The role of the professional worker with unaccompanied refugee minors

The diploma thesis reflects current situation of international migrations. It deals with inadequately arranged legal field of unaccompanied minor refugees and the roles of professional workers dealing with this extremely vulnerable group. The theoretical part is an attempt to reflect the events during the so-called European refugee crisis. In the first part, it outlines the »Western Balkan migration route«, presents the legal framework of international refugee protection and also the changes in European and Slovenian migration politics in this period. Then it defines the population of unaccompanied refugee minors and presents their specific characteristics. At the end, it presents principles and practices in professional work with unaccompanied refugee minors in Slovenia. The qualitative research method was used in the empirical part of diploma thesis to look on the roles of professional workers with unaccompanied refugee minors. The results show that when working with this target group the professional workers have various tasks in different fields of work and they usually have to deal with different obstacles (lingual, cultural …). Because of that, professional workers need a lot of specific skills beside the classical pedagogical competences. The results show that professional workers take on a variety of professional roles, but most often they are pedagogues and guardians of the unaccompanied refugee children and minors. The empirical findings conclude that in Slovenia there is no comprehensive and systematic approach to the protection of unaccompanied refugee minors