Refugee report - Treatment of children is a disgrace

THE Irish Refugee Council’s report on separated children seeking asylum in Ireland is an indictment of our bureaucracy.

In 1999 there were only 32 documented cases of children separated from their parents arriving in the country, but by March of this year that number had jumped to 2,717 separated children. About 40% of them were reunited with family who had already arrived in this country, but some 60% were not, which poses a huge problem. Of the 1,085 children who arrived in 2000, some 9% were between the ages of six and nine, while another 9% were under the age of five. The latter usually arrived with an older sibling, but there were many who arrived with people who were not related at all.

The unaccompanied, or separated children, like their adult counterparts, originated mainly in Nigeria, Romania, Sierra Leone, Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in that order. They arrived by the same means as the adults.

Only 12.8% have been recognised as refugees, which means that over 87.2% have had their applications refused.

The study shows that progress has been made in terms of developing procedures of asylum determination, but key gaps have been identified in matters such as guardianship, accommodation and interim care, as well as access to and support in education.

There have also been failures in identifying and implementing durable solutions for the children, such as settlement and integration, or tracing and re-uniting them with their families.

One of the biggest problems has been a general asylum policy, which treats minors over the age of 14 years of age as de facto adults.

There is also discrimination against separated children in care, compared to Irish children. There is only one social worker for every 42 asylum-seeking children, which makes it extremely difficult to address their individual needs.

Many have language problems. Others have difficulties as a result of having been exploited, traumatised by war, or raped on the way to this country. Some of the young girls were pregnant when they arrived here.

Most of those over 14 years old stay in unsupervised hostels, where there is nobody to look after them. This is an invitation to trouble and further exploitation, which reflects a typical shirking of responsibility on the part of our bureaucrats.

Until recent years the typical solution of bureaucrats was to hand over responsibility for such children to religious institutions and forget about them.

We are now being confronted with the horrors of the Dickensian conditions in which some of those children were held, abused and exploited. But now the solution seems to be to do nothing at all.

Are we not inviting even more horrors by ignoring the needs of these children and even pretending that they have no such needs, because they are supposedly adults? Such an attitude is disgraceful.