More than 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children have disappeared in Europe, according to the EU police agency Europol. Many are feared to have fallen into the hands of traffickers who are targeting minors for sex work and slavery.
Since November, there has been a spike in the number of children making the dangerous journey to Europe. According to United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), children make up about 40 percent of the arrivals. Nearly one of every three of the 62,000 migrants and refugees who entered Greece in January were unaccompanied minors.
"They didn't have the money to pay for the trip, so in some way they promised smugglers that they will pay when they reach the destination countries. This means they're in a kind of a debt; they're obliged to return this debt and nobody knows what they'll have to do when they reach the countries where they want to be," said Jelena Hrnjak, member of ATINA.
ATINA, a Serbian-based NGO working to combat human trafficking, who says children have been forced to commit criminal and sexual acts. Some of those minors simply vanish from the system altogether.
Rados Djurovic, who runs The Asylum Protection Center, says the method of trafficking children is getting more complex.
"Actually you have whole systems supporting the smuggling of kids. Very soon after they reach the camps or after they remain in some place, they got contacts, they got Skype or telephone contacts of most probably smugglers or even parents saying them to contact someone else who will organize their trip further on," said Djurovic.
One way the traffickers get children across the border is to pair them with fake family members, particularly through Serbia, Djurovic said.
However, there is no way of physically proving that these children belong to these "parents" without DNA samples correct.
"Without knowing language, without them staying for a longer period of time, you're actually facing with a really really dark sea of troubles and you can't stop this intercontinental migration and smuggling of kids," said Djurovic.
Not all unaccompanied minors are being trafficked. Some have been sent to Europe by their parents to find work, and others have been separated from their families.
In those cases, NGOs have set up tents at reception facilities to reunite families, and the Serbian government has built two centers to handle the influx.
Meanwhile, Britain has said it will take in refugee children who have been separated from their parents.
Yet for those kids who have simply disappeared, the journey to Europe has not turned out as they had ever dreamed.
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