AYS Special: Missing Asylum-Seeking Children, UK Home Office at fault
In the first of the Are You Syrious Christmas Specials, we share a detailed article prompted by reports at the beginning of the year of hundreds of children unaccounted for. Unaccompanied minors arriving, particularly those arriving to the England by small boat, are being mistreated at the hands of the UK Home Office. With thanks to Helen Tennyson for researching and writing.
200 asylum-seeking children were reported missing at the beginning of the year. In January 2023, The Observer broke the news that over 200 asylum-seeking children had gone missing from UK hotels while in Home Office care. A member of staff at one hotel in Brighton had reported that “some children had been abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars”. The news was tragic, and is a jarring example of how the British asylum system is failing the very people it is designed to protect. It also highlights how systemic neglect is contributing to an increase in the wider problem of human trafficking across the UK.
This year also saw the introduction of the Illegal Migration Act; court action against the British government on numerous occasions based on the legality of their human rights record; and fierce debate on the protection of victims of human trafficking; yet the dangers facing children arriving in Britain persist.
7000 In 2022, over 7000 children made the journey to the UK in small boats, many of them unaccompanied. According to UK law, these children should have been housed by local authorities — in children’s homes or with foster carers. Instead, over half of those children were housed alongside adults in unsuitable hotels by the Home Office. In the UK, under the Children Act 1989, asylum-seeking children are considered “children in need” and should have their needs assessed and be placed into the care of their local authority, as other vulnerable children are. Local authorities have much better access to resources for children than the Home Office, and yet children are being systematically placed in the care of the Home Office and housed in hotels with adults. The migration watchdog found that staff in many of the hotels where children were staying had not passed a DBS check (required when working with vulnerable people in the UK), and yet had access to master keys for children’s rooms. As of January 2023, 4600 children had been housed in hotels. The Home Office, on its own website, highlights “the serious safeguarding risks of detaining unaccompanied children alongside adults”, and yet has continued to do so. It is from these hotels that children were systematically going missing, many of them considered to be victims of trafficking, with many yet to be found.
Why are the Home Office housing children if their care should be under the authority of the council?
In 2021, Kent County Council abdicated its responsibilities towards children, stating that it did not have the resources to accommodate the number of children arriving on small boats. Small boat crossings from France land on the Kent coast, leaving the Kent County Council with an unequal burden. The Home Office stepped in, and in so doing created a vacuum of responsibility, where no state body was actually taking reasonable care for the wellbeing of the children.
This set a precedent and the practice continued across other county councils, either due to a lack of funding or a lack of will. A family court ruled on June 9th that the “Home Office had no power to house children outside the care system”, and that local authorities were breaking the law in neglecting their responsibilities to these children. The case was brought by Article 39, a charity which deals with the welfare of children in state care, and also reaffirmed the responsibility of the Sussex and national police in ensuring that the missing children are found.
Yet, local authorities in England are woefully underfunded. Some 31% of all local councils in Britain are unable to meet the cost of running their required services. This comes after a spike in inflation, huge pressure on local services throughout the pandemic, and years of low spending by a Conservative majority keen to keep taxes low. When services are cut, all children in care suffer, but children who are not yet fully in the system are easily swept under the rug. As councils are unable to financially meet their obligations in caring for vulnerable children who have arrived by irregular means, they turn more and more to the Home Office to house them. In a parliamentary debate on the issue, held on the 24th January after the new story broke, Robert Jenrick (then Minister for Immigration) evaded responsility by referring again and again to the issue of illegal migration when debating the issue of these missing children: “There is nothing compassionate about allowing insecure borders and allowing growing numbers of people, including young people, to cross the channel.” The government blames rising numbers of channel crossings and “evil illegal people smugglers” for their own failure to provide for children in their care.
The Hostile Environment
There is nothing new about Britain’s hostile immigration policy (a term first coined by Theresa May in 2012), and it is sadly no surprise that it extends to children. Children are often met with suspicion about their age when they arrive. Robert Jenrick is quoted on the government’s own website as saying: “It is vital we use every tool at our disposal to weed out people falsely claiming to be children.”.
His language speaks for itself. The initial approach is not one geared towards safeguarding the child, it instead semi-criminalises the child by applying an assumption that they are abusing the state. This is part of the rhetoric which has allowed for reforms to be made to the age assessment of children which will include invasive procedures such as bone scans and X-Rays, as passed in the Illegal Migration Act (July 2023).
Through a freedom of information request it was recently found that two thirds of people deemed to be adults by the Home Office were in fact found to be children, despite the Home Office insisting the contrary. Government guidance for people performing age assessments deals primarily with demeanour and appearance (and will also include the above procedures once they come into effect), and fails to consider the psychological implications of their journey and how that could have affected the overall impression they make. This, however, doesn’t make the process less problematic. The very nature of a physical assessment means that unaccompanied children are initially met with mistrust, which can have far reaching implications on the child.
How can newly arrived young people trust the system that is supposed to protect them when they are met with suspicion from the offset?
