5 children per constituency: UK must protect 'vulnerable' unaccompanied refugee children

For our children here in the UK, Christmas is a time of excitement, fairy lights and preparing lists for Santa. But for refugee children across Europe, the changing season spells misery, disease and even the risk of freezing to death. These children are cold and afraid.

Take just a minute to imagine a child you love in a foreign country completely alone without you or anybody else to take care of them. I’ve just returned from visiting Save the Children’s work with refugees in Greece, and I can’t stress enough how vulnerable these children are. It isn’t simply a case of not having a grown-up to ensure they get fed and receive any medical attention they require: travelling alone makes a child a target for exploitation and abuse. Our teams in Italy are already picking up cases of children with STDs, a sign that they have been sexually abused or prostituted. Of the 13,000 refugee children who reached Italy all alone last year, nearly 4,000 disappeared. Sadly we know that this year the numbers will be much higher.

The British public has been tremendous during this crisis, with 1.4 million actions already taken for the ‘refugees welcome’ campaign.  And indeed, Britain has a proud history of helping children in crisis. In the run up to the Second World War, Britain rescued 10,000 children in what became known as the kindertransport. These children were fleeing Nazi persecution and have gone on to enrich our national life beyond measurement. The Syrian families who have been arriving in the UK this past month, as part of the Prime Minister’s plan to resettle 20,000 refugees, will make a similar contribution.

The Prime Minister recently made a welcome commitment to consider whether Britain can do more to fulfil its moral responsibilities to protect vulnerable children who have arrived alone in Europe. These children who are alone and afraid in Europe deserve a safe and loving home. Of course, Britain should not shoulder the burden on our own - we have calculated that the UK’s fair share of the total number of unaccompanied refugee children in Europe is about 3,000. That is less than a third of the children Britain took in during the kinderstransport and amounts to just five children per parliamentary constituency.

This Christmas we would like to invite you to show your support for child refugees who have arrived in the UK. We’ve teamed up with education provider Pearson to give child refugees arriving in the UK a welcome gift.  Children will receive a special pack of books – appropriate to their age and ability – to help them learn English.

If you are in Westminster on 15th December we invite you to join our event, hosted by Catherine West MP. You’ll have the chance to write a welcome message to a child refugee, which will be placed inside English language books to be distributed across the UK. Experts who have worked with refugee children in Europe will be on hand to speak to you about their experiences and there will be a display of beautiful new illustrations by leading artists who have recently visited child refugees in Italy, Germany, Serbia and Greece. And if you can’t make it then you can write your own message online here.