Unaccompanied minors: 10 per cent commit crimes – there is no effective safety net

‘10 per cent of unaccompanied foreign minors enter the juvenile justice system, and are at greater risk than Italian children and foreign children living in Italia with their families”. This is one of the findings contained in the report ‘Unaccompanied foreign minors: reception and risk of criminality’, presented today, Wednesday 23 September, by the Ombudsman for Children and Adolescents, Marina Terragni, and compiled by the Psychoanalytic Institute for Social Research Ets (Iprs).

The research, which was carried out by interviewing around 110 practitioners and analysing 80 cases taken on by the services, traced the young people’s journeys through the care system prior to committing the offence and their subsequent path through the youth justice system.

A picture in which the risk of deviant behaviour does not appear to be uniform across different countries of origin. Indeed, certain nationalities are heavily represented amongst the minors taken into care by the youth justice system. This is particularly the case for young people from Egypt and Tunisia. Others, whilst numerically significant amongst the unaccompanied foreign minors present in Italia, are instead under-represented or virtually absent. These include Bangladesh and The Gambia and, due to the specific nature of their migration patterns, Ukraine. A central aspect of the study concerns the role of reception in the phase preceding any entry into the criminal justice system.

The data reveals, in fact, an effect described as ‘particularly protective’ for unaccompanied minors, reception and integration systems specifically dedicated to unaccompanied foreign minors. These facilities appear to offer an educational framework capable of mitigating the risks associated with the situation of young people arriving in Italia without guardians and ‘better able than educational communities and CAS centres for minors to mitigate the risks to which minors arriving in our country without guardians are exposed’, the report states.

CASs are Extraordinary Reception Centres set up to provide initial reception when places within the standard system prove insufficient. This figure takes on particular significance when compared with the total number of unaccompanied foreign minors in the national system. In fact, approximately one in four unaccompanied foreign minors is accommodated in the SAI for minors. Among the young people who entered the juvenile justice system and were analysed in the study, however, just over one in ten had passed through an SAI prior to committing the offence.