Why does the Home Office continue to ignore the consensus on age assessment?
Daniel Smith, Policy and Campaigns Coordinator
In November, we attended a roundtable in parliament chaired by Baroness Lister with NGOs, parliamentarians, social workers, children’s psychologists and academic researchers to discuss what needs to change in the government’s approach to assessing the ages of young refugees arriving in the UK. Our research on the quality of age assessments, launched in September, was discussed, amongst other excellent research from the Helen Bamber Foundation, Humans for Rights Network, Refugee Council, and Southampton University. The topic of age dispute is receiving increased amounts of attention at the moment – as it should be.
Age dispute can be a complicated, granular, topic with a range of competing thoughts about who should conduct assessments, where, how and whether they should take place. But there are three points about age assessment that everyone seems to agree on. And not just charities like ours. These three points are supported by every piece of best practice guidance that has ever been written about age assessment. They are supported by the government’s own guidance on age assessment, and 20 years of caselaw from the courts. And yet, these three points are not reflected in the government’s current approach to age assessment when young people arrive in the UK claiming to be aged under 18.
Consensus number 1 – Assessing age is really, really, difficult.
Age assessing is hard. To get even a moderately reliable assessment of age, assessments require a careful process of interviewing, observing and evidence-gathering. Young people need time to rest and recover from their journeys before anything resembling a reliable age assessment can take place. Assessments should only be carried out as a last resort, and if they are to happen, should take place in comfortable environments, where young people feel safe and able to properly engage in the process. Why then, is the government making life-changing decisions about age in Border Force-run immigration centres within hours of young people stepping ashore from treacherous journeys across the Channel? These are surely the worst possible circumstances in which to produce an accurate assessment of age and makes this difficult task immeasurably harder to get right.
Consensus number 2 – Looks are deceiving
Everyone agrees that assessing age on physical appearance and demeanour alone is a fool’s game and can lead to very poor assessments of age, especially when trying to distinguish between teenagers and young adults. Why then, does the government continue to make assessments of age based on physical appearance and demeanour alone for recently-arrived young people? Is it any surprise that a teenager who has just spent 14 hours drifting across the open sea in a small boat, and 3 months street homeless and destitute in Europe, might present differently to what you would expect of a teenager that hadn’t had those experiences? Or that teenagers who shared those experiences might present differently from each other? It is absurd to make judgements on appearance in those circumstances. We have even seen cases in our frontline teams where young people presented ID documents to immigration officers confirming their minority, but were deemed to be adults regardless, based on their physical appearance and demeanour alone.
Consensus number 3 – it’s traumatising
The process of age dispute is often retraumatising for young people who have in most cases already suffered unimaginable hardships in their short lives. Feeling disbelieved and scrutinised on matters of their identity, let alone their reasons for fleeing their homes to seek safety, can cause extensive psychological harm. Our recent research with the Helen Bamber Foundation found that age disputes often irreparably damage relationships with care givers and professionals and that even if a child is eventually accepted to be their claimed age, the psychological impact is acute and long-lasting. Why then, are age-disputed young people simply shipped off into the adult asylum system where they share bedrooms with older people, have no support networks and no straightforward way of correcting their age? Unsafe, unsupported and stuck– these are conditions extremely likely to retraumatise a young person.
Change is needed
The government’s current approach to this is nonsensical, and it shows. Using the system described above results in many hundreds of children being wrongly assessed to be adults every year. The government knows this but chooses to persist anyway. This cannot go on. There is much disagreement amongst well-meaning colleagues, professionals and policymakers about the issue of age assessment, but the time surely has come for us to redesign this fundamentally flawed approach, starting with the facts we can all agree on.
We encourage you to keep raising these arguments in conversations with colleagues and policymakers in your networks.