Overview

Protecting children from abuse and exploitation is a societal imperative that is entrenched in the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and in the pursuit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.2: “End abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children”. However, it is a global – and often silent – epidemic. It happens in every country and every community and across all cultural and socio-economic contexts. According to studies, one in two children experiences violence every year, totalling one billion children across the globe.

In the case of the safety of migratory children, their wellbeing is also pursued by SDG 10.7: “Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well-managed migration policies.” Migratory children face additional threats beyond abuse and exploitation, including a lack of basic human necessities such as proper nutrition, healthcare, shelter, and water on their journey to their destination country.

The intended Invitation to Tender (ITT) investigates the opportunities for innovative and sustainable space-enabled solutions that support the safeguarding of children and young people across the globe. It will investigate the integration of space data and technology with complementary data derived from digital and terrestrial sources to tackle the issues stated below, addressing SDG 16.2 and 10.7 through sustainable services.

Overview

There is a global need to improve existing tools and develop new ones to identify and address the issue of missing children. The International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), as well as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), have identified room for improvement of such tools. ICMEC has developed their own case management, communication, and public alerting platform for use by law enforcement and other organisations to help them locate missing children.

This opportunity is supported by ICMEC, which has provided use cases and will support resultant activities by providing user requirements and recommendations towards establishing sustainable space-based services for the safeguarding of children.

Topics of Relevance

Examples of services that could be relevant are outlined below. The list is not exhaustive as other services could also be analysed if duly supported by the user communities.

Protecting migrant children

Protecting migrant children is especially important for humanitarian institutions, given that children on the move face a greater chance of abuse and exploitation. Unaccompanied children are often left in a protracted state of vulnerability and can easily fall victim to abuse and exploitation.

The protection of children on the move requires a multi-sectoral response regionally, nationally, and globally. Organisations like ICMEC have made real progress to help others recognise this imperative and take action. Recent examples of progress made include the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration agreement established in 2018, as well as other organisations that have sounded the alarm such as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the Red Cross, and UNICEF.

However, the response to the needs of migratory children has not gone far enough to ensure their safety. Stronger tools and mechanisms are needed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of coordination across migrant focused organisations and efforts.

It is essential that authorities and NGOs know the routes taken by migrants so that they can provide comprehensive assistance to migrants ‒ not only to combat abuse and exploitation, but also to provide basic human needs.

Missing children

There are hundreds of thousands of missing children reports each year. However, these reports provide only a snapshot — there are few reliable statistics on the scope of the problem. In several countries, there are no statistics available on missing children at all, and the statistics that are available are often inaccurate.

Children may flee their homes for a variety of reasons following trauma, including surviving violence and exploitation, witnessing and experiencing abuse, being victims of human trafficking, or even being exposed to armed conflict. Once an unaccompanied child is on their own, they often rely on traffickers due to restrictive border enforcements between their home country and destination/transit countries, who may expose them to further exploitation and/ or kidnapping.

One of the biggest barriers to identifying trafficked children is the availability of dependable, timely, spatially explicit and scalable data on trafficking activity. However, by using spatiotemporal information of missing populations, it is possible to predict the locations of missing persons on a large scale.