Child migration

Child migration, sometimes called children in migration or mobility or children on the move, is the movement of people between roughly three and eighteen years old within or across political borders, whether or not they travel with a parent or legal guardian and whether or not they carry legal travel documents. The term covers a wide historical and contemporary range: documented cases include Australia's Stolen Generations, in which Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families under government policy; Canada's residential school system, which separated Indigenous children from their families for schooling under similarly coercive state programs; and present day movements of unaccompanied minors fleeing conflict or poverty, as well as children moved as part of human trafficking. Because it spans state policy, family decision making and, in its worst forms, criminal exploitation, child migration functions as a real, observable social practice studied across child welfare, migration policy and human rights fields rather than as a single theoretical construct.