Children of the Crisis

Ethnographic Perspectives on Unaccompanied Refugee Youth In and en Route to Europe

Annika Lems, Kathrin Oester, Sabine Strasser, Annika Lems, Kathrin Oester, Sabine Strasser

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000460827
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Emigration & Immigration

Every year, thousands of young people on the run from war and persecution, or escaping poverty and chronic instability, make their way to Europe without their parents. Embarking on long and often dangerous journeys, they have either become separated from their families on the way or set out on their own. In recent years, the number of unaccompanied minors arriving in Europe has risen drastically. It has led to a major shift in perception in European countries, initiating a wealth of policies and infrastructures targeted specifically at unaccompanied child refugees.

This book investigates the emergence of the unaccompanied child refugee as a 'crisis figure'. It shows how the sense of exceptionality attached to this figure translates into ambiguous and at times extremely contradictory social practices that have far-reaching effects on the lives of refugee youth. By bringing together ethnographically driven research on unaccompanied minors in some of the core arrival and transit countries in or into Europe, it shows the divergent ways ideas on childhood, deservingness and vulnerability are interpreted, lived, and grappled with on the ground. By laying the focus on young people's own experiences and perspectives, it establishes a deeper understanding of the ways unaccompanied asylum seekers live and make sense of shifting social terrains.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Introduction

Annika Lems, Kathrin Oester and Sabine Strasser

ABSTRACT

This special issue explores the ways unaccompanied refugee youth in and en route to Europe actively deal with the intensification of exclusionary practices towards migrants and refugees. In the Introduction we aim to set the scene for the individual articles by sketching the various political, historical and discursive levels at which the unaccompanied minor has come to be constructed as a crisis figure in Europe. We show how the sense of exceptionality attached to this figure translates into ambiguous and at times extremely contradictory social practices that have far-reaching effects on the lives of refugee youth. In paying attention to the conceptual flaws and dangers inherent in linking unaccompanied minors to ideas of crisis, we aim to demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the ways young people themselves make sense of the ascriptions, ideas and practices they are subject to. We suggest that ethnographically driven research that lays the focus on the ways young people actively navigate the ambiguous social landscapes they are confronted with can form an important means to move beyond the simplistic and ahistorical models of explanation put forward by frameworks of crisis.

Introduction

In the summer months of 2015, when people across Europe were coming to terms with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees, journalists and political commentators were quick to label the momentary breakdown of long-established European strategies of deterrence against migrants and refugees as a ‘crisis’. This ‘crisis’, the emerging narratives suggested, was not one of the people forced to leave behind their countries due to violence, war or chronic uncertainty, but a ‘crisis’ of the European countries who could no longer keep the movements of displaced people at bay. As this ‘crisis’ manifested itself through depictions of the seemingly endless masses of people crossing borders, climbing fences or camping out in parks, one figure came to occupy centre stage: the child refugee. Stories about large groups of children travelling without parents or adult guardians rapidly made their way into media reports. Tabloid newspapers across Europe that had previously played an important role in the instalment of an anti-refugee discourse driven by fear and resentment changed tone when it came to the unaccompanied refugee minors (McLaughlin 2017; Smith and Waite 2018). On the 12th of June 2015 the British right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail published a headline article carrying the telling title:

They’ve already walked across the blistering Sahara desert, witnessed ISIS beheadings and survived the voyage across the Med in boats so hot ‘they couldn't breathe’. Now these child migrants – as young as ten – are travelling Europe ALONE. (Roberts 2015)

In a similar vein, the German tabloid Bild published an article about the dreadful situation of children, including unaccompanied minors, travelling along the Balkan route entitled:

Starvation, coldness, abuse: This is how children on their way to Europe suffer. (Dümer 2015)

In the weeks that followed, countless media reports depicted the young people as a traumatised and highly vulnerable group of refugees in dire need of help and socio-medical intervention. A narrative emerged that portrayed unaccompanied minors as victims of the wrongdoings of a world ruled by corrupted adults, a world they were not in control of and that they needed to be protected against. There was talk of a moral responsibility to save these children, often by drawing on historical events, such as the Kindertransport in the Second World War, when Jewish children were brought to Britain (McLaughlin 2017), or, in the case of Germany, by describing the responsibility of helping refugee children as a reparation for the failures of the Nazi past (Anderson 2017, 11). Throughout these discourses, the figure of the unaccompanied child refugee as an exceptional humanitarian category entered the discursive scene. Unlike the figure of the (male) adult asylum seeker who had potentially been contaminated by the political and social chaos marking their countries of origin, the figure of the unaccompanied minor formed the ‘purest’ refugee victim.

Yet, these depictions of victimhood did not last long. No sooner had the narrative of the unaccompanied child refugee in need of saving entered the public discursive arena than it started to transform into its extreme opposite. In December 2015, the Bild’s headline article was entitled:

Unaccompanied ‘minors ‘: 45% are cheating regarding their age. (Aswad 2015)

Not long after, the Daily Mail headline read:

Just how old do you think these migrant ‘children’ are? Alarming pictures of refugees – including ‘the fastest 14-year-old in Sweden’ – that shed light on a growing scandal amid Europe's asylum crisis. (Reid 2016)

Only months after the wave of compassion for the unaccompanied child refugees had engulfed even the most hardened right-wing tabloids, the figure of the unaccompanied minor became riddled with doubts and fears. Stories about ‘imposter children’ (Silverman 2016) faking their age and identity in order to gain access to welfare benefits mingled with narratives about migrant youth criminality and fears of hordes of young asylum-seeking men threatening Europe’s moral and social order (Pruitt, Berents, and Munro 2018, 695). Throughout these debates, the unaccompanied minor was no longer treated as an innocent child, but written into the ambivalent narrative conventions surrounding youth.

