Introduction
When young people arrive in the UK seeking refuge, they need to be able to prove how old they are as there are significant differences in the rights of people depending on their age. This paper refers to unaccompanied minors only and not to those children who arrive with their families.
Why is there an age assessment process in place for unaccompanied minors to the UK?
When unaccompanied minors (those under 18 years old and not accompanied by their family) arrive in the UK, they have to provide a date of birth to prove they are children. The age of an unaccompanied child is extremely important: as well as access to education and support, it also affects the way in which their asylum claim is processed and can even be a decisive factor in a claim for asylum. Most unaccompanied children arriving in the UK have their age accepted. But in some cases, the Home Office or the local authority doesn’t believe the age they claim to be. In those situations an age assessment is undertaken.
Until recently, after an initial age assessment was conducted by immigration officers, local authority social workers would conduct the age assessment. However, the UK Government introduced the National Age Assessment Board (NAAB) on 31 March 2023. The NAAB, is located within the Home Office and consists primarily of expert social workers who have responsibility for conducting age assessments on children whose age is in doubt. This is to ensure the individual is treated age-appropriately, that they receive the necessary services and support, and is important for safeguarding children in the UK care system. All refugees are provisionally treated as a child until a decision on their age is made pending the outcome of the assessment. The local authority where a young person resides can undertake the age assessment or refer the young person to the NAAB.
What is the age assessment process?
The age of a person arriving in the UK is usually determined by the documents they have in their possession. However, unaccompanied children seeking asylum may be fleeing war, persecution, and human rights abuses and/or have been victims of trafficking. Many of these children are unable to show official identity documents because they have either never had them or they may have been destroyed, lost, or taken. In these circumstances an immigration officer can:
- Treat the child as the age they say they are.
- Treat them as a child but ‘dispute ‘their age and refer them for further assessment to the local authority or the NAAB (in these circumstances, the local authority are obliged to provide accommodation and support while the age dispute is resolved).
- Treat them as an adult (‘if their physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggest they are significantly over 18’) and move them straight to adult accommodation/detention.
How is the age assessment carried out?
Where there is ‘reasonable doubt’ that a young person is not the age they state then a ‘careful, holistic social worker assessment’ is conducted through a process known as a ‘Merton compliant’ age assessment. This includes looking at the physical appearance and demeanour of the young person, a process that is hardly scientific and is problematic. The more detailed age assessments are carried out by social workers and should be child appropriate. This involves gathering information through speaking with the young person, and the network of professionals and carers who they might be engaging with from which to take a view on age. There is a large amount of guidance provided on government websites setting out how age assessment should be carried out but as can be seen from the case study below this is not always followed.
Age determination is an inexact science, and the margin of error can sometimes be as much as five years either side, especially around the time of puberty. There is no single reliable method for making precise estimates, and no conclusive medical test. Age is central to identity, and the age assessment process can be very damaging for children who are disbelieved. It is extremely important that age assessments are only carried out where there is significant reason to doubt the claimant’s age.
The government’s own advice to their staff is that deciding a person’s age by looking at their physical appearance and demeanour is an unreliable method for making judgements on a person’s age and yet the government continues to use a process they accept is unreliable.
How is the age assessment carried out?
Nish was 16 years old when he arrived in the UK, He was classified by immigration officers as an ‘age disputed minor’. Initially he was sent to a detention centre but then was hosted by a British family while his age was clarified. Three months later two social workers interviewed him, and they noted that.
- he had facial hair.
- did not maintain good eye contact,
- they had found a Facebook profile that “looked like him” and that person was 21.
On the basis of this ‘evidence’ the social workers concluded he was 21years old (5 years older than he actually was). Fortunately, for Nish, he was able to stay with the family while he appealed with the help of an advocacy charity. Otherwise, he would have been sent to an adult centre. Two weeks before his 18th birthday an appeal judge ruled that his claimed age was accurate.
Age assessments of minors elsewhere
In the rest of Europe, unaccompanied child applicants are on the rise – totalling 41,500 in 2023, a rise of 60% on the previous year.
In many other countries, minors face hurdles to get their age correctly assessed too. Under a legal principle called favor minoris (favouring the minor) international law requires that asylum seekers who declare themselves to be under 18 should be treated as minors until their age can be confirmed. This principle is often disregarded. Examples from two of these countries help to illustrate the dangers minors can experience if they are wrongly considered to be an adult.
Greece
Both the Greek Council for Refugees and Save the Children have described how the non-uniform application of the age assessment procedure in Greece makes children feel unsafe and insecure and is acknowledged to be an infringement of their fundamental rights.
In 2021, for example, age assessments on the island of Lesvos were suspended for six months because of a lack of qualified personnel. During this time, many people who said they were minors – but were not believed by authorities – were placed in tents with hundreds of adults at the reception centre on the island. One Afghan asylum seeker who claimed to be 16 was placed in a tent with 180 men where he was threatened with rape before eventually being attacked with a knife in the toilets.
If they are incorrectly determined to be adults, they must challenge this result within 15 days using specific home country documents officially translated in Greek. Contesting misidentification is a monumental task for a child, particularly without a guardian or age-appropriate free legal aid.
