Proving ones' age

One of the frequent problems at Sankofa, is the number of young people arriving from countries where the children have no means of identification. It is not a problem for us, but it is a problem for the children, because the Local Authority do not have a duty to care for anyone that they believe to be older than eighteen years ( unless they are adults with problems requiring assistance from other departments).



Agents who traffic people around the world invariably advise people not to take their ID with them. There may be many stops along the journey, many places to wait until the next connection. A straight journey from Sudan, for example, by lorry and ship, may take twenty eight days. A straight journey from Iraq or Iran, may take ten days by lorry. However, there are many people who cannot make straight journeys, and they are kept waiting until the time is right for the next part of the journey.



Some children have made the journey from Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran, and got as far as Greece, and there they may have a very difficult time waiting. Children have told me of being kept in rooms in the basement of a house for over a month, crowded in with many other single people or families with small children. Food is scarse, and the travellers are not permitted to leave the room or the house for fear of discovery. Periodically representatives of the agent might arrive with offers of food - never enough, or bottled water. One adolescent described tearfully, how a bag of peaches or tomatoes would be brought to the crowded room, and offered at ten dollars each to whoever still had money, bottled water might be five dollars. people would give all that they had for something to eat, or water to drink. Sometimes I have wondered if part of the waiting is to take all the money that the travellers have left. They have already paid perhaps, twenty thousand dollars to make this journey to safety.



Others don't even have this much of a chance. The threshold for looking after children that arrive in Greece as seekers of asylum is thirteen or fourteen years of age. Greece has been sanctioned recently for not complying with the standards for assessing asylum claims and many people, adults and children, have suffered in Greece. I have met children who have been obliged to sleep in church yards, or prostitute themselves for the price of a sandwich. Men describe the kindness of strangers who place bags of food beside the sleeping seekers of asylum.



The journey is fraught with dangers. I have been called from my office in the evening to meet children who have arrived in the City with nowhere to stay. What can you say? They are advised to contact the duty team at social services, but for whatever reason they often seem to get an answer machine. Looking into the faces of children who have just arrived in the country, they look so tired and disorientated. They do not yet speak my language and they take their cues for who to trust from the people that they do understand.



It can be a difficult process getting these children accepted for care.



Usually someone who may have known a distant relative, or someone else from the village or City, take them in for the night. The next morning, washed and rested a little, they arrive at the office of social services who either accept them or they dont. If the social worker does not accept that the child is aged under eighteen, the child is sent away until they can produce their original ID or passport from their country which can take weeks to arrive - if they have one at all ( although now the age has been lowered and they must show that they are younger than seventeen and a half).



We refer them to a family solicitor or the Refugee Council Childrens Panel. The solcitor writes to Social Services and asks that they conduct a full assessment ( The Merton Compliant test). It is quite often the case that social services do not accept the age even after this assessment. The child goes back to the family solcitor who then aranges a paediatric assessment of the child, which often confirms the childs age after a process of analysis. This report is then returned to social services who must accept the findings of the report before agreeing to accept responsibility for accommodating and supporting the child.



Throughout this process children are without support unless they are befriended by others. This is a process which we would be horrified to hear happening to indigenous British children.



Children from around the world often look considerably older than their peers in the UK or the rest of Europe and America. They do not sit in front of play stations or in their own bedrooms with tv and hi fi, strumming on their own guitars during endless periods of leisure when they are not doing school work or delivering the early papers for pocket money. usually they are obliged to work from the age of four years, often in heavy manual labour. For an example look at the film, Time for Drunken Horses, or Can Turtles Fly by Bahman Gobadi. Children can be working carrying huge boxes of goods on their backs from the earliest age, obliged to walk long distances with a far too heavy load. I have clients who continuously complain of back pain so severe that they refer themselves to A and E in the evenings. This is ongoing back pain throughout their young lives as a result of work too heavy for their developing bodies.



Children at the earliest age are working on the farms, hired out to neighbours to underttake manual work, driving vehicles, up early selling goods in shops and tea houses before going to school, if they ever get to school.