Asylum-seeking children ‘frightened’ by age tests
Government paper reveals that biological assessments to clarify age potentially expose children to harmful ‘ionising radiation’
Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) has highlighted a new report suggesting that unreliable age tests on asylum seekers may leave children ‘frightened and unsafe’.
The recently-published government paper reveals that biological assessments to clarify age would potentially expose children to harmful ‘ionising radiation’ and could ‘increase distress’ that is already caused through the current process of age assessment.
The report, published by the interim Age Estimation Science Advisory Committee, follows up on proposals that X-rays and other biological tests could be carried out on children seeking asylum. The biological tests were part of a plan, announced last year by Priti Patel, to stop men from ‘masquerading as children’. The reliability of the proposed tests has however been called into question by rights groups.
Sheila Mosley, from QARN, said: ‘The accuracy of any age assessment is questionable – whether it be the unethical intrusion of a medical examination, or a social worker (often an agency worker) forensically asking questions in a hostile environment that is set up not to support children, but to catch them out as too old to be supported by the very services doing the assessment.’
According to the Refugee Council, in 2021 they assisted 233 young asylum seekers who were deemed to be adults by the Home Office. Of those, 219 were found to be children upon further assessment by local authority social workers.
The Helen Bamber Foundation gathered information from just fifty-five local authorities and found that in 2021, 450 young people were referred to local authorities for age assessments and, of these, three quarters were found to be children. The Refugee Council argues that the high level of decisions being overturned ‘challenges the view put forward by the government that the problem is primarily that many of those who claim to be children are not’.
Children who are incorrectly assessed to be adults can be sent to live in hotels, hostel-style asylum accommodation, or former military barracks, and forced to share rooms with adults, without any further support from their local authority.
