‘Like a wastepaper basket': Life as a child refugee fleeing home

Al Jazeera

4 hours ago

If the global refugee population were just 100 people, 33 would be children, each in need of protection. By Hanna Duggal and Mohamed A. Hussein
Sameer - not his real name - fled Afghanistan when he was just 17 years old.
The Taliban had overthrown the government of President Ashraf Ghani - which his father worked for - placing his family at risk.
'I was doing well in my life, practising and exercising normally," Sameer, an aspiring mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, tells Al Jazeera. "But when the Taliban took power … the situation became very hard, like putting us under pressure.'
Sameer became a child refugee and endured a journey not unlike that of many other displaced and fleeing children.
Today, of the 41 million refugees around the world, 13.3 million are children. In other words, there are more child refugees than the entire population of Belgium, or Sweden, or Portugal, or Greece.
That also means that 33 out of every 100 refugees are children, each in need of international protection.
To better understand the lives of refugee children - their challenges, vulnerabilities and resilience - we visualise what the world would look like if it had just 100 refugees.
According to the latest figures from the UNHCR , 6.8 million child refugees (51 percent) are boys and 6.5 million (49 percent) are girls.
While that division is fairly equal, refugee children often face distinct challenges based on their gender. For example, girls may be more at risk of gender-based violence and sexual assault, whereas boys may face different hardships - including other forms of physical violence. These forms of abuse and violence are more pronounced among unaccompanied minors.
For Sameer, this came in the form of police beatings at country borders.
'The worst effect or part of the journey was when we used to cross the borders. And different countries' police used to stop or catch us, and they used to beat us in front of others,' Sameer says.
'They did not spare a child or adult or anybody.'
In 2024, 44 percent (5.9 million) of child refugees were aged 5-11 years, followed by 32 percent (4.2 million) aged between 12-17 years and 24 percent (3.2 million) aged between 0-4 years.
At each stage of childhood, distinct and compounding risks threaten healthy development. For example, young children are especially reliant on caregivers and at heightened risk of malnutrition, illness and disease. Any child refugee of school age will face disruption to their education due to access.
However, in adolescents, the effects of a trauma can be compounded as they go through puberty: It's in this age bracket that mental illness most kicks in.
In addition, a child's ability to articulate distress or seek help evolves over time, David Trickey, consultant psychologist and co-director at UK Trauma Council (UKTC), a project of the Anna Freud Foundation, tells Al Jazeera. 'Younger children find it more difficult to tell the carers and those around them what's going on internally.'
If Sameer were one of the 100 child refugees, he would be among 21 from Afghanistan.
In 2024, two-thirds of child refugees came from just four countries - 21 percent (2.8 million) were from Afghanistan, followed by 20 percent (2.7 million) from Syria, 14 percent (1.8 million) from Venezuela and 10 percent (1.3 million) from South Sudan.
When the UN Refugee Convention was adopted in 1951, there were 2.1 million refugees. Now, there are 20 times that number. In 1951, 1 in every 1,190 people was a refugee and now that number is 1 in every 185, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and civil wars in Syria and South Sudan, among major drivers of the crisis.
It took Sameer one and a half years to reach the United Kingdom, making him a part of the 12 percent of child refugees who have travelled more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) to get to safety.
According to an analysis of data from the UNHCR, 9 out of 10 refugee children have journeyed more than 500km (300 miles) from home.
Half (50 percent) of all refugee children have had to travel between 500 and 1,000km (600 miles) from their homes.
That's a distance that could be covered in a 10-12 hour drive or a two-hour flight. But most refugees fleeing their home country journey on foot, in boats or using other slower means of transport.
Sameer tells Al Jazeera his journey was spent in the wet and cold. 'We passed through different countries, but we stayed most of the time in forest and mountain areas.'
On top of the physical toll of travelling, Sameer faced brutality at the hands of border police he encountered when crossing into Turkiye and Bulgaria.
'They beat us in all senses. They used to poke at our clothes and send us back to the previous country.'
Sameer's experience is a microcosm of the violence, unfamiliarity and grief - not just for lost family members, but also for a lost home - that accompany refugee life.
'The fact that they're fleeing something - that is dangerous in the first place, that has the potential to be traumatic. You're then taking them away from everything that they know that is familiar, possibly their friends, possibly even their families, going to somewhere that they don't know, a strange place, that all has the potential to get in the way of their recovery,' Trickey tells Al Jazeera.
Sameer is one of the very small percentage of child refugees that has ended up in the UK. In 2024, the top host countries for refugees were Iran (1.8 million), Turkiye (1.4 million), and Uganda (965,000).
