters by militant groups such as the Islamic State group, which has overrun large areas of Syria and Iraq, or Somalia's al-Shabaab.

Less than a third of the unaccompanied children are ever reunited with their parents.

Some are found wandering on Malmo's city streets, 35 minutes from Copenhagen, by strangers who take them to the authorities. Others seek out police or social workers, or are dropped off by smugglers near the Migration Agency with directions to its offices.

By August, 9,383 unaccompanied children had applied for asylum in Sweden this year, up from 7,049 in all of 2014, with numbers accelerating sharply this summer.

They were mainly from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and Syria, data from Sweden's Migration Agency showed, and most of them were boys.

Last year, 29 percent of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in the EU came to Sweden, the agency says, putting the cost of care at 9.1 billion kronor ($1.1 billion) this year.

Children stay at the Malmo transit center for just a few days before they go to other centers around Sweden, or move in with foster families if they are very young.

Staff try to give the Malmo center the atmosphere of a home rather than an institution. Teenagers sit in what looks like a living room, playing computer games or browsing Facebook.

(China Daily 09/09/2015 page11)