Baobab Briefings, Baobab Voices
The experiences of age-disputed young people at the Baobab Centre
The Baobab Centre is proud to present our latest publication:
“Looking for “the youthful lustre”: The experiences of age-disputed young people at the Baobab Centre, in their own words”.
This report shares the first-hand testimonies of 27 young people from our community, directly quoting their experiences with age-assessment disputes and the age dispute process. Complementing the key reports produced over the last few years by the Helen Bamber Foundation, Refugee Council, Young Roots and others, our report aims to add our data to document this malpractice and, even more important, to amplify the voices of those who have to live with the consequences of this continuing injustice.
Their stories are shocking—but they are real.
Our report found that among the young people who attended our services in 2024:
For a significant number of young people who attend our centre, age disputes were part of their experience of arriving to the UK unaccompanied as minors and of claiming asylum. This is a shockingly high number for any population — but particularly so for our young people, who have all experienced at least one traumatic event in their journey into exile. Even for this particularly vulnerable group, age disputes are frequent, and the impacts of trauma on their presentation, their appearance or their narratives, clearly not accounted for by authorities who assess them.
As other reports from other NGOs have found out, age disputes turn out to be more often wrong than right by a significant margin. Clearly, visual age checks at the border, and the systematic disbelief that greets children as they arrive, produce results that are unreliable. Why, when results are so clearly wrong, force young people to appeal and follow lengthy procedures so they can prove they were right when they said they knew how old they were in the first place? Suspicion is not in a child’s best interest, as defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Among all young people in our community, the average waiting time to receive refugee protection was in 2024 an astonishing 3 years and 8 months — a shocking number when one remembers that these are young people waiting for certainty to rebuild their lives here. For age-disputed young people, this average was 4 years and 4 months. Being age-disputed, clearly, delays what is already a long and complex process to be granted asylum protection
In our young people’s experiences of age disputes, there was a shocking reliance on visual, pseudo-scientific methods to assess age. A young person we see was denied to be a minor as assessors found his skin tone had lost its “youthful lustre”. Worryingly, the Home Office guidance on age assessment still includes reference to “physical appearance and demeanour”. There is no scientific way to ascribe age to anyone — and what is used today is pseudo-science of the worst kind.
Of central importance is the fact that age disputes impact on all aspects of our young people’s social lives: access to foster care, access to education, access to employment, access to family reunification and family life, etc. Quick, visual “age-assessments” at the border were shown again and again in our documentation to have huge and multifaceted impacts on young people’s lives down the road. Children whose age was disputed in a cursory check (for instance: hair pulled back on arrival at Dover by a border guard, after 10 hours at sea) find themselves denied access to the education they need or the support they deserve.
Fundamentally, our young people felt that being age-disputed and disbelieved on such a fundamental aspect of their identity had made them feel “stripped of everything”. Not only their personal integrity felt under attack, but also the memory of their left-behind parents. This, in the words of their therapists, “was crippling”.
Our report offers direct, concrete testimony from our age-disputed young people. In their words, age disputes are shown to be part of an asylum and care system that thwarts their best efforts to rebuild their lives. Being disbelieved on their age, they say, delayed their efforts to integrate, held their therapeutic recovery back, and at times led to suicidal thoughts. It should not be that way.
Based on this evidence, our report makes five essential recommendations to all stakeholders for urgent improvements in age assessment procedures:
