ONE CHILD EVERY SECOND

James Elder, spokesman for the UN agency for children Unicef: “On average, every day in the last 20 days in Ukraine, more than 70,000 children have become refugees, so almost one every second”.

According to the latest UN data, since February 24, a total of 2,952,026 refugees have crossed the Ukrainian border to seek refuge abroad. The overwhelming majority of the people arrived in Poland (almost 1.8 million refugees), followed by Romania (over 422,000) and Moldova (almost 340,000). In Italy over 44 thousand.

Even as Ernesto Caffo, child neuropsychiatrist and founder of Telefono Azzurro recently stated, in the large and daily flow of people fleeing Ukraine, all checks are being skipped, for example those of biometric analyzes, the collection of documents and digital fingerprints, thus risking cases of child abduction, which will be subject to trafficking, also aimed at illicit adoptions.

In particular, we are talking about children who already lived in a situation of hardship in Ukraine, because they were disabled and left by poor families in dedicated structures, such as orphanages.

We fully share the fears of Caffo, who is now in Poland: “We see children getting into cars and disappearing.”

“The non-profit world and associations must avoid acting at random”. Senseless fundraisers or buses leaving to Italy for just little more than three children increase media visibility, but do not help the cause.

Even during the recent presentation of the public and pre-political Agenda “Say it from the rooftops”, our President Emmanuele Di Leo had affirmed the urgent need for a serious coordination among Europe, the Italian government, UNHCR and associations, coordination which is now lacking and which is the cause of the absence of the protocols in the controls we have described above. We must act now, afterwards it will be too late.