Thousands of underage migrants live in shadows across Europe

Outside the train station in Rome, teen migrants sell drugs from school backpacks and trade sex for cash or clothes. In the capital of Sweden, they steal food from supermarkets and sleep on the streets. From makeshift camps along the northern French coast, they try to hop at night on to the backs of moving trucks headed to Britain.

All across Europe, there is a growing shadow population of thousands of underage migrants who are living on their own, without families. They hide silently and in plain sight, rarely noticed in the crowd. Nobody even knows how many of them there are, Europol estimates broadly that at least 10,000 kids have gone missing from shelters or reception centres.

These unaccompanied minors are slipping through the seams of a European system strained to bursting, and they present one of the biggest challenges of the migrant crisis. The fact that accurate numbers are so hard to come by reflects the shortcomings of the bloc's 28 member states in implementing laws and guidelines that are supposed to protect asylum seekers in general and unaccompanied minors in particular. While the problem is not new, the sheer volume of migrants arriving last year has made it acute.

Like adult migrants, minors are flooding into Europe for both security and economic reasons.

- AP