Refugee Children

Towards the Next Horizon

Charles Watters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134177134
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Prestazione di assistenza sanitaria

The last twenty years have seen unprecedented numbers of refugee children entering Western countries. Many of these children will have experienced the atrocities of war and issues concerning their care and treatment are high on the agenda of research bodies, policy makers and service providers.

Refugee Children is the first book to offer a wide ranging analysis of the context of care and the measures taken by nation states and intergovernmental bodies to address perceived problems. Drawing on a detailed examination of practices, the book outlines a model of good practice in the care of refugee children. Topics covered include:

• the treatment of asylum seeking children at the borders of industrialised countries
• reception, psycho-social problems, social capital, education, and issues relating to cultural diversity and integration
• a critical analysis of responses to these problems including the development of special programmes for refugee children,
• elements of good practice in the field
• the transfer of good practice between countries
• implications for the development of services and academic research in this vital area.

With a series of case studies examining practices from a number of countries, Refugee Children makes a vital contribution both to the social care literature in this field and to theory and research in refugee and migration studies. As such it is essential reading for academic researchers in a range of disciplines including social policy, education, migration and refugee studies as well as service providers in health care, social care, housing and education.

Charles Watters is Director of the European Centre for the Study of Migration and Social Care in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.

1
Introduction

When I considered writing a book on refugee children, I was immediately confronted by questions concerning its scope and related questions regarding the definition of ‘refugee children’. The more I engaged in research on the topic, the greater the potential areas of investigation became. One could easily argue that one book alone would be totally insufficient to address the issues affecting refugee children even in one country or region of the world. At the time of writing, the everyday brutality of the situations in Darfur, Somalia, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name a few, are giving rise to the forced displacement of thousands of people, many of them children, who cross international borders in the hope of protection. By the end of 2005, Afghanistan was by far the largest country of origin of refugees, with no less than 1.9 million Afghan refugees reported in 72 asylum countries (UNHCR, 2006a). All of these situations have a profound impact on children under the age of 18 who make up an estimated 44 per cent of the total population ‘of concern’ to United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). The scale and complexity of the field is indicated further by the considerable regional variation in the proportion of children involved and the types of displacement experienced. Those recorded as being ‘of concern’ to UNHCR include refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons and stateless persons. The proportion of children in this overall population of approximately 20.8 million at the end of 2005 (UNHCR, 2006a) varies considerably from region to region with 54 per cent aged under 18 in Africa, 46 per cent in Asia and 25 per cent in Europe (UNHCR, 2006b, p22).

As will be discussed below, these figures reflect different dynamics of displacement. As UNHCR notes, ‘the vast majority of the world’s refugee children seek sanctuary in poor countries’ and have neither the resources nor the capacity to travel to wealthy industrialised countries (ibid.). In general, in the first decade of the new millennium, countries with mass refugee situations are those in the developing world and these also have proportionately higher numbers of refugee women and children among refugee populations. The gender and age balance differs considerably among those seeking asylum in ‘developed’ countries, with fewer children and a significantly higher proportion of males.

Besides geographical and numerical disparities, the subject matter immediately raises definitional issues. As Zolberg has noted, ‘although the term refugee has deep historical roots, its significance as a legal and administrative category has been vastly enhanced in our own times’ (Zolberg et al., 1989, p3, emphasis in original). Along with this increase in significance, the category ‘refugee’ has been more narrowly defined within legal and administrative contexts. According to the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees agreed upon by the UN in 1967, the term has a very specific meaning applying to any person,

who is outside the country of his nationality…because he has or had well-founded fear of persecution by reason of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion and is unable or, because of such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of the government of the country of his nationality.

(Ibid., p4)

As will be discussed below, the focus of this book is not restricted to legal and administrative definitions of refugee children based on the protocol, but instead accords with what Zolberg has referred to as a ‘sociological’ definition ‘grounded in observable social realities’ (1989, p4). As such, rather than taking its point of departure from legal definitions, the operation of these definitions ‘on the ground’ constitutes part of the field of enquiry. Accordingly, many of the children considered in the study will not be granted refugee status; some will be expelled from territories without having access to information or resources that would enable them to make an asylum claim, others will be placed in detention or reception centres while an asylum claim is considered, only for it to be rejected and the child deported. Indeed refugee status is accorded to a very small minority of children in industrialised countries owing to a prevailing ‘culture of disbelief’ while a significantly higher proportion are allowed to remain for limited periods on humanitarian grounds (Bhabha and Crock, 2007). Rather than being led by prevailing legal definitions, I use the term ‘refugee children’ in a capacious way to refer to children who are seeking refuge in industrialised countries owing to adverse circumstances in their countries of origin. Many of the children considered here make applications for asylum, but substantial numbers do not or cannot owing to various constraints arising from the policies of deterrence pursued by potential host countries.

