Children at risk under new asylum policies
Every child deserves to live in a place of safety and hope. But in the past two years the government has introduced new measures that greatly increase risks for unaccompanied children seeking safety in the UK. Now, the Illegal Migration Act will make things even worse.
Jumping through hoops
In July 2021, the Home Office began placing unaccompanied, asylum-seeking children in hotels, outside the usual care system. This was intended to be a short-term, emergency measure. Hundreds of children vanished from these hotels. Now this practice has been put into law by the Illegal Migration Act, with the Home Office able to accommodate and move children in and out of care at its discretion.
In 2022, the government announced plans to forcibly remove people seeking protection from the UK and send them to Rwanda. The Illegal Migration Act has now made clear that anyone seeking safety in the UK via anything other than a ‘safe and legal’ route will be unable to claim asylum, detained, and removed to a third country. Although the Rwanda plan was found to be unlawful, the government has challenged this decision, with the Supreme Court set to hear the appeal in October 2023.
Asylum seekers
Wrongly assessed
As a whole, the government has said that unaccompanied children will not be removed while they are under 18. However, with an unreliable and often impulsive system of age-assessing refugees, many children are incorrectly deemed to be adults.
Born in Sudan, Samir was a child when he was forced to flee his home and undertake a terrifying journey in search of safety. At 17, he arrived in the UK alone, believing he had found a place of sanctuary and hope. Instead, he was exposed to a hostile system that only added to the trauma he had already experienced.
Wrongly assessed
Despite his age and need for support, Samir was incorrectly identified as an adult, placed in adult accommodation and left to fend for himself. He explains, ‘the decision that I was an adult was made very quickly.’
After a five-minute meeting, they brought a taxi, and I was sent to a large hostel for adult asylum seekers.
Alone and afraid
Scared and alone, Samir considered running away. ‘It wasn’t a good place. There’s no one that can check on you and I was really exposed to seeing stuff for the first time. There were horrible things’.
Without The Children’s Society I would have just disappeared because in that place no one is looking after you.
Eventually, Samir learned about the work we do and reached out for help. With the support of our project workers, he was able to challenge his age assessment. He was finally correctly identified as a child and taken into the care of the local authority.
Help children who arrive in the UK
A group of young people want all children who arrive in the UK alone get a legal guardian - someone to take them to immigration interviews, make sure they're heard, help them adapt to life in a new country. Guardians give children seeking asylum hope for a brighter future.
New risks
Today, Samir is a university student with a bright future and a desire to help others. Under new immigration policies, he fears that children seeking safety face harsher treatment and greater risks than ever before.
‘The situation is getting worse. The idea to send people to Rwanda is just cruel. People are coming here seeking protection from persecution. They flee their countries and risk their lives’
The government says that unaccompanied minors won't be sent to Rwanda while they are under 18, but you can never trust this.
‘They might decide someone is older and send them away. It happened with me. They made me a bit older and sent me away as an adult. It was awful’.
How guardianship can help asylum seeker children
The need for guardians
Even those who are recognised as children often fail to receive adequate protection.
Currently, many lone children are being placed in government contracted hotels without the support that they need. Appallingly, hundreds of children have disappeared from these hotels and currently 154 remain missing, feared to have fallen into the hands of traffickers.
A group of young people known as the YLCSC (Youth Led Commission on Separated Children) are campaigning for every unaccompanied child to have an independent legal guardian who can advocate for them and provide continuity throughout the asylum journey.
Unaccompanied children
They explain, ‘After our own experiences of going through the system, we understand how critical it is to have a guardian for every child in the UK’
Hundreds of unaccompanied children are missing, and this is exactly why we need guardians.
Children should not be by themselves in hotels. Some children meet new people who assure them it will be safer outside the hotels, but they end up in the hands of traffickers’
‘All we want is for children that are going through the system now, not to go through the experiences that we went through’.
Guardianship schemes already exist in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but not in Wales or England. To learn more and support the campaign for legal guardians across the UK, listen to the YLCSC’s ‘Call for legal Guardians’ podcast episode.