These paradoxical discursive formations have much to say about the conflicting ideas, expectations and fears that have become attached to the figure of the unaccompanied minor. Narratives about the unaccompanied refugee child as the ambassador of a pure and untainted form of humanity run alongside stories about unaccompanied refugee youth as the ultimate embodiment of a Europe that is spinning out of control. These ideas cannot be reduced to the sphere of media representations alone. In recent years scholars have started to devote attention to the ways the sense of crisis that has become linked to the figure of the unaccompanied minor translates into ambivalent and often extremely contradictory policies and practices (e.g. Menjívar and Perreira 2017; Sedmak, Gornik, and Sauer 2017). While these policies and practices are well documented, very little is known about the ways the young people themselves navigate these shifting social terrains. How do young people categorised as unaccompanied minors deal with the deep sense of ambiguity surrounding their reception and treatment? What ideas of childhood, youth and adulthood do they bring along, and what hopes propel them on their journeys? How do they make sense of the intensification of exclusionary practices they are confronted with in or on their way to the European societies in which they seek to settle down?

It is these questions we aim to explore in this special issue. Our focus lies on the young people’s own experiences, perspectives and narratives. By bringing together ethnographically driven research on unaccompanied minors in some of the core arrival and transit countries in or into Europe, the individual articles show the divergent ways ideas on childhood, youth, deservingness, vulnerability and danger surrounding this discursive figure are interpreted, lived and grappled with on the ground. Our aim is thus twofold: While tracing the discursive practices whereby young unaccompanied refugees have come to be written into ambiguous social and political classifications, we do not reduce these processes to the discursive arena. By laying the focus on the particularity of ‘local moral worlds’ (Willen 2015) in the interplay with translocal dynamics, our aim is to come to a deeper understanding of the ways unaccompanied asylum seekers live and make sense of these shifting social terrains.

In keeping our focus on the young people’s social worlds, we are in conversation with a growing body of research that deploys ethnographic approaches to gain a more nuanced understanding of unaccompanied refugee youth’s lived experiences (e.g. Bryan and Denov 2011; Engebrigtsen 2011; Wernesjö 2012; Chase 2013; Heidbrink 2014). This increased interest in unaccompanied minors’ own perspectives needs to be read against the backdrop of a wider trend in migration research that has started to pay attention to children’s active involvement in migratory processes (e.g. Knörr 2005; White et al. 2011; Nì Laoire, White, and Skelton 2017). In a similar vein, the authors in this special issue do not treat children as mere backdrops or onlookers to an adult’s world, but as important actors that need to be taken into consideration when attempting to understand phenomena such as the ‘crisis’ of the current border and asylum regimes. In doing so we aim to extend the scholarship on unaccompanied refugee youth beyond its dominant focus on psychosocial well-being (e.g. Bean et al. 2007; Derluyn and Broekaert 2008; Stotz et al. 2015), policy- and rights-related responses (e.g. Bhabha 2008; Menjívar and Perreira 2017; Parusel 2017) and social work practices and welfare services (e.g. Kohli 2006; Nelson, Price, and Zubrzycki 2016). While these studies give a good idea about the different institutional forces that enhance or limit the young people’s possibilities and freedoms, very little is known about how they actively navigate the complex social landscapes they find themselves confronted with.

In this Introduction we lay the discursive, theoretical and epistemological grounds for the articles that follow. We do so by mapping the various political, historical and discursive levels at which the figure of the unaccompanied minor has come to be constructed as a crisis figure in Europe. In paying attention to the conceptual flaws and dangers inherent in linking unaccompanied minors to ideas of crisis, we aim to show the importance of taking seriously the ways young people themselves make sense of the ascriptions, ideas and practices they are subject to. We argue that the nuance an ethnographic focus reveals allows us to move beyond the simplistic and ahistorical models of explanation put forward by frameworks of crisis. While the individual articles show the ways unaccompanied refugee youth actively deal with the ambiguous ideas, expectations and practices they are confronted with, the Introduction sketches the criss-crossing historical, social and political processes playing into the production of this particular figure. By delineating the multiple levels at which the unaccompanied minor as a crisis figure has come to be riddled with ambiguity, we aim to lay the conceptual foundation for the articles’ empirical focus.

In a first step we show the emergence of the unaccompanied minor as an ambiguous crisis figure in Europe. We do so by tracing the shifting social and political formations the 2015s summer of displacements called into being and the particular role unaccompanied young refugees occupy within this space of social and political transformations. We build on a growing body of research that reads the emergence of the figure of the unaccompanied minor against the backdrop of an asylum system that uses the language of crisis to justify the increased creation of short-lived humanitarian exceptions (e.g. Ticktin 2016; De Graeve 2017; Sedmak, Gornik, and Sauer 2017).

In a second step we shed light on the contested ideas and expectations of childhood and youth that unaccompanied refugee youth have to contend with. We do so by tracing debates in policy, activism and academia that discuss unaccompanied minors mainly in connection to children’s universal right to a carefree childhood. While the emphasis on unaccompanied minors as children in need of protection is based on an understandable urge to safeguard the rights of this particularly vulnerable group of young people, we show that this often comes at a great cost: the backlash against those who do not fit in the picture of the innocent, apolitical child refugee and are treated as problematic and potentially dangerous refugee youth. Looking into the ambiguous ways youth has been c...