Home Office plans 'scientific age assessments’ for asylum-seeking children
Joe Lepper
Thursday, January 6, 2022
The government plans to bring in "new scientific methods" for assessing the age of asylum-seeking children in disputes over how old they are.
Some older asylum-seeking children are currently involved in lengthy disputes over whether they are entitled to be supported as young people or treated as adults by services
Home Secretary Priti Patel says that the Nationality and Borders Bill, which has passed its House of Commons stages and is being debated in the House of Lords this week, will look to overhaul the way older children are assessed.
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Patel says the focus of the move is to crackdown on abuses by adults, who she says are falsely claiming to be adults to access children’s and education services.
“The practice of single grown adult men, masquerading as children claiming asylum is an appalling abuse of our system which we will end,” said Patel.
“By posing as children, these adult men go on to access children’s services and schools through deception and deceit; putting children and young adults in school and care at risk.”
She added: “I am changing UK laws to introduce new scientific methods for assessing the age of asylum seekers to stop these abuses and to give the British public confidence that we will end the overt exploitation of our laws and UK taxpayers.”
The Home Office is creating a Scientific Advisory Committee to advise ministers on ways to check how old an asylum-seeker is.
This will look at methods used in other countries, including X-ray scans, CT scans and MRI imaging, and will be chaired on an interim basis by forensic anthropologist Professor Dame Sue Black.
The Home Office says that in Finland and Norway radiographs are taken to examine “the development of teeth and the fusion of bones in the wrist”.
Meanwhile, in France X-rays are taken to look at collar bones, wrists and teeth.
This current age assessment process, known as ‘Merton Assessments’ can take as long as a year to complete and cause distress to young people, experts have warned.
According to latest government figures there were 732 age disputes in the year ending December 2020. Of these 134 had not been resolved.
In the 598 cases where a decision was reached, 232 were classified as under 18, while 366 were categorised as adults.
Earlier this week an inquest heard how a young Eritrean asylum seeker killed himself after his 18th birthday amid fears around his application to remain in the UK.
On Alexander Tekle’s arrival to the UK he had given the wrong date of birth and spent time trying to correct the error, which had seen him transferred to adult services and not eligible for children’s services support.
He had also been traumatised by his experiences in Eritrea and the recent suicide of a friend, the inquest heard.