Today Missing Children Europe launches several translations of the “Practical guidance on preventing and responding to trafficking and disappearances of children in migration” (Interact Handbook). This Handbook, originally published in English in December 2019, is now available in Dutch, French, Greek and Italian.
The Interact handbook addresses several practical issues related to the protection of migrant children at risk of (re)trafficking, including among others perspectives of actions related to prevention, the importance of risk assessment, GDPR concerns and actions to take when a child goes missing. The handbook includes good practices and practical ready-to-use tools in the form of checklist templates, and standardised flowcharts of action to improve prevention, response and aftercare of missing children in migration, including when the case involves multiple countries.
Therefore, this handbook can be used by professionals in their daily work, but also as a basis of training on specific matters related to the disappearance of children in migration, especially when linked to trafficking and exploitation.
The Handbook also provides practical solutions to gaps identified during the simulations of cases of missing children in migration, organized in 6 countries to test practices and procedures for multi-agency collaboration at national and cross-border level. Through an innovative methodology designed for this project, ninety professionals from Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Sweden and UK worked together to find Abena and Qiro, fictive cases of children in need of protection and made real-time judgement calls on how to cooperate with partners within and outside of the country. The goal of the simulations was to identify the gaps in the knowledge and practice of frontline agencies and organisations in Europe in their coordinated response to cases of missing unaccompanied and separated children at risk of (re-)trafficking.
The Handbook is co-produced by Missing Children Europe and ECPAT UK and benefitted from inputs of all the organisations belonging to the INTERACT Project’s partnership. For more information, you can visit the project page here.
Language versions:
If you are interested in translating the Handbook in another language or want to organise a training or a simulation exercise, please contact laure.vierset@missingchildreneurope.eu.
INTERACT Partners:
