More than 1,300 underage asylum seekers have been wrongly treated as adults in an 18-months period, a report published on Monday said.
The charities also said children have been allowed to share accomodation with unrelated adults or put in adult prisons without safeguard.
They called on the Home Office to accept individuals’ claims to be children except in “exceptional circumstances” and not do remove individuals before their age disputes are resolved. They also rejected the government’s plan to use scientific methods to determine age, saying it’s not a solution to the problem.
Age assessment has been notoriously difficult, particularly with illegal immigrants as they are from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, often do not have documents, may appear older than they actually are because of hardships, and are incentivised to lie about their ages for better protection and benefits.
Other claimants would either be treated as children or temporarily treated as children pending further assessment.
According to the report, 69 local authorities have received a total of 1,004 referrals to their children’s services departments in the first six months last year of young people who had been sent to adult accommodation or detention.
“Of the cases where a decision on age was made/age assessment concluded (847), more than half (57 percent) were found to be children—meaning that in just six months at least 485 children had been wrongly placed in adult accommodation or detention at significant risk,” the report said.
“Taken alongside the data from 2022, this shows that over an 18-month period (Jan. 2022 to June 2023), more than 1,300 children were wrongly assessed to be adults by the Home Office.”
The charities said children have been put in unsafe adult settings, including sharing accommodation or a prison cell with an unrelated adult.
One of the charities, Humans for Rights Network (HFRN), identified 15 cases where children wrongly treated as adults have been charged immigration offences under the Nationality and Borders Act (NABA) 2022, with 14 spending periods of time held with adults in adult prisons, the report said.
According to Home Office figures, around half of asylum claims made in 2022 were by illegal immigrants who arrived on small boats.
In one example, the report said Marwen, a Sudanese national who claimed he was 17 when he arrived by small boat in August 2022, was assessed visually by two Home Office officials to be 21.
He was later charged and imprisoned under the NABA and has shared a cell with a 30-year-old man.
After he managed to get HFRN involved, Marwen was eventually released into the care of the local authority, which later confirmed that “there were not sufficient grounds to undertake a full age assessment and Marwan’s [claimed] date of birth was accepted.”
He was then acquitted of any offence “due to the fact that he is a child,” the report said. He was imprisoned for four months.
Age assessment will also make a difference if and when the government’s plan to remove illegal immigrants to Rwanda is revived because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the scheme.
According to the report, underage asylum seekers reported not being provided with the correct interpreter, being accused of lying, and being mocked when they provided their age.
The charities also claimed that staff in asylum accommodation are “deterred from referring people claiming to be children to local authorities” and that the Home Office “frequently refuses to accept the local authority’s decision on age if they decide not to carry out a full assessment.”
They called on the Home Office to to limit age determinations to those with relevant training and treat those who claim to be children as children expect in exceptional circumstances, including when evidence show they are in their late 20s or older.
Other recommendations include publishing statistics on the number of people claiming to be children, notifying relevant local authority about those who claimed to be children by assessed to be adults, and establishing an independent body to scrutinise age assessments.
They also called on the government to “Abandon the implementation of provisions in the Illegal Migration Act that would: leave children at risk of being removed from the UK even if they are challenging a decision on their age; make legal challenges harder to bring; or allow for children to automatically be treated as adults simply for refusing to consent to scientific procedures as part of their age assessment.”
However, they also rejected the scientific age assessment, claiming it “does nothing to solve the issue of flawed decision-making at the border because resources and attention are not directed at the root cause of the problem.”
The Home Office previously said there are risks in treating children as adults, but also risks in adults being treated as children and placed in schools with other children.
A spokesperson for Home Office said in a statement to the PA news agency: “Age assessments can be challenging and there is no single method which can determine a person’s age with precision.
“Many individuals arriving in the UK who claim to be children often don’t have clear evidence like an original passport or identity document to back this up.
“We are strengthening our age assessment process, including establishing the National Age Assessment Board and specifying scientific methods of age assessments.
“Measures under the Illegal Migration Act will ensure the swift removal of individuals who have been assessed as adults and who have no right to remain in the UK.”
In 2022, a total of 1,693 age disputes were resolved. Of these, 1,042, or 61.5 percent, were assessed to be under 18.
