“I have just come back from the Greek islands, and I was shocked by what I saw and by the accounts I heard from my colleagues on the ground.
They told me about a 12-year-old boy who came to our clinic in Moria, on Lesvos, after repeatedly self-harming by cutting his head with a knife. And they told me about another child, a 9-year-old girl with serious injuries from a bomb blast in Afghanistan. She was still smiling when she arrived in Greece. But in the months she’s been trapped on Lesvos she has stopped talking, stopped eating, and completely withdrawn from life.
They have survived war and persecution, but months in unsafe and miserable places like Moria have driven many of our children patients over the edge, to self-harm and thoughts of suicide.
It is for these children, and for all the other people you continue to trap on the Greek islands, that I feel compelled to address this letter to you today.