The project Safeguarding Unaccompanied Migrant Minors from going Missing by Identifying Best Practices and Training Actors on Interagency Cooperation (SUMMIT), launched in October 2014, is co-funded by the EU under the Pilot Project “Analysis of reception, protection and integration policies for unaccompanied minors in the EU.” It was implemented through a partnership cooperation of six organisations, including Missing Children Europe, NIDOS, Defence for children-ECPAT, KMOP and Child Circle and TUSLA, the Irish Child and Family Agency, and the University of Portsmouth (UK). The partnership was supported by a group of organisations running the hotline for missing children, operated through the number 116 000, in seven Member States (Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). The objective of the project is to reduce the numbers of unaccompanied children who go missing. This project addresses how the issue of the disappearance of an unaccompanied child is tackled in different Member States and promotes promising strategies and behaviours related to the prevention and response to disappearances. The project specifically looked to combine the experience of hotlines who work with missing children in general and actors who work on the issues of unaccompanied migrant children, and from that combination examine how to cooperate better on this issue and on what issues in particular.
