Hidden Lives

DR EDIE FRIEDMAN exposes the UK government's failure to provide for underage refugees and asylum-seekers

Children represent more than 50% of the world's refugees and asylum seekers. In the UK, children account for at least a quarter of those seeking asylum. It is something of a paradox that while children's education, health and welfare issues are uppermost on the social policy agenda, refugee children are left out of the picture, seen first as refugees and only secondly as children.

Most asylum-seeking and refugee children enter the UK with their families. A small but significant number arrive alone. Known as unaccompanied or separated children, they share the predicament of other asylum-seeking and refugee children, but their situation makes them less visible and far more vulnerable.

Since the 1990s, following the arrival of children from Kosovo and Bosnia, local authorities have struggled to provide adequate care provision and, as a result, have been severely criticised. The resultant pressure on funding has reinforced the perception that supporting unaccompanied children means higher council taxes and less money for "deserving" vulnerable groups such as the elderly.

The majority of refugee and asylum seeking children attend schools in Greater London. It is estimated that in London one child in 19 is a refugee, accounting for 6% of all children in the capital. The largest numbers have come from Somalia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

Many refugee and asylum-seeking children are not in school because they are either waiting to be relocated or to be placed in permanent accommodation. Because local schools and colleges will not admit students without a permanent address, which can take weeks and sometimes months, children's education is likely to be suspended during that period.

There are further obstacles that these children face. In some areas, particularly London, there is a shortage of school places. In addition, few schools offer support in English language or preparation classes and certain secondary schools are unwilling to admit refugee pupils for fear of their impact on GCSE league tables.

Finding a school for their children can therefore be a confusing and demoralising scenario for refugee parents, who are often unaware of their children's right to a school place. And when they do manage to find a school, they face the financial hardships of buying school uniforms and paying for travel, school trips and other school-related expenses.

But while some schools see them as a burden, others see refugee and asylum seeker children as a positive asset to the school and the community. Even pupils in areas predominantly hostile to asylum seekers have actively campaigned against the threatened deportation of fellow pupils. As one head teacher put it: "The refugee children in this school are an incredible resource for Britain. Some of them speak four languages fluently. We should stop treating them as a problem and tap into their valuable skills."

Until 2001, refugee children were rarely detained in the UK. It is now estimated that 2,000 children each year - those in families as well as unaccompanied children - are held in detention, some for considerable periods of time. Many families with children have been taken into detention with excessive force and intimidation, without being given an adequate explanation. Research has shown that detention can be very damaging to children's mental and physical health, and in order to highlight this situation a number of organisations joined together in 2006 to form the "no place for a child" campaign against the detention of children.  

Education in detention centres is invariably patchy and of inferior quality to that in mainstream schools; because the numbers in detention are small, lessons take place for a limited number of hours each day and there is no obligation for the children to attend lessons.  
As one researcher has found, "if [children] are released rather than deported after their detention, they may well not be able to go back to the area where they were previously at school. And even though they have done nothing wrong, they do not like to tell other children that they have just spent a couple of months in detention centres."

It is estimated that more than a quarter of refugee and asylum-seeker children in the UK have significant psychological difficulties, and many of their mental health needs are being left unmet. In their short lives, many of these children will already have experienced different types of traumatic events. For example, in their home country they may have witnessed violence and torture, seen a parent killed or the destruction of their home and livelihood, or been exposed to child labour. They may well have endured a horrendous journey in reaching their country of refuge, walking huge distances or becoming separated from their parents.

In the process of trying to integrate into a new country, new traumas may arise as a result of homelessness, destitution, bullying and racial harassment, including physical attack.

Every year over 2,500 unaccompanied children arrive in Britain, their nationalities reflecting hotbeds of unrest around the world. They may have been sent abroad by their parents, or become victims of trafficking or the sex industry.  A number of young refugees simply drop out of the system or disappear for what may be a variety of reasons, including trafficking for sexual or economic exploitation.

The psychological needs of the unaccompanied child may be immense. Child psychotherapist Sheila Melzak points out that unlike adult asylum seekers, the decision to flee has not usually been made by the unaccompanied or separated children themselves and this fact may increase the child's feeling of powerlessness. Children traumatised by witnessing atrocities committed against their parents or others may also face a range of ongoing emotional problems.

Ragi, a ten year old Somali boy who arrived in Britain in 1995 tells us his story: "I came here by aeroplane from Africa, from Nairobi in Kenya. From the airport I came to London by train. A woman came with us. She took money from my family and she came with us. She had the passports and she did the talking. She answered when they asked questions at the airport. I don't know where she has gone now. Now I live with my uncle. My mother, she is in Nairobi.

"My dad died in Somalia, in the first day of the fighting. He fell on the floor and the soldiers captured him. My mum told me he was killed. When he was dead we went to Kenya. My mum wanted to go. We went to Nairobi in 1991 and spent four or five years there. But in Nairobi the police come and they check all the people to see if they have got passports. We left. Now I don't know how my mum is, or my brothers and sisters."

One main difficulty facing unaccompanied children is that their age is very often disputed. Inevitably, many of the children who come to Britain have no documentation of any kind; they therefore cannot provide evidence of their date of birth. A number of unaccompanied children are sent to detention centres because immigration officers categorise them as adults due to their lack of documentation or their physical appearance.

A large number of unaccompanied minors are in the 14 to 17 age range. The margin of error is as much as five years in many cases. Immigration officers are advised to treat children as adults if their appearance strongly suggests they are over 18 (the age at which failed asylum seekers can be removed from the UK). Almost half of asylum applications from unaccompanied children under 18 are disputed by the immigration service.

This climate of disbelief has been condemned by England's children's commissioner, Sir Albert Aynsley-Green. "It's unacceptable that in too many of these cases the authorities fail to give young people the benefit of the doubt", he says. "I have been moved and angered by how children describe the disbelief they often face - and how they fear the practical consequences of being treated inappropriately or as an adult. The stories they tell me are powerfully substantiated in this report."

There is also considerable confusion about what should happen to unaccompanied children when they reach the age of 18. The government expects local authorities to treat them in the same way as a reasonable parent would, which includes providing regular welfare check-ups and possibly paying for housing. However, the older a child is, the less money the local authority receives for them, and the funding from central government is inadequate to help councils finance this work.

A study commissioned to look at the situation of unaccompanied refugee children found that a significant number of the children had had chaotic and disturbing experiences on arrival and received little or no support. But in spite of these difficulties, the young people interviewed spoke of their desire to integrate into Britain, spend more time with their British peers and become economically independent to enable them to make a positive contribution to British society.

The situation of unaccompanied refugee children is very disturbing. Several thousand children and young people are, to all intents and purposes, hidden from both public consciousness and from those support services that could help them. In the absence of a public consensus that unaccompanied children should receive support, and in the absence of a compassionate government policy towards them, many separated children are inadequately supported.

This, compounded by overstretched and under-funded social services departments, a similarly overstretched voluntary sector and the already impoverished refugee communities, results in too many of these children being left without proper care and support, leading to isolation, depression and poor nutrition.

Those working with these children are adamant that they should be entitled to all the welfare rights enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 and have the same rights as children who are citizens.  This means that all services should be developed so that asylum-seeking and refugee children are seen first and foremost as children: a vulnerable group in need of proper care and protection.

Dr Edie Friedman is director of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, on which see www.jcore.org.uk. This article is adapted from Dr Friedman's forthcoming book, Reluctant Refuge: The Story of Asylum in Britain, co-written with Reva Klein.