ELTEOREMA DE PITÁGORAS

Age as a relevant category for the distribution of resources and services emerged prominently through the analysed material. However, it is significant to highlight here that age was mostly perceived as ‘young age’, as the emphasis was put on children and youth, and that it was almost entangled with the category of the ‘unaccompanied minor’. Disaggregation of arrivals’ data was mainly made by age group (see for example UNHCR, 2018g) and in much of the advocacy and press material analysed, there were explicit references to the increased presence of minors among the newcomers and the consequent need for humanitarian aid and protection (see for example Klein Leichman, 2015).

Being a minor (younger than 18) suggests also a criterion of vulnerability according to the Greek asylum law and this was associated in the documents with families with young children often being prioritised in terms of accessing appropriate accommodation and services. Besides, minors traveling without the company of an adult had to be under the protection of the Greek state and to be provided with all necessary care. However, due to failures in the reception management and the limited numbers of available positions in appropriate accommodation schemes, young children, accompanied or not, were often staying inside the camps sharing the same conditions with adults or even being detained. Reportedly, unaccompanied minors were often kept in police custody until a position became available in one of the few shelters in the islands or the mainland (ARSIS, 2018a).

Regarding children living in the camps, organizations’ main concerns included providing primary and paediatric care, creative and educational activities, as well as child-friendly spaces inside the facilities. DWB report that the majority of children examined by them suffered from PTSD symptoms, sleep disorders, urinary disorders and various psychosomatic symptoms, while children who were traveling only with one parent had a greater difficulty in expressing their trauma (DWB, 2015c). In a paediatric clinic operating outside Moria RIC, working teams were offering services to children younger than 16 years old and to pregnant women in order to prevent pneumonia, hypothermia and other conditions caused by winter’s low temperatures. The majority of treated children were younger than five and they were suffering from respiratory infections and diarrhoea caused by the inappropriate living conditions (DWB, 2017c). Problems inside the camps were also associated with minors’ nutrition. As breastfeeding patterns were far from optimal due to the lack of safe spaces, hospitals’ strategy to provide formula to new-borns, and mothers’ inappropriate nutrition, one third of caregivers were feeding their children with infant formula. The formula itself was distributed from charities or bought by the caregivers, further burdening their budget. Complementary feeding practices for infants and young children were also problematic, among other reasons due to the lack of cleaning and sterilizing facilities and the insufficient food distribution in terms of quantity and nutritional value (Save the Children, 2016).

Further, for refugee children living in the camps, access to the national educational system – if available at all- was highly problematic either due to the reluctance of local schools and/or parental associations to accept refugee students or due to the lack of transportation services and other management gaps. In parallel, alternative educational and recreational activities in the camps were rarely available in a consistent manner. Needs’ assessment reports

highlighted that this contributed to the overall lack of structure in children’s everyday routine and negatively affected their well-being causing agitation and aggressive behaviour, while in parallel burdening women caregivers with the duty of children’s constant surveillance (Oxfam, 2016). Finally, in this context, minors were at increased risk of SGBV amid poor security. Although the UNHCR coordinated with humanitarian actors and stakeholders in order to enhance children’s protection through legal aid, psychosocial support and case management, children’s needs remained unmet to a large extent.

Moreover, the documents reported a series of vulnerabilities as particular to unaccompanied minors who in their vast majority were boys older than 12 (UNHCR, UNICEF, IOM, 2017; NCSS, 2018). In order for the unaccompanied minors to be transferred to appropriate shelters, it was necessary to be identified but also to receive the approval of the Public Prosecutor for Minors. In the context of the overall delays and vulnerability identification obstacles, this added an extra layer of delay in the process and in cases where minors’ age was not self-evident (e.g. in cases of teenagers close to adulthood), it also implied an age assessment. The actual process of age assessment was described as severely problematic due to the lack of trained staff and paediatricians. Particularly, in advocacy documents it was described as a migration control tool that forced children and youth to undergo unnecessary examinations (DOW, 2016b). The outcome of these processes was that unaccompanied minors had to spend weeks or months inside camps or detention facilities and police departments without the protection and care of an adult. Given that referral processes to appropriate shelters were prioritising girls and younger children -in line again with dominant understandings of vulnerability- (Brown et al., 2017), teenage boys were those exposed to the camps’ dangerous conditions the longest.

The overall guidelines of the age assessment suggested that in cases where it was not possible to decide whether the person was younger than 18 years old, the decision should favour the refugee and grant them access to the relevant services for unaccompanied minors (DOW, 2016b). However, given that in the shelters, minors had limited or no ability to go outside, had no access to cash assistance and were kept detached from acquaintances and their communities, it was reported that many young boys who could ‘pass’ as adults, would choose to report an older age in order not to be transferred to the shelters. This choice was described as the outcome of minors’ distorted perceptions regarding their legal options and also of their eagerness to exhaust every possibility in order to continue their journey. Given that Greece lacked a formal guardianship system, it was common among youth to get involved with

smugglers to leave the islands regardless of the involved risks. In this frame, youth were often exploited and trafficked (IRIN, 2016), with the risk being particularly salient for young people coming from the non ‘refugee producing’ countries. Scarce references included information about young boys and girls who were reported as missing (UNHCR, 2017f). An additional form of exploitation in the specific context was that unaccompanied minors often appeared connected to adults who were falsely reporting that they were their relatives, guardians or caregivers in order to derive benefit from the services designated for children’s caregivers (DOW, 2016). The documents did not elaborate on the context of those ‘connections’, however one cannot but see them as potential enablers of dependency, coercion, exploitation and violence against the already disempowered minors.

As no surprise, the documents offered ample references to the extent that these conditions impacted unaccompanied minors’ mental health. Both for the children residing in protection facilities and for those in the RICs, common symptoms involved anxiety and PTSD symptoms, hostility, violent behaviour and bullying. Moreover, there were alarming rates of substance abuse that in some cases involved prescribed psychotropic drugs and in others, particularly in the RICs, alcohol or non-prescribed psychotropic substances that were shared with adults. The organizations repeatedly stressed their concerns regarding the way that prolonged detention of minors was worsening their already damaged mental health and creating serious psychopathology with long-term impacts. Still, access to mental health services was even more problematic for children than it was for adults due to the limited number of specialists in the Greek NHS (UNHCR, 2017e). In those circumstances, conflicts and violent episodes between minors and also between minors and adults were common and in certain cases, led to serious incidents with injuries of those involved and with the consequent transfer of minors to temporary shelters. Incidents of sexual assault were also suspected, however references to particular incidents (e.g. report on a young boy who was raped by other minor refugees at Moria RIC - DOW, 2016c) were limited.