Rejected petition Find and protect the 200 missing asylum-seeking children lost by the Home Office

Since 2021, 440 asylum-seeking children have gone missing and only half had returned. The 200 who are still missing may have been trafficked or coerced into criminal behaviour. The government should take immediate action to find these children and protect all children living in Home Office hostels.

More details

Children seeking asylum as extremely vulnerable to being trafficked, abused, and coerced into criminal behaviour. They may experienced trauma back home or on their journey to the UK, and should receive support and care. Instead, a lack of security has allowed them to disappear and there appears to have been little effort to find or protect these children. It is the state’s duty to protect children under The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). It is the government’s duty.

This petition was rejected

Why was this petition rejected?

We can't publish petitions when the request is something that's already happening or something that has been announced since you started your petition.

We think your petition is covered by Government or Parliament action already. If you'd like something else, you could start a new petition clearly explaining what it is.

The Government has said that when any child goes missing, a multi-agency missing persons protocol is mobilised alongside the police and the relevant local authority to establish their whereabouts and to ensure they are safe.

You can find out more about the Government's response to this issue here, where a Minister responds to questions on this subject: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2023-01-24/debates/290AF292-5D7E-411C-8FB8-A6E0F288365C/UnaccompaniedAsylum-SeekingChildren

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards.

Date submitted 26 January 2023
Get petition data (json format)

About petition data

The data shows the number of people who have signed the petition by country as well as in the constituency of each Member of Parliament. This data is available for all petitions on the site. It is not a list of people who have signed the petition. The only name that is shared on the site is that of the petition creator.