Hungary
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee reported that age assessments take place before a guardian is appointed and the child is alone in a process where a military doctor measures the child’s height and size of hips, looks at the teeth and examines the shape of the body with signs of sexual maturity. Military doctors are usually not specifically trained for the process and a psycho-social assessment is typically not carried out. The National Directorate General for Aliens Policing (NDGAP) does not have an age assessment protocol and considers that this is a medical competence. The results of an age assessment still cannot be appealed separately by law (it can only be appealed against a negative asylum decision).
Criticism of the current UK System
One of the biggest concerns with the current system is where children have been incorrectly assessed as an adult when they are not and then are sent to adult accommodation/detention. This raises serious safeguarding concerns. In 2022, 62% of children who were originally assumed to be adult were in fact recognised later to be children. These children are completely abandoned by the system and are extremely vulnerable and crucially have no one to look after them. Children as young as 14 years of age have been placed in hostels or detention and many have been forced to share rooms with adults. There have been several reports of incidents of violence and sexual assault against children. The Home Office does not publish statistics regarding children who are wrongly assessed as adults on arrival nor regarding the number of initial age assessments which are later overturned. The Refugee Council showed that 94% of the young people they supported who were initially assessed as adults by the Home Office were later found to be children.
Furthermore, guidance for accommodation providers is written in such a way that it deters staff working in hotels from referring people claiming to be children. Staff are told that if the Home Office has already carried out an ‘assessment’ then they should only refer the child to a local authority if the individual is “childlike, is highly vulnerable and/or not behaving like an adult”. In practice, this has been interpreted by staff as meaning they should never refer a child to children’s services. Children wrongly treated as adults receive no information or support on how to address what has happened to them.
There have been concerns raised by charities that the NAAB lacks independence and removes power and responsibility from child protection experts. In fact the British Association of Social Work (BASW) are pushing for the abolition of the NAAB.
Criticisms across an international perspective including the UK
The New Humanitarian and the Greece-based investigative newsroom Solomon spent more than six months investigating the wrongful classification of asylum-seeking minors as adults in Greece, Italy, and Britain, speaking to over 30 lawyers, doctors, and human rights advocates, and analysing court documents and reports. The reporting showed that:
- Unaccompanied children seeking asylum in all three countries have been repeatedly classified as adults;
- The assessment systems used to determine people’s ages are unreliable, poorly implemented, and often violate the legal rights of children;
- Systemic issues – including a lack of qualified interpreters – make it difficult for children who are wrongfully qualified as adults to appeal their cases;
- If they get into trouble with the law, children being incorrectly classified as adults during trials leads to harsher sentences, and time spent in adult prisons increases the likelihood of them being exposed to violence and abuse;
- Outside the criminal justice system, children wrongfully classified as adults are also denied rights, such as access to education, and face bureaucratic barriers to reuniting with family members in other European countries;
- Some experts say the dysfunction of asylum systems – which in many places (including Britain, Italy, and Greece) are being made increasingly draconian as a strategy to try to deter migration – creates an incentive for some people to try to game the system. “If you know that after turning 18 you’re screwed, then you do anything to remain 17 your whole life,” said Nikolaos Gkionakis, a psychologist and co-founder of Babel Day Center, which provides mental health services to asylum seekers and migrants in Athens, Greece.
The question remains: What would a better system look like?
Overall, the flaws in age assessment systems are reflective of the problems within European asylum systems as a whole, lawyers, researchers, and migration experts said. The Refugee Council makes a number of recommendations that would improve the system for the young people whose ages are disputed:
- The Government must collect and publish statistics on age disputed young people who are: wrongly assessed as adults at the first stage and later found to be children. They should also collect and publish statistics on those who are assessed as minors and later found to be adults on the date of arrival.
- The Government needs to assess the impact of referring young people assumed to be adults, for lawful social work assessments, so as to quantify the risk and avoid any children slipping through the net.
- Where a person has been assessed as an adult, no further steps should be taken until the judicial review or appeal has been heard, or the timeframe for challenge has passed.
- Any work with migrants should be the responsibility of departments with responsibility for children. Social work bodies and inspectorates should have oversight of all age assessments conducted in the UK.
- Ofsted, or a similar independent oversight body should analyse the number and quality of age assessments.
Governments repeatedly acknowledge that unaccompanied children seeking asylum are amongst the most vulnerable, and many policies and processes are different for those deemed to be children. On such an important issue it is vital that public messaging, including by government, is responsible, measured and accurate, reflecting the necessary complexity of making judgments about how old a person is, particularly when they are children without the protection of their parents and living with the anxiety that the asylum process brings.
Governments would do well to follow the Irish model, where Tulsa, the Child and Family Agency, have stated anybody subject to age dispute should be treated as a child during the assessment process and is given the benefit of the doubt throughout both the assessment and appeal stage, even where there is uncertainty as to whether they are a child.
With the focus on reducing migration rather than providing people protection, “what’s missing is the willingness to do a good job.”
Alice Argento, an Italian immigration lawyer.
