Unaccompanied Children Seeking Asylum in the UK: From Centres of Concentration to a Better Holding Environment

Abstract

The United Kingdom's Children Act 1989 provides that unaccompanied children claiming asylum in the UK are looked after by the local authority in whose area they first come to attention of the authorities. Unlike adults, they were not subject to dispersal to other parts of the country under the Asylum and Immigration Act 1999. This has created an uneven pattern of asylum-seeker children across the country, who have no choice in where they live and are concentrated in a few geographical areas, typically near ports and administrative hubs. That, in turn, has produced unmitigated pressure on local services while fostering a view in other areas that the children are someone else's 'problem' rather than a shared responsibility for the country. This article maps the distribution of unaccompanied children in England (Different laws apply in Scotland). It considers the effects of this geographical concentration on the care of children, based on qualitative interviews with unaccompanied children and young people and adults working with them. These interviews are analysed through the lens of the requirement in the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child that States must act in the best interests of the child. The support structure around each child is conceptualized as the 'holding environment' in which they live and develop, drawing on an idea developed by the British psychologist Donald Winnicott. It is argued that neither children's legal rights, nor their best interests, are best served by living in areas of high concentration. However, the article also criticizes the language of 'dispersal' and 'burden sharing' in the wider debate on refugee reception. Finally, it analyses responsibilitysharing models from France and Austria and a similar model operating between different boroughs in London, concluding that the laws and practices which exist do not fully comply with the 'best interests' principle, often because of a failure to properly fund transfer and care arrangements.person becomes a refugee. 1 This is of course not to deny children's agency, as Elaine Chase, Ravi Kohli, and others have explored, with research coming particularly from the social work field. 2 This article makes a contribution to the growing academic literature on unaccompanied children by arguing a simple point: unaccompanied children are more likely to have their needs unmet if they are left concentrated in particular geographical areas, which may therefore be unable to provide foster carers, school places, and other aspects of care because of the level of demand. This argument relies on the concept of the 'holding environment', first developed by the British child psychologist Donald Winnicott in the 1950s: I conceptualize the child's accommodation, education, social support and relationships, formal support, legal advice, and leisure opportunities as the environment which holds the child, in the absence of a family.In the UK, section 20 of the Children Act 1989 mandates that a child for whom no adult has parental authority must be ...

Redessiner les contours de l’État : la mise en oeuvre des politiques migratoires

“…Conformément à la convention internationale des droits de l'enfant, ces jeunes gens sont censés être considérés comme des enfants en situation de danger. Mais en France comme ailleurs, l'accueil de ces mineurs isolés est de plus en plus considéré comme un enjeu migratoire, à traiter sous un angle répressif, plutôt que comme une question de protection de l'enfance (Senovilla Hernandez, 2014 ;Van Zeebroeck, 2007 ;Wilding, 2017 ;Senovilla Hernandez, 2014).…”