Introduction

One of the most riveting sets of images in the international press in the last decade has been the arrival of young North African boys who cross the Strait of Gibraltar trying to reach the shores of southern Spain. The majority of them are Moroccans. They enter Spain hidden under trucks or buses on ferries from Tangier, in northern Morocco, or in overloaded pateras, small, precarious speed boats run by professional smugglers.

The arrival of these boys has drawn considerable attention from policymakers, NGOs, scholars and journalists. Under international law, children enjoy particular protection. As ‘legal minors’, children are regarded as a particularly vulnerable category of persons with specific protection needs. In addition, the young North African boys who are the subject of this chapter are also unaccompanied and thus enjoy specific protection under international law as unaccompanied minors. International humanitarian conventions view children lacking the care and supervision of an adult as ‘neglected’, a status that, irrespective of their nationality or circumstances, accords them immediate protection in whatever state they arrive.

Behind the sensational headlines are two issues: the pressures in the country of origin that have led these boys to embark on their journeys and reports of how they have fared in Spain. The notion of ‘neglect’ has been central to public debates about these boys. Typically, two types of factors may lead to situations of child neglect: 1) situations in which children's basic physical and emotional needs are disregarded and 2) situations in which a child's future prospects for success are not encouraged or invested in. Neglect may apply to all siblings; conversely, individual children may become the targets of exclusion and hence of neglect (e.g. Scheper-Hughes 1987). In such cases, families may try to invest their efforts in one child they think may have the best probability of success, neglecting other children within the family. In the case of unaccompanied Moroccan minors seeking to go to Spain, many families appear to make the opposite decision: they appear to ‘neglect’ the child they think will have more opportunities to succeed in migration. If a boy feels he is excluded from family investments, this may in fact encourage him to go to Spain: to select himself for a pathway of migration.