5,000 kids missing, who cares?

There are almost 5,000 missing children in Italy right now, and no one is looking for them.  Their photos aren't posted on the Internet, and there are no Amber Alerts notifying the general public to keep a look out for them.  They are nameless statistics, identified only by the identification number bracelets given to them after they were rescued at sea.

The missing are unaccompanied minors, many of whom survived untold horrors for most of their lives before arriving in Italy on smugglers' boats from Libya.  According to Italy's Foreign Ministry, 4,840 have simply disappeared from the reception centers across the country since last summer.

The lucky ones, if you can call them that, presumably met family members who were here waiting for them. Others have been sucked into Italy's dark underworld and are victims of sex trafficking, labor exploitation or other unimaginable fates.

“The hope we have is that children end up with family members who are already here,” Equality Now trafficking consultant Esohe Aghatise told The Daily Beast.  “But the reality is that many end up in the sex trade or exploited in other ways.”

Aghatise, a Nigerian-born lawyer who came to Italy on a scholarship 23 years ago, got involved helping victims of trafficking when local police roped her in to help as an interpreter dealing with Nigerian prostitutes as they first started working the Italian streets in the early 1990s.  Now, she says there are as many as 20,000 Nigerian sex workers in Italy, which makes up the vast majority in the country. Some, she says, are as young as 12 years old.

 But Nigerians are not the only minors who are lost.  Many other sub-Saharan and North Africans children end up exploited on what Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has called a “modern slave market.”

Many boys and young men are picked up outside the migrant reception centers in Italy and enticed to work in the agricultural sector for a meager wage that they are led to believe will help them earn enough money to move on, according to a recent report by Italy's labor ministry, that predicted an escalation of sex and labor trafficking in 2015.

At the current rate, as many as 300,000 migrants could reach Italian shores by the end of the year, among them an increasing number of unaccompanied minors who could just disappear without a trace, almost as if they never existed at all.