‘Refugee Week’ highlights rise in lone refugee children
The fifth annual Refugee Week is launched today on London’s South Bank with ‘Celebrating Sanctuary’.
According to the Refugee Council, Refugee Week – 16th to 22nd June – will celebrate the economic and cultural contributions that refugees make to the UK and it will also seek to promote understanding about why people seek sanctuary.
Over 300 public events are to be held in towns and cities throughout the UK and thousands more events are scheduled for schools, youth groups, colleges and universities to reflect this year’s theme of ‘young people’.
The launch of Refugee Week coincides with a disturbing report in today’s ‘Independent on Sunday’, which reveals that thousands of asylum chidren in the UK are left to fend for themselves in bed and breakfast hotels and bedsits.
At any one time, around 300 juveniles, some as young as 13, are living alone in bed and breakfasts and younger children and even babies are reported to be kept in detention centres.
The number of child refugees has risen dramatically in recent years; in 1996 there were just 631 refugee children under the age of 17 in the UK; by 2002 that figure had risen to 5,945:
And according to the Independent, 6,000 unaccompanied refugee children are in the care of the Social Services in England, including 4,000 in London alone.
