Unaccompanied and Separated Children
This section is being re-edited for better clarification.
Please visit this section again in the near future for more information
on ISS work with unaccompanied and separated children.
International Social Service is developing a research division relating to unaccompanied and separated children’s issues.
The Research Division’s work will be based on the lengthy experience of ISS in these matters. For a number of decades the organisation has been actively working in a variety of contexts involving unaccompanied or separated children including World War II, the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the large scale migration wave of Vietnamese and Cambodian persons in the 1970’s, the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the 1990’s, the massive migration of children for economic reasons across the world, etc. Currently, ISS remains active in helping unaccompanied and separated children, notably those migrating from a Western African country to a neighbouring country using a South-South approach.
ISS has also developed expertise in this field by circulating information, preventing forced migration and promoting appropriate international principles and norms for the care of unaccompanied and separated children. As early as the 1970’s, when unaccompanied refugee children from Vietnam arrived in European countries, ISS has promoted and coordinated the exchange of knowledge and experience between social workers in different countries. Very recently, it published a series of articles intended to promote the rights and the effective protection of unaccompanied and separated children in countries of origin and in countries of reception through focused policy, legal, social and practical articles. In 2008 ISS also supervised a study relating to the situation of unaccompanied and separated children who are returned to their home country, conducted by a group of five students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Children’s Rights of the Institut Universitaire Kurt Bösch and the University of Fribourg.
For further information:
- Unaccompanied Children : What happens once they are back home?
- Special Series on Unaccompanied Children