Age disputes: Findings from our latest research
Daniel Smith, Policy and Campaigns Coordinator
When a young person seeking asylum arrives in the UK and says they are under the age of 18, it is now very common for their age to be disputed and for them to be subjected to an age assessment. The age assessment process leads to many children being wrongly assessed to be adults.
Incorrectly assessing a child to be an adult can have catastrophic consequences with regards to access to care, their health, education, safety, development, trust in professionals, protection status and life chances.
This year, Young Roots has partnered with several leading organisations in the fields of law, policy, mental health and social care to produce three reports on the issue of age disputes, available here.
These reports have explored key themes of trust, recovery and reconciliation for young people subjected to age disputes and the long-lasting effect the process has on those who experience it. We studied how models of specialist support providing stability, engagement and wellbeing to age-disputed young people often allows them to better-demonstrate their true age to professionals. And we conducted research to find out exactly how a young person’s age is assessed by local authorities.
We came to three key conclusions:
1) An unnecessarily high number of age assessments are being conducted on children who do not require them.
2) In cases where an age assessment is justified, the overall standard of assessment is poor and must improve.
3) Young people are poorly informed of the process, lack agency within it, and suffer long-lasting harm because of it.
The government recognises that age dispute should not be a routine experience for children arriving in the UK and yet it has become the norm. We know – and our reports demonstrate - the harm that it causes.
An age-disputed young person supported by Young Roots told us: “We need like a real person who is help us. I can't repeat myself again and again. I’m tired mentally, physically, everything. Even my hair is changed now. I’m not like this before. I’m so beautiful I was. And now, I’m absolutely changed… I can’t drink, I can’t eat, it’s closed my appetite.”
Where it is plausible that a young person is the age they claim to be, they should be treated as that age. Only in cases where there are significant reasons for doubting a young person’s age – reasons well beyond the absence of formal identity documents – can it be justified to put a young person through the harmful age assessment process.
The Home Office has started conducting its own age assessments on young people arriving in the UK seeking safety, taking this responsibility away from local authority children’s services teams. Age assessment is a matter of children’s social care, and on that basis, it should sit with the Department for Education like other matters of children’s social care, not with the Home Office whose focus is on enforcement. Immigration enforcement is a highly politicised matter and one which should not be conflated with children’s social care.
Keep politics out of child protection.