He tells Al Jazeera how he finally ended up in the UK. 'First, when I tried to cross the Channel, the boat drowned and we were recovered by French police.'
After taking another boat at midnight, Sameer reached British shores in the morning, ending an 18-month journey.
Upon arriving in a host country, refugees often face additional risks like being held in detention centres.
'For some people, that's [being held in detention centres] the worst bit," Trickey told Al Jazeera. "You know, that was the biggest trauma.'
Sameer had a more welcoming experience on arrival. 'The UK police was kind and very gentle. And they treated us very gently. They took us to a place where they provided us with the clothes, and also provided the food.'
According to the UNHCR, about 153,300 children are unaccompanied or have been separated from their guardians and family.
Sameer was separated from his brother in Turkiye. 'I was sent a different way and he was sent a different way, and since then I never saw my brother and I don't know about his wellbeing or whereabouts,' Sameer tells Al Jazeera.
Some children travel alone because they have been sent by their parents to ensure their survival, while others are orphaned.
Peter Ventevogel, senior mental health and psychosocial support officer at UNHCR, told Al Jazeera, 'If you're in a good social system, you feel safe, then you feel you're less affected. But for children, that effect is even stronger.
'We have these case reports of children who are in terrible situations, but as long as they're with their mother, if it's a young child, and the mother is able to convey that sense of safety, then you can buffer a lot of the consequences, which also means that in displacement settings where family structures are disrupted you see more issues among children.'
According to research conducted by scientists at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University, both in Northern Ireland, high rates of mental illness and symptoms among unaccompanied refugee minors were consistent across national and settlement contexts.
But how they are treated once they reach their destination matters, say experts.
Trickey tells Al Jazeera about two children from Afghanistan he has worked with. 'Both of them were from Afghanistan. Both arrived the same week in the UK. Both were unaccompanied. One was looked after by one particular local authority who found a foster placement that spoke the same language, had children the same age, and he just thrived.
'The other one, same age, same experience or similar experience, ended up being placed in this semi-independent hostel where no one spoke his language. The staff were pretty absent, and he really struggled. He really, really struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. So that stability and the connection that you're provided with can make a real difference to your capacity to process things that have partly happened in the past.'
Sameer tells Al Jazeera,'Scenes of those things which I witnessed had a very bad effect on me and still when I remember, it [makes] me upset.'
Research with refugee children finds the prevalence of emotional disorders to be generally higher than in non-refugee children.
According to one study, the overall prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was 23 percent (one in four) in refugee children, that of anxiety disorders was 16 percent (one in six) and that of depression was 14 percent (one in seven).
'One of the things about trauma is it keeps you on this very high state of alert,' says Trickey. "And I think those without refugee status, they're living this constant fear of being returned to the place they fled.'
But not all children experience trauma the same way, Trickey adds.
'A more important risk factor, a predictor of PTSD, is not how big the event was, but it's what you make of it. Were you afraid? Did you think someone was gonna die?
'And different children will find different things frightening. There'll be some people that actually experience the most awful things and seem pretty unaffected, and they do OK. There'll be some people that seem to be doing OK, and then they have, we can sometimes call it, latent vulnerability. And later on in life, that's when they develop difficulties.'
Ventevogel tells Al Jazeera that often, in younger children, there may be more issues with withdrawal, because they cannot verbalise how they feel, for example where 'a child withdraws, stops playing with other children, or a child shows in play, in the way the child enacts issues, that there is something not OK.
'It's not diagnostic, but this can be an indication that there is something deeper,' Ventevogel says.
Trickey explains that during a trauma-focused therapy session, a boy he was working with described what he was going through by comparing his brain to a wastepaper bin stuffed with "scrunched-up pieces of paper" that represent "all the bad things" he had been through.
"And as I walk to school, they fall in front of my eyes. And when I lie down and go to sleep, they fall into my dreams," the boy told him. "But when I come and see you, we take them out of the bin, and we unscrunch them. Then we read them through carefully, then we fold them up neatly, and then we put them back in the bin. But because they're folded up neatly, it means they don't fall out the top, and I've got more room in my head to think about other things.'
For Sameer, his ability to cope came down to his mindset. 'With the passage of time, I became used to the situation and I feel confident and fine now. And I hope, whatever problems or difficulties I face in the future, I will overcome and hopefully things will get normal.'