My decision to focus the book on refugee children in industrialised countries is not therefore based on a prior calculation of numbers or of needs, but on a growing concern to understand a crisis on the ‘doorstep’ of the world’s richest nations. The study is informed by accounts of refugee children’s experiences, but its primary focus is not on presenting ‘stories’ of displaced people themselves, of which there are several good recent examples (Jones, 2004; Moorehead, 2005; Yaghmaian, 2005; Molano, 2005 to name a few). The focus instead is on what may broadly be described as the ways in which refugee children are treated when they seek to cross borders into the industrialised world. I argue that children find themselves at a number of interfaces between what may be described as technologies of government. These include concerns with security and territorial integrity or what may be called the ‘immigration control trajectory’ and what I have described as the ‘welfare trajectory’ which is oriented towards programmes of social support and, increasingly, psychosocial well-being. The interrelationship between these aspects of government reveals acute tensions between conflicting views of the refugee children as ‘untrustworthy children’ or as ‘damaged children’ requiring psychological and emotional rehabilitation.

The content and purpose of this typology is rather different to influential generic and sociological approaches suggested, for example, by James, Jenks and Prout (1998). In examining how the child is constituted sociologically, James et al. outline four orientations; the socially constructed child, the tribal child, the minority group child and the social-structural child (James et al., 1998). The orientation of the present study is towards representing ideal typical forms generated through practice rather than through an overview of academic theories. I include an examination of a range of responses to refugee children, from border controls and age assessments to educational and psychosocial interventions. In doing so, I attempt to identify and examine salient discourses on refugee children that are embedded in a range of services and institutional responses.

My concern here is not only to examine the way in which industrialised countries respond to refugee children, but also to argue for a particular methodological orientation in examining these responses. It is proposed that a ‘thin’ description of various programmes offered in countries is insufficient as it tells us little about the social and political contexts in which such programmes arise and the professional discourses that underpin them. I argue instead for a multi-level ‘thick’ description in which programmes are examined in the context of macro-, meso-and micro-level aspects. I postulate that this approach is not only theoretically important but also necessary at a practical level if programmes are to be transferred successfully from region to region, country to country.

A further area of concern is the transformation of services themselves. Here I eschew casual distinctions between the world of academic research and the world of policy and practice. I argue that ‘thick’ analysis, far from being an academic indulgence, is here a prerequisite for meaningful and enduring change in services. As Turton has argued, ‘the best way to make scientific knowledge “relevant” to practice is to use it to scrutinise and problematise what practical knowledge takes for granted, not to sustain or legitimise it’ (Turton, 2003, p17). Turton draws on Castles’ observations of the potential weakness of policy-driven research to support his argument:

The key point is that policy-driven research can lead not only to poor sociology but also to bad policy. This is because narrowly focussed empirical research, often designed to provide an answer to an immediate bureaucratic problem, tends to follow a circular logic. It accepts the problem definitions built into its terms of reference, and does not look for more fundamental causes, nor for more challenging solutions.

(Castles, 2003, p26)

The present study seeks to move away both from a narrowly policy-driven research focus and from scientific measures administered on the basis of a premise that refugee children have various problems that should be rectified. Rather, its focus is on examination of the ways in which refugee children come to be construed as ‘problems’ and the roles of professionalised discourses in postulating and analysing the nature of their problems.

I pay particular attention to the response of public services with responsibility for children’s welfare and the plethora of special programmes that have been established in response to refugee children’s perceived needs. My approach has not been to offer a country by country account of the treatment of refugee children, but to draw on examples from a range of countries to illustrate particular aspects of their treatment. In doing so, it is not my intention either to single out particular countries for condemnation, nor to promote nationalistic hubris in which one country is seen as ‘better’, or ‘more humane’ than another. The issues affecting refugee children in our own times are cross national and the measures of control and treatment can be found in general terms across the industrialised world. The limitations identified in many programmes are not so much the products of weakness in national responses (although in some cases they are) as symptomatic of wider deficiencies that can be found across several countries. Likewise, no country is devoid of innovative and positive responses towards the care of refugee children and these are often achieved in the context of similar institutional and financial challenges.

The book as such is oriented primarily around particular themes rather than practices within specific countries and governed by overriding questions regarding the treatment of refugee children entering industrialised countries. I have adopted the term ‘industrialised’ following its common usage by international bodies such as UNHCR to encompass the countries of the European Union, North America, Australia and New Zealand. While there are references to a number of countries as illustrative of particular approaches to policy and practice, some have received considerably more extensive treatment than others. This is, as indicated above, partly due to a focus on themes rather than particular countries. It is also a consequence of selecting topics and locations of which I have the closest knowledge through various projects of collaborative research and educational exchange.