Illegal Migration Act
Likewise, the Illegal Migration Act’s introduction of invasive scientific means of testing is widely criticised across the spectrum by scientists and human rights organisations, stating that it cannot be used to accurately determine a child’s age, and that in other countries “children often leave child protection if threatened with these assessments”. The more mistrust and fear these children have to suffer, the more at risk it makes them of exploitation and trafficking.
The Illegal Migration Act means that children will not be allowed to settle in the UK over the age of 18, nor will they be allowed to claim asylum at all in the UK.
In terms of trafficking, the act means that children trafficked to the UK face limbo until they are 18 years old, when they are removed. There is no incentive for the government or any other body to consider the wellbeing of the child long term, only to hold them as a stopgap until they reach 18. The act is indiscriminate in its anti-immigration policy, criminalising anyone who enters the UK by irregular means, regardless of circumstance. For more information on what that means for children in a practical sense, this governemnt documentation is available here.
The Illegal Migration Act fails children and adults alike, penalising vulnerable people for simply seeking safety. It is heartless, cruel and will lead to a further disregard for child wellbeing, ultimately endangering more children.
The government policy prioritises criminalising those seeking help — according to the report published in December 2023, by the cross-party Home Affairs Select Committee. Their report on its inquiry into human trafficking confirmed that victim-blaming is a higher government priority than helping those who have been exploited.
“We have been very concerned throughout this inquiry that the fight against human trafficking is, in practice, no longer a priority for the UK Government, notwithstanding the Government’s claims to the contrary. Recent prioritisation of irregular migration policies over those concerning human trafficking, claims of migrants ‘abusing the system’, the lack of outputs from the Home Office modern slavery unit, the lack of an updated modern slavery strategy, and the 18-month delay in appointing a new Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner demonstrate a disappointing lack of commitment on the part of the Home Office for tackling human trafficking in the UK.” Home Affairs Committee; Human trafficking; First Report of Session 2023–24
It’s a scathing review. The report is a full account of the investigation into human trafficking, both on a national and international scale, and offers insight into the grave risk that children are being put under through a focus on immigration policy.
“Much of the evidence we received conveyed concerns about recent legislation, specifically the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the potential negative impact its provisions could have on victims of modern slavery and human trafficking.”
The report states that through conflating the issue of migration and human trafficking, the government is not doing anything to stop trafficking taking place within the UK itself, the number of child victims increasing at an alarming rate, with British nationals, and not asylum-seeking young people, being most often affected. The focus on a hardline immigration policy is not only failing children arriving in Britain, but British children too.
The use of hotels for unaccompanied minors puts them at “grave risk of exploitation and trafficking”, yet accountability is non-existent. Members of the committee made a demand that a progress report on locating the missing children be made public by the end of the year. No such statement has been made by the Home Office or any police force at the time of writing.
System failures
The entire system failure means that children are increasingly at risk of real harm. When children arrive they are treated with mistrust and hostility from the outset. This leads to distrust in the system and means that children will be less likely to access what little services are available from already overstretched councils. Children being housed in hotels means that they are not being safeguarded properly and are increasingly becoming victims of trafficking and exploitation. Due to the heavy focus on controlling “illegal migration” children are “too often treated first as migrants and offenders, then as children, and only then in some cases as victims of trafficking and slavery” (the Children’s Society).
Finally, the Illegal Migration Act has removed what little incentive there is left for authorities to safeguard children who have arrived by irregular means, and has meant a lack of resources available to help victims of child trafficking at home. This combination of factors is proving to create perfect conditions for the exploitation of extremely vulnerable children, and is why we are seeing an alarming rise in the number of child trafficking victims.
In its desperate pursuit of the far right vote, the government is abdicating its responsibility to the children in its care.
Vulnerable people are being failed by a government that is clinging to power, whose only lifeline is one of a divisive immigration policy. By turning its people against people in need, the government seeks to draw attention away from its utter failure to govern at home and abroad. It is not the fault of vulnerable children that the government has failed its people, and yet it is they who are being failed by a government unfit for purpose. At the time of writing, there are still some 150 children who have vanished. No one knows where they are. The government must be held accountable in its miscarriage of duty to all victims of child trafficking, and must focus on creating policies which protect, rather than persecute, children.
Sources and further reading:
Government information & reports:
Government Age Assessing Instructions
Transcript of Commons debate — January 2023
Press Release: National Age Assessment Board
Home Affairs Committee Trafficking Report November 2023
Written evidence submitted by ECPAT UK in relation to the above report
Human trafficking — Report Summary December 2023
Illegal Migration Act 2023 October 2023
Illegal Migration Bill: children factsheet July 2023
News
Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT) response to Home Affairs Committee Report
Guardian — Home Office faces legal action over children missing from UK asylum hotels June 2023
Guardian — Fear of X-ray age tests in UK ‘may force child asylum seekers to flee’ September 2023
Guardian — UK minister admits 200 asylum-seeking children have gone missing January 2023
Refugee Council — Channel Crossings report March 2023
The Justice Gap — Charity takes action against Home Office over missing children June 2023
Unison — Councils face ‘dire’ cash crisis totalling more than £3.5bn September 2023
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