What’s in an age
When I was a youth worker, I had a whole repertoire of ‘get to know you’ games. I always carried around an imaginary ‘tool box’, so to speak, consisting of games and activities that helped participants to get to know each other, which according to me is one of the most essential tasks that can make group work with young people either successful or a complete disaster. The games and activities one choses as a facilitator must be playful and light-hearted, yet personal and revealing enough so that participants get an idea of others in the room before entering into deeper conversations and exploring topics together. These games set the tone for the rest of any session, workshop, or event and are crucial to defining group dynamics.
One of my favourite ‘get to know you’ activities is one where the group has to form lines according to certain criteria without talking. You ask participants to form a line from the tallest to the shortest (often easy), then you go on to make the task a bit more difficult by asking them to form lines according to their shoe sizes, first letter of their name in alphabetical order etc. At some point (usually rather early in the game) I would ask participants to form a line according to their age. While this is a rather straightforward task in most settings (after all numbers can be expressed through finger count), I remember trying to facilitate this exercise with a group of young people in the asylum process. ‘Which age do you want?’ one participant said, ‘the one the Home Office gave me, or the one from the Council?’. Others turned around with similar questions while I gave up on this being a non-verbal exercise. ‘Yeah which one is it? The one they wrote on my file in Dover or the one they then decided here in Croydon.’ I turned back to the first participant and said something along the lines of ‘Why don’t you go with the one your family gave you?’. ‘Ah man, I don’t even remember what that was, they’ve confused me now’ he scoffed. I decided to move to another activity at that point, but couldn’t stop thinking about what my young participants had just told me. How does being of a certain age (or not) affect your rights and entitlements? What does it do to you when something as fundamental as your age is being challenged by bureaucratic authorities? What other categories might be dragged into uncertainty when not even your age is clear? If authorities don’t believe your age, what will they question next: your nationality, your identity, where your family lives, what languages you speak? And how do you maintain a sense of self when everything around you is being challenged and interrogated?
Age is a category that we learn to be important while growing up. The simple fact that nursery groups, school-classrooms, youth sports teams, and many other parts of children’s and young people’s lives are allocated according to year of birth instils the idea in us (humans) that there is a fundamental difference between being born in one year or another, that the numerical / quantifiable value of age holds actual meaning in terms of who we are and how we see one another. I remember clearly thinking of my high school peers born in 1985 as ‘elders’ that I needed to learn from and of those born in 1987 as ‘youngsters’ that needed my advice and guidance. School had decided to put us in different categories (grades) according to the year (and month) we were born in, and while sometimes there were only a few months between myself and someone a grade above or below me; being in these grades mattered. It defined what you were learning, who you were hanging out with and how you were being treated. Here I was in 11th grade (the first year of German high-school) telling 10th graders (the last year of German middle-school) who were probably only a couple of months younger than me about all the things they could expect once they were in high school and starting sentences with ‘when I was in middle school’, almost like a granddad digging deep in memory and telling the new generations about how it was ‘back when I was your age’. To me, these gaps were meaningful, and I really understood the world around me and the people within it according to these administrative categories related to chronological age.
For the young participants in the workshop age mattered on a different level. Authors such as Heaven Crawley have suggested that ‘it is virtually impossible to assess chronological age even using scientific or medical assessment processes’ (2009, 95). From interviews with practitioners carried out as part of the Shadows research project we know that many age assessments with young asylum seekers don’t even use scientific or medical means but rather rely on whether Home Office or local authority employees think that an individual looks and behaves like a child after a 15-minute assessment. These arbitrary decisions of declaring someone 17 ½ or 18 years old have a huge impact on the rights and entitlements of young people in the asylum process. These decisions define whether young people qualify for local authority care as a ‘looked after child’ with access to leaving care support (foster care, or semi-independent housing in the local area, support from a social worker / Personal Advisor etc.) or whether they’ll be put into the general asylum system (NASS) as an adult asylum seeker (which means hotel accommodation often far away from the area, a weekly allowance of £8.86, and no right to work). The outcome of an age assessment fundamentally defines a young person’s pathway after claiming asylum.
I am not only a youth worker but also a researcher on the Shadows project, where we are trying to understand how people make lives under the conditions of ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF). Age assessments in this context emerge as one route that leads young people into situations where they end up with NRPF. Young people who are assessed as being over 18 years of age are put in a situation that produces both gaps and cul-de-sacs in their journeys and denies them access to the most basic government and welfare support.
Age disputes show how particular aspects of young people’s identities are not only questioned but also weaponised and operationalised to produce categories of deserving and undeserving migrants. A process by which national border regimes are being enforced by controlling and curtailing access to welfare benefits; something that several authors have described as ‘welfare bordering’. Age being both weaponised and operationalised in this way has deep implications on ideas about childhood and migration. It seems that the figure of the ‘asylum seeking child’ occupies a very particular space in the nation-state’s categorisation of (un-)deservingness. Nando Sigona and Elaine Chase draw our attention to this when they describe how migrant children ‘embody an underlining and unresolved tension embedded in the handling of migration in liberal Western democracies: to protect the vulnerable whilst also protecting the border of nation-states’ (2023, 232) and Jacqueline Bhabha detects a similar ambivalence in the treatment of migrant children ‘where perceptions of vulnerability and otherness coalesce’ (2014, 13). These tensions and ambivalences have real-life consequences for my young workshop-participants who were caught in between different categories, constantly having to prove their status as ‘children’ or ‘former children’ in order to secure access to public funds. A similar ambivalence struck us in interviews with third-sector practitioners where on the one side it was stressed how young people who came to the country by themselves had missed out on important stages of their development as adolescents, therefore operating at a much younger age, on the other side it was mentioned how unaccompanied young people matured more rapidly due to the lack of parental support during their journey. Unaccompanied children seem to be both younger and older at the same time, as well as trapped in between the unresolved tensions of the nation-state’s protection logics.
At Shadows we want to learn more about how arbitrary bureaucratic categorisations affect people’s lives; age emerges here as an important factor to consider. They say age is just a number but in times of the ‘hostile environment’ and ‘welfare bordering’, it becomes much more than that; a tool to measure deservingness for the state and an arbitrary obstacle for young people that prevents them from accessing important support structures.
References:
Bhabha, Jaqueline (2014) Child Migration and Human Rights in a Global Age, Princeton University Press.
Crawley, Heaven (2009) ‘Between a rock and a hard place: negotiating age and identity in the UK asylum system’, in: Thomas, N. (ed.), Children, politics and communication: Participation at the margins, Bristol University Press.
Sigona, Nando & Chase, Elaine (2023) ‘Global Governance of Child and Youth Migration’, in: Chaise, E. et. al., Becoming Adult on the Move: Migration Journeys, Encounters and Life Transitions, Palgrave Macmillan.
