The months-long investigation was produced by media outlets from Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, and the UK.
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An investigation into the disappearance of more than 50,000 child migrants has won the European Parliament’s 2024 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism.
Led by Dutch journalist Geesje van Haren, the Lost in Europe project found that since 2021, on average nearly 47 migrant children arriving in Europe have gone missing per day.
Van Haren told Euronews that many of these missing children fall victim to human trafficking, or find themselves caught up in the EU's crackdown on people smuggling gangs.
"Many children are also caught at the borders, and they end up in prison for people smuggling while they were being smuggled themselves. So the EU war against people smuggling works out the other way for minor children. A lot of minor children are in adult detention because of that," Van Haren explained.
"We do know that our police system and the system fails to protect these children. And we also know that there is a high pressure on police teams who need to investigate this. But there's also a big pressure on police who has to investigate drugs, things. And most of the time human trafficking is related to also to drugs staff working," she added.
Documentation failures
The research also uncovered significant inconsistencies in documentation and reporting across 31 countries, including Austria, Germany, and Italy, raising concerns that the actual number of missing children may be higher.
It's latest findings build on research conducted during an initial investigation in 2021, which revealed that more than 18,000 migrant children went missing in Europe between 2018 and 2020.
"We spoke with from NGOs and experts from out in the field. They say this is just the tip of the iceberg, that there were 51,433 children missing. The last time that we did this investigation, there were only 18,000 children missing back in 2021," Geesje van Haren told Euronews.
She adds that the team also experienced difficulty in accessing data from some countries, with France offering no response at all and Spain claiming they don't differentiate between adults and minors in their data.
However, van Haren hopes the new EU pact on migration and asylum will make data collection more stringent, which could reveal even more missing children in the future.
Lost in Europe began investigating the stories of missing or 'lost' migrant children following a comment made by a former Europol chief of staff in 2016, who said at the time more than 10,000 migrant minors had gone missing in Europe.
The Lost in Europe team are planning to launch a fresh investigation in three years time.