Children being sexually assaulted in Greek refugee camp - report

Charities and human rights advocates reported that children from a state-run Greek refugee camp on Thessaloniki suffered incidences and threats of sexual assault.

According to the Observer, testimonies from various sources indicated the horrifying cases of sexual assaults targeting children even as young as seven years old.

A volunteer for an aid organization at Thessaloniki's Softex camp, holding 1,400 refugees with 60 percent Syrians and 170 of which are children, reported that a crushed Iraqi family abandoned its dreams of resettling in Europe and now wanted to go back to their war-torn home country after male gangs attacked their daughter.

"The parents are still in disbelief over what happened," recounted the volunteer, as reported by The Guardian. "A man from one of the 'mafia' groups asked their seven-year-old daughter into their tent to play games on his phone and then zipped up the tent. She came back with marks on her arms and neck. Later the girl described how she was sexually abused. It has scarred a seven-year-old child for life."

Anna Chiara Nava of Médecins Sans Frontières in Thessaloniki attested to the plights of survival for unaccompanied minors and described the nights in the camp as marked with terror as children and women go to hiding in their tents for fear of attacks. She added that they can't even go to the toilets alone.

Cases of rape and violence also marked the makeshift refugee camp in Giessen, western Germany, where 5,000 asylum seekers await their future. Women's rights groups and politicians raised such concerns since last year.

British parliamentarian Yvette Cooper, also chairwoman of the Labour Party's refugee task force, decried the revelations in the Greek camps as one that "should shame us all."

Cooper urged the UK government to start taking action and reminded them that the Dublin amendment "because we were worried about child refugees being exploited, trafficked and sexually abused because other countries were overwhelmed with the scale of the problem."