Actually, it is always the same, foreigners basically have, no matter where they are from, always bad experiences with the police. […] Foreigner themselves coming to us […] is very rare.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)
It’s hard to have someone coming to one of our teams to publicly report a crime, whether it’s theft or violence; I don’t have enough facts and statistics to answer [because] there is a lack of trust from these people towards the institution.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)
We are more able to speak about this group when it is an offender than when it is victim.
(Law enforcement expert, France)
Finding an apartment in the city without an employment contract is almost impossible. And then it often ends in a way that they are somehow illegally – without a rental contract – in rooms where they pay several hundred euros for a mattress in a mouldy room, where they share a room with other refugees, which is obviously not legal – but there is quite a black market in the area of housing.
(NGO expert, Austria)
They are packed in together with all kinds of cultures and they have very limited space to themselves. From what I can tell, this is a major reason for them becoming victims of crime sooner or later. You become an easy prey, especially when you are as young as 16. This is an important reason for moving them to foster families or move them away from the large asylum accommodation centres. The younger you are and the longer you stay, the greater the risk is of becoming both [a perpetrator and] a victim of crime.
(Law enforcement expert, Sweden)
Children who become adults and grow up alone and have no experience of the world are very susceptible to becoming victims of sexual exploitation, of violence, of fraud, etc. [...] Such incidents have been recorded, described [...] Yes, [the main risk factor] is inexperience and lack of knowledge of the world.
(Government representative working in the integration field, Greece)
A 15-year-old, if he was lucky, he was unaccompanied. He was accommodated in a nice single bedroom […] There are six full-time staff positions for 10 children […] a reference person and cooked food. However, if he was unlucky, he arrived together with his dad and maybe ended up in a shared housing facility. […] A very different key applies there: in some cases we had only two full-time social workers for 600 residents in one shared facility. (Government representative working in the integration field, Germany)
They have been victims of workplace harassment – this is a very common thing because there is a very strong perception among employers that these people [asylum applicants] have a vulnerable legal status and are therefore more susceptible to blackmail.
(NGO legal assistant, Italy)
[Police] constantly let them be stopped, searched, […] empty backpacks, in the wallet – ‘you have a [customer] card in your wallet, that can’t be your wallet, it’s stolen’ – and then they always get fines for something, and the fines are coincidentally exactly as high as the amount of money they happen to be carrying with them. That’s actually the most common thing I hear about [with regard to victimisation].
(NGO child expert, Austria)
That’s difficult because which other persons would I tell: ‘Don’t go to the city centre, don’t drink, and make sure you stay somewhere where you cannot be screened in public’?
(NGO anti-discrimination expert, Germany)
There are some criminal behaviours related … physical integrity (fighting with each other) or attacks on one’s honour and reputation (insulting each other) or other offences such as … someone who wants to leave and uses a fake document in order to leave
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)
Frankly they impress me. I have had about, since 2015, we will say about 300 files. They set me the challenge: nothing, zero.
(Guardian, France)
I think this victim-perpetrator thing is lost. I think that a child that gets involved in this [drug dealing] is both victim and perpetrator. When someone, because of the conditions they live in, is dependent on other people, who put pressure on them or blackmail them.
(Guardian, Greece)
At some point necessity knows no law, so they will steal a mobile phone, a wallet, break into a car but they know it’s illegal.
(Law enforcement expert, France)
This is why we always need to consider the individual case. It is never possible to generalise, or to say, ‘if it is like this in one case, then it is the same in another case’. Everybody is very different, so it is really difficult to tell. […] Moreover, as concerns the pedagogical measures, they have to be adapted to the individual case every single time. And for this reason it is very difficult to say, ‘if it wasn’t for this, then it is always like this’. You cannot tell.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)
“[The] best way […] of integration is with employment; but they do not always find it [employment], it is not possible […] Who has a job is better integrated.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)
That’s a discrepancy, because in support we say ‘first he should take up vocational training or education and learn German’, but there he doesn’t earn money. Now he has pressure from the family and there are cases of those who feel obliged to get into drug trafficking so that they can fulfil their responsibilities to the family. Those are cases that we have again and again. Often there are also cases where the traffickers come and say ‘all right, [you still owe me] a few thousand dollars’, and then even more pressure is exercised.
(Government representative working in the integration field, Austria)
The most relevant factor that put the target group at risk of becoming involved in crime is if you for different reasons don’t get them to attend school. If you don’t get them to attend and they continue to be absent and meet others who don’t go to school, they will soon be up to something. I have had a couple of boys who have been stealing and doing drugs and so on, and one is now drifting somewhere in the south of Sweden. So, if you can’t catch them from the start and get them into the school system, there is a really great risk that they will get into strange activities.
(Guardian, Sweden)
In this neighbourhood there are big families and they have too small flats, so the youths don’t get peace and quiet to study because they have many younger siblings. They cannot be at home – it’s too crowded – so they hang around the street corners and in the stairwells. Then they form gangs and it’s easy for criminals to recruit them.
(Housing authority expert, Sweden)
For a period of time asylum applicants are somehow protected, because they’ve got a place to stay [in the reception system], but then this ends and that’s where the big problem lies. They are accorded a form of protection, and then they have to leave these centres. They can’t find a job, because for various reasons [it’s not easy], so they can’t rent a small apartment or something […]. Then they end up in abandoned areas, in which there are ethnic-based groups, but also groups … I wouldn’t know whether to call them criminal, or tending to criminal activities, they dominate the situation and they start imposing rules.
(NGO child expert and psychologist, Italy)
The presence of family members plays a big role for this group, but mostly the family is absent. Those who come with family are always less of a problem than those without family.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)
Someone who is necessarily marginalised will latch on to a specific group to belong to, so either an ethnic group or a criminal group … ultimately they try any means to latch on to a group.
(Law enforcement expert, France)
The waiting time in the hotspots creates tension, in general. When they are not sure, when there is no precise information about when they will leave, or sometimes in order to cause their removal from the area, they manifest intense, violent behaviour mainly directed towards the place itself, namely by destroying the infrastructure of the hotspots and camps; this frustration is also directed towards different nationalities or towards any different group in the area.
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)
These gangs are recruiting these guys because they [the gangs] know that, if you are an asylum applicant or if you are undocumented, then it’s like you have zero rights. You are invisible, so they can use you to whatever they want. So, you have to [do] the dirty work, as they say, and risk getting into real trouble.
(NGO housing and child expert, Sweden)
I also note that many who receive negative decisions on their age assessments [i.e. are re-registered as adults] noticeably often get negative decisions in their asylum cases. It’s not unusual that they disappear. It’s not unusual that they wind up in criminality, either as victims or that they actually commit crimes of different kinds, primarily acts of violence. It’s mainly this part of the target group, the ones who’ve got a feeling that ‘this is really about to go to rack and ruin. I will probably not be allowed to stay’. It’s my experience, given the clients that I’ve had, that many are at risk in this way.
(Legal expert, Sweden)
Well, to put it simply, one can say that, wherever the state pulls back from particular fields of competence, [religious extremists] enter and take over these tasks.
(Law enforcement expert, Germany)
We haven’t seen at the moment any particular link [between extremism and migration] … It is still being examined if there is such a trend but there is no evidence or statistical data supporting this.
(Law enforcement expert, Greece)
The fact of being an asylum applicant isn’t in any way related to a phenomenon of extremism or radicalisation; these two elements aren’t linked in any way whatsoever.
(Law enforcement expert, Italy)