Trafficked, beaten and raped The price of a rising cocaine habit

Maddalena Chiarenza never knows what state the children will be in when they arrive at her door.

- Mark Townsend

She has seen terrible injuries. Black eyes, missing teeth. A broken jaw.

"They suffer such regular violence," says Chiarenza, whose Brussels-based NGO, SOS Jeunes, cares for unaccompanied Moroccan and Algerian children.

A short walk from the NGO's office near the Eurostar terminal, ragged groups of north African children are a common sight. Some walk through the streets like zombies, after being fed Rivotril, a potent benzodiazepine. Chiarenza says that other than NGOs such as SOS Jeunes, nobody wants to take responsibility for their care.

Chiarenza says at least five children SOS Jeunes cared for in the past three years have died. Another 23 it has had contact with are in prison, some on drug offences.

On the surface, the plight of these unaccompanied child migrants, and hundreds like them throughout Europe, is a testament to the failure of governments across the continent to provide help to the most vulnerable victims of the global migration crisis. Dig deeper and these children present a different story, of Europe's growing addiction to the chemical formula C17H21NO4-cocaine.

A Guardian investigation has found that hundreds, if not thousands, of African children have been trafficked into Europe's booming cocaine trade, small cogs in a £10bn criminal industry transporting vast quantities of the drug from the Andean rainforests to rising numbers of customers.

Police intelligence identifies an "unlimited" supply of vulnerable child labour trafficked from north Africa to work for Europe's top-tier cocaine networks.

In March, senior police officers convened a secret meeting in Brussels. Present were officers from 25 EU countries along with the UK, Europol, the EU border force, Frontex, the UN refugee agency and the European Commission. On the agenda was the exploitation of unaccompanied African children by powerful international drug syndicates in western Europe.