22 January 2024 , 22:00
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Terrified child refugees are being put at risk of abuse as the Home Office forces them to share rooms with unrelated adults, a new report shows.
At least 1,300 unaccompanied children - some as young as 14 - were wrongly put in unsupervised adult accommodation and detention in 18 months, figures show. Campaigners say the findings show there is something "fundamentally wrong" with Home Office decision-making at the border.
Fourteen under-18s spent time in adult prisons after being charged with immigration offences after being wrongly age assessed between January 2022 and June 2023, it is claimed. And Humans for Rights Network says it identified 832 cases where a child may have been sharing accomodation with unrelated adults - including 50 who it was unable to find.
A 16-year-old girl, whose age has since been accepted, told researchers: "When I said my age they said to me you are lying, so they took us to a private room and a lady asked me some different questions, she said ‘ok your age, I can guess your age is 22’.
"She said because you arrive by boat, you must know what you are doing, therefore you are over 18." The teenager, from Eritrea and identified as Helen in the report, added: "The hotel I am in now, there are lots of people, more than my age, men more than my age, I find it quite stressful here."
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Kamena Dorling, director of policy at the Helen Bamber Foundation - which produced the report along with the Refugee Council and Humans for Rights Network - said: “These new figures show that there continues to be something fundamentally wrong with Home Office decision-making at the border, and hundreds of children are suffering as a result."
And Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: "Each case is a child who is being put at risk and whose welfare is being forgotten. It is an alarming child protection failure and the Government must take urgent action so every child is kept safe."
A Home Office spokesperson said: "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."