“Yes, it still shocks me”, my colleague says, “but I’m glad it shocks me. I don’t want to get desensitised.”
We’re going into a large hotel, next to a dual carriageway, in a windy suburb of London. The hotel serves as contingency asylum accommodation. A lot of the young people we speak with here will talk about the Manston processing centre, where they were held when they first arrived in the UK.
We work for the Refugee Council—my three colleagues are in the charity’s Age Dispute Project, and I’m in the media team. Their task is to interview teenagers who have been wrongly treated as adults by the Home Office, and to get them taken into care. There’s a real sense of urgency—the children could be “dispersed” to adult accommodation in other parts of the country at any point, and the team are seeing large numbers of boys aged 15, 16 and 17 (and also a few girls) in this nightmarish situation.
A security guard lets us into the hotel forecourt. There are a few people smoking outside, and once we’re inside the foyer, there are lots of men in flip-flops, despite the cold weather. On the reception desk there is a sign giving phone numbers for Samaritans, Mind, and the NHS.
It’s not difficult to find the kids. One of them—with wide, anxious eyes and hunched shoulders—is waiting in the foyer when we arrive. He shows us his phone—he’s trying frantically to communicate using Google Translate. We set up our laptops in an overheated ground-floor room, and start with him, while an orderly queue forms outside the door. Some of the boys have been in touch already—they sit on chairs in the corridor waiting to speak to us about their age, because they’ve heard that we can help.
After that, it doesn’t stop. We interview 16 young people. At least 13 of them have come from the notorious Manston processing centre in Kent, which has since been emptied. It was not supposed to be used for unaccompanied children. Most of these young people say they were kept there for over ten days (the longest for 25 days, three of the others for over 20 days), despite the fact that this is far longer than the legal limit. Two of the others have been in detention—one was in Yarl’s Wood for 13 days, and the other has spent ten days at Tinsley House.
Eight of them tell us that they are 16, six of them that they are 17, and two that they are 15.
It feels uncomfortable to describe them, since a focus on their physique is part of the problem. They are just teenaged boys, with all the physical diversity this implies. Tall or short, lanky, stocky or slight, several look so shockingly young to me that I can’t understand how this can have happened. Others have the self-conscious clumsiness of the newly grown, with a childishness about their faces that seems at odds with their bodies. It feels to me as if anyone used to working with young people would recognise them as adolescents pretty fast.
The vast majority are to me obviously, glaringly, telling the truth about their age—three of them even have documents to prove it. With a couple of the others their claims seem very plausible, but it’s hard to tell. There’s a cross in a box on a form they have been given—“Two Home Office members of staff have assessed that your physical appearance and demeanour very strongly suggests that you are significantly over 18 years of age.” The team don’t agree that this is true of any of them.
The government narrative—that adult migrants are posing as children—is often repeated in the press, but our experience is that this is very misleading. The real problem we witness is quite the opposite. Ill-informed reporting obscures a shocking truth—hundreds of children arriving alone here every year suffer neglect and trauma, and are put at risk of abuse and exploitation, by having their true ages disbelieved or disregarded. They are left by themselves in our cruel and chaotic asylum system, and as a result, terrible things are happening to them.
In the hotel, we ask our own preliminary questions: mostly about their age, but other basic facts too. How do they know how old they are? I’m surprised by how many different calendars are in use around the world. In some countries, it’s rare to have documents. One boy’s parents both died when he was younger—he says he knows his birthday because an aunt told him. My colleague speaks an impressive array of languages, and where he can’t understand, we use a dial-up interpreting service. Do the chronologies of their journeys add up? A week in Chad, four months in Libya, Morocco… Details and phrases stand out, and churn in my head later on.
Their reasons for leaving home (some of which are detailed on printouts of their asylum registration questionnaire) are pretty stark. Of the kids we see, four are from Eritrea, three from Sudan, two from Ethiopia, two from South Sudan, two from Iran, and one each from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. “I do not want to be forced to join the army. It is dangerous there.” “I will be caught in the war and I would die.” “They have taken over my land and have threatened to kill me.” One of these young people was at risk after distributing leaflets for a Kurdish political party. The Afghan boy was threatened by the Taliban for being in a family which dealt with UK and US troops in the past, and his brother had already been killed.
None of them have proper shoes. To say they are neglected is an understatement: they are almost completely uncared for. Some of them need medical help—one lifts up his hoodie and shows where he was injured in Manston, attacked by other young men. One has something wrong with his feet—they look patchy and discoloured. One of them wants to see a doctor about his eye. One of them has an older injury from falling from a vehicle.
