01 December 2015 -- A new data brief produced by IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre and UNICEF shows that children make up at least one in five of the 870,000 refugees and migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean Sea so far this year.

The share is greatest along the Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece and through the Western Balkans, where children make up over one quarter of arrivals. About 10 per cent of arrivals to Italy are children, with nearly three quarters unaccompanied by a parent or guardian.

Children are among the most vulnerable of the migrants and refugees travelling to Europe.  More than one third of all deaths in the Aegean Sea this year have been of children, many of them infants.