In 2015, more than 90,000 unaccompanied migrant children sought asylum in Europe. Last year that number dropped to nearly 20,000. This last week, the Fostering Across Borders (FAB) project, aimed at supporting these children by training care professionals in Austria, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Poland and the United Kingdom, ended.
Unaccompanied children are more exposed to exploitation, violence and abuse, and may need emotional and practical support to recover, to settle in a new country, to find their way, and to acclimatize to their host country’s culture and religions. Foster care or family-based care, seems a better solution for children travelling alone, without family or friends, than reception centres or institutions. But foster care professionals have to be prepared to deal with the unique challenges these migrant children might present.
‘When you first meet a young person from abroad, you have no real understanding of what they experienced or have gone through’, says Fiona, a foster care professional in the United Kingdom.
In the last 18 months, the FAB project developed a foster care training programme aligned to the country’s national context. It provided many tools for handling the specific needs of unaccompanied migrant children. It also promoted the family-based care model with migrant children and stakeholders involvement.