Thousands of underage refugees live in shadows across Europe

CALAIS, France — Outside the train station in Rome, teen refugees sell drugs from school backpacks and trade sex for cash or clothes.

From makeshift camps along the northern French coast, they try to hop at night onto the backs of moving trucks headed to Britain.

The fact that accurate numbers are so hard to come by reflects the shortcomings of the bloc's 28 member states in implementing laws and guidelines that are supposed to protect asylum seekers in general and unaccompanied minors in particular.

Like adult refugees, minors are flooding into Europe for both security and economic reasons, the Associated Press found in interviews with more than two dozen.

Only his gym shoes cracking at the seams and the cloud over his face hint at the hardship of his life, light years from his dreams of going to “doctor school.”

Frightened, his mother sold the building that provided the family's income to pay smugglers for Imran to join his uncle in Britain.