Several of the boys seem visibly traumatised. One shakes when he’s talking to us, another starts crying. The boy who is orphaned says he has bad dreams about his dead parents. Another was locked in a warehouse in Libya and forced to work. Most are quiet and self-contained, as if very used to waiting—some of them smile and joke with us as we take down their details. Polite requests are conveyed by the interpreters: “any support or help I can get, I’d be grateful.” Sometimes we try to lift the mood, with silly asides about our team.
The boys who were there all say that Manston was horrible, and these are kids who have seen some really bad things already. Their accounts are similar—not enough to eat; large numbers crammed into each marquee; too few showers; only one blanket each; having to lie on the floor or sleep sitting up—if they could sleep at all. “I’ve never been more frightened than I was in Manston,” says the young Syrian, and a boy from Sudan says “it’s the worst place I’ve ever been to.” One young person talks about things being stolen, fights, and says that the police were called several times. Another asks how he can find a bag that was taken from him at Manston.
They are relieved to be out of there, but most of them are still very worried. This hotel is not a safe place for a lone teenager, and there have been incidents here already. The hotel staff seem to be doing their best, but it’s an impossible situation. One boy says that the adult man he shares a room with is always drunk; another says he’s frightened to go downstairs.
“They want a normal life, and they want to be treated as human beings”
The boys can’t understand why they have been “given” a new age, despite their protests. “I cried so much but they still didn’t change it back,” says the young Afghan. One has had his date of birth altered by just one year, to put him over the dividing line of 18. Three of them show us images of their documents on phones, which they say have been ignored or discounted by the Home Office.
The case of the 15-year-old from Iran is astonishing—he looks very young, and has got an image of his passport and his ID card, but he says that Home Office officials were “not interested.” They told him it didn’t matter that they’d given him a new date of birth, because there would be a chance to correct it later on. He’s spent 24 days in Manston and 17 days in the hotel.
“Why would anyone do that to him?” I ask my colleague.
“I suppose they think that someone else will deal with it later down the line,” he says.
Unfortunately, plans for more “scientific” methods of age assessment are unlikely to help with this problem—X-rays and dental examination are not reliable for this purpose, and in our experience it takes time, adequate resources and trained social workers to make accurate decisions.
Towards the end of the interviews, and despite the fact we’re battling the clock, I try to connect with the children a bit differently, by asking about their hopes for the future. One of them says he wants to play basketball, another would like to train as a car mechanic. They want to be with people their own age, they want a chance to go to school. Above all, they want to live in a society where they don’t risk being attacked by either the public or the police, as they sometimes have been in other European countries. It’s fairly unsurprising—they want a normal life, and they want to be treated as human beings.
When we leave it’s dark, and I see the streets of my own city a bit differently. The team will refer the children we’ve seen to the local authority, who they say have been very co-operative, but it might take a few days, and we hope they don’t get moved to another part of the country first. We have a list of boys who called us in advance, and we didn’t manage to find all of them. Over the next few days, the team will take phone calls from 20 more boys at the hotel who we still haven’t seen.
I start to play back moments from the interviews in my head. It’s weird to make the transition back to my own home life—my youngest child is of a similar age to the boys in the hotel. I think, too, of my grandmother, who came to this country alone as a teenager in 1938—without a passport.
I don’t understand how this can be happening to teenagers in this country, now. The stories they tell us show that separated children have regularly been kept in Manston—alone, cold, hungry and terrified. According to UNICEF, there are record numbers of displaced children worldwide. The agency has called on governments to provide equal support to all children wherever they come from—but these boys’ accounts show we’re failing to do this.
They are paying the price of hostile policies—which do nothing to deter desperate refugees, but which punish them further once they arrive on our shores. New measures just announced by the government look likely to make this problem even worse for the children who—ignored and largely invisible—get caught up in this political posturing.
It’s difficult glimpsing the scale and scope of the crisis. “It can be very draining, and lots of them are so vulnerable”, says my colleague. The Age Dispute Project has had to close to new referrals several times this year because of a lack of capacity. “We have to celebrate the small wins—each time one of them gets taken into care,” she adds. For a couple of the boys, it will only be for a few months—two of those we saw are shortly turning 18, and will be returned to asylum accommodation almost as soon as they’ve started to settle in.
My colleague says that she sometimes thinks about how people would react if these were British children, and how differently they might be treated.
“It makes you wonder—how did we stop being human?” she says.