This knowledge has been generated through my experience in working on a wide variety of studies including an examination of good practice in mental health and social care of refugees in four European countries – UK, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal – plus Australia, Canada and Guatemala (Watters et al., 2003); an ongoing collaborative project on schools’ projects for refugee children with colleagues at McGill University in Montreal and a review of policies of deterrence and their impact on refugees with colleagues at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (Silove et al., 2000). It has also been influenced by engagement in a number of studies and educational forums with governmental bodies and NGOs including the Red Cross, the Refugee Council, various local authorities including Kent and Manchester, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, the Transcultural Centre in Stockholm, the Nordic School of Public Health and the European Network of Asylum Reception Organisations.

Refugee children: issues of definition and enumeration

Academic and policy papers on refugees frequently begin with statements concerning the number of refugees in the world or, depending on the scope of the paper, in a specific geographical area. However, statistical presentations can be fraught with problems and data has to be carefully contextualised to avoid confusion. One salient distinction is between refugees and ‘persons of concern’ to the UNHCR. In 2003, for example, the global number of refugees reached an estimated 9.7 million while the total population of concern to UNHCR was 17.1 million. At the start of 2005, the figure for the number of people of concern had risen to 19.2 million, an increase of 13 per cent, while the number of refugees – identified as those who have fled persecution to seek safety by crossing international borders – had decreased by 4 per cent to 9.2 million people. Significant influences on the decline in refugee numbers in early 2005 included the return home of approximately one million Afghans and significant refugee returns to Iraq, Burundi, Angola and Liberia.

As noted above, persons ‘of concern’ include asylum seekers who may be defined as those who flee their own country and seek sanctuary in another state. Despite widespread concerns about an influx of large numbers of asylum seekers, the latter only constitutes about 4 per cent of the population of concern with the numbers of people seeking asylum in industrialised countries has declined significantly. In 2004 the number of asylum seekers, some 680,000, represented a fall to its lowest level for 16 years (UNHCR 2006a). The reasons behind this dramatic decrease in numbers are complex and contested. They are at least in part linked to the expansion of policies of deterrence, making it increasingly difficult for asylum seekers to cross international borders. For example, the UK, which in recent years has been a major country of destination, has taken a number of steps to deter asylum seekers, including tightening of borders, increasing visa restrictions in ‘sending’ countries, increasing fines for transport companies and restricting opportunities for pursuing asylum claims through the legal system. It is perhaps notable that France, often a major route for refugees heading towards the UK, displaced the UK in 2004 as the industrialised country receiving the highest number of asylum applications, some 58,500, as compared to a UK figure of 40,600.

An increasingly significant population ‘of concern’ to UNHCR is internally displaced people, commonly referred to as IDPs. Indeed at the present time, the ratio of IDPs to refugees is estimated to be 2.5:1 (Weiss and Korn, 2006, p12). UNHCR record that ‘while nearly 5.6 million internally displaced persons were “of concern” to UNHCR in 2004, the total number of internally displaced persons worldwide was estimated at 25 million’ (UNHCR, 2006b, p17). The circumstances of this group are likely to be similar to those of refugees with the exception that they have not crossed an international border in seeking safety from persecution. Columbia records the highest numbers of IDPs being helped by UNHCR, some 2 million according to government estimates and 3.3 million according to the estimates of NGOs. Other significant categories include stateless persons (approximately 2 million in 2004); some 1.5 million returnees who have gone back to countries of origin and a population of 83,700 in 2004 who have resettled, notably in Australia and the US.

Questions regarding the number and distribution of refugee children must be placed in this broader context. According to the UNHCR, in 2003 43 per cent of the population of concern of 17.1 million were under 18 years old. Eleven per cent were under the age of five. In Africa and the CASWANAME region (Central Asia, South-West Asia, North Africa and the Middle East) birth rates tend to be high and more than half of the refugee population is under 18 years old, with lower proportions in Asia and the Pacific (36%), Europe (26%) and the Americas (20%). These numbers fluctuate year on year and month by month, reflecting human responses to war, human rights violations and environmental catastrophes. It should be added that these figures include those IDPs helped by UNHCR, representing just over one fifth of the estimated 25 million IDPs worldwide (UNHCR, 2004).

A 2001 report by UNHCR entitled ‘Women, Children and Older Refugees’ provides a relatively detailed and nuanced account of the global situation (UNHCR, 2001). The figures presented are broadly consistent with later reports in highlighting Africa as the region with the highest number of refugee children, with 17 per cent of the children under five and 56 per cent of the total global population of refugee children under 18. Here it is reported that the countries with the highest proportion of refugee children under five are Togo (26%) and Burundi (24%). However, aggregated data derived from continents may obscure salient differences between countries in the same region. For example, while 12 per cent of refugee children were located in Asia, high rates of refugee children under five were recorded in Bangladesh (24%) and East Timor (24%), similar to the rates in some African countries. In Europe, significant regional variations were noted in 2000, with children comprisin...

Table of contents

• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical orientations
• 3 Children at borders
• 4 Unaccompanied minors
• 5 Education
• 6 The role of special programmes
• 7 Good practice in services for refugee children
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index