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A 14-year-old boy arrived at the Frankfurt airport, one of Europe’s busiest, from an African country all by himself. He appeared afraid and withdrawn. His passport had fake pages and several forged stamps. He did not have any relatives in the country where he landed.

Such incidents involving vulnerable children are some of the more difficult ones for border guards and airline and airport personnel working at European airports. How do you speak to a distraught child? How can you spot when a child is being smuggled across the border or may be a victim of child trafficking?

For most victims of human trafficking, including children, the moment of passing through an airport may be the only time they will come in contact with law enforcement officials before they disappear into the world of exploitation.

While the true extent of child trafficking into the European Union is disputed, Eurostat estimates that more than 1 000 children were either identified as or most likely were victims of sexual exploitation between 2010 and 2012. Most of them were EU citizens trafficked within the European Union. Nearly a third of all trafficking victims come from outside the EU.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported that of the more than 40,000 trafficking cases reported worldwide between 2010 and 2012, one out of every three victims was a child.

This is why Frontex puts such emphasis on the Vega Children activities, which brings together border guards and representatives from civil society organisations, giving each a new perspective on dealing with the complicated issue of vulnerable children at the airport. In the 2015 operations, 24 guest officers and 22 observers from international organisations and civil society groups worked together at 12 European airports, including Amsterdam, Bucharest, Paris and Stockholm.

The Vega Children aims to provide the tools necessary to help tackle the scourge of child trafficking and ways of providing assistance to the youngest and most vulnerable at Europe’s borders.

Observers from groups such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and those focusing on helping children, such as Amber Alert and Terre des Hommes, learned first-hand about the difficult work of the border guards at the airport. They were able to sit in on interviews with the passengers travelling with children, document checks and passenger registration.

 “I found this particularly helpful because I could see children who could be potentially being trafficked into the EU in the context of the entire passenger flow,” said Livia Styp-Rekowska, Senior Immigration and Border Management Specialist at IOM.

Styp-Rekowska took part in this year’s first phase of Operation VEGA Children 2015 at the Porto Airport in Portugal, where she also spoke to the staff of the various airport shops to raise awareness of the operation among the staff and asked them to report any suspicious behaviour to the airport law enforcement officials.

It is often somewhere in that duty-free store or a cafe where the clerk or the barista will spot something unusual in the behaviour or a child passing through the candy aisle or sitting down for a sandwich. Or a flight attendant or even a passenger notices something unusual before their plane lands at the airport.

This is one of the main insights behind VEGA Handbook: Children at airports. While border guards sitting in a booth usually see individual passengers for some 12 seconds on average while checking their passport, other people, both in the airport and in the airplane, have more time to see a child and her travelling companions whose behaviour could be a warning sign.

The handbook, which Frontex published in August, just ahead of the second phase of this year’s Operation VEGA Children, is written in language accessible to everybody, not just specialists. It is also available in an electronic version on the Frontex website.

It is the result of years of cooperation between Frontex, border guards, non-governmental agencies and international organisations such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Organization for Migration (IOM), which created a set of guidelines for border guards to help assist children at risk.

“For a border guard who has only a few seconds to spot a potential problem at an airport, detecting children who may be victims of trafficking is difficult, to say the least. Now they will have a printed manual in hand to help them,” said Sascha Liedtke, a police sergeant working at Frankfurt Airport.

Some of the other issues covered by the handbook include how to make the child feel comfortable during an interview, how to spot trouble signs during passport control and other checks at the border. But it also discusses how airline staff can notice and share unusual behaviour of children and the accompanying adults during a flight.

VEGA Handbook: Children at airports suggests creating a pleasant environment in a child-friendly room, if possible, which is exactly what the border guards did with the 14-year old boy who arrived from Africa. They offer him some food along with some toys. A trained female officer interviewed him with the help of an interpreter.

After the authorities, who were assisted by the embassy of his home country, were not able to make contact with his family and found no relatives in Germany, they boy was taken to a Children’s home in Frankfurt.