When working at Love146UK we researched this. We campaigned against this. Biological age assessments are notoriously unreliable, and incredibly traumatic for children who have been through war and persecution.
It is part of a pattern with this government to put immigration enforcement ahead of child protection, though. They are abandoning the very principles of safeguarding in favour of cruelty. Already they are talking about forcibly restraining children.
They are actually boasting about plans to lock up children. Children who have already been through more than most of us could possibly imagine.
Their response to hundreds of children going missing from Home Office hotels has been to shrug and blame the kids. Even though they know many have already been found being exploited.
This isn’t what “the public want”. Are you honestly telling me people voted for the Conservatives to put children at even more risk? Yet, here we have a government which doesn’t see them as children. A government which doesn’t see them as human beings.
We have child protection laws in this country developed over years of experience. Laws which specifically state that it doesn’t matter where a child is born, they still get equal protection. We have a government which is denying them that protection.
We have a government which is deliberately, and knowingly, facilitating child abuse to try and appease a minority of vocal voters who don’t even see children as people if they were born elsewhere. THEY ARE STILL CHILDREN.
Ask yourself, would you accept it if it was your child? Would you sit quietly by if this was being done to children in your community? Would you remain silent if 200 children disappeared from a government- run boarding school? Then why accept it happening to these children?
Editor’s note: If you have children, especially teenage boys, do ask yourself how you would feel if your 15, 16. 17 year-old was put through this. What wouldn’t you do to keep him safe, to keep him from a scarring, traumatic experience? We can’t have a situation where we see our under 18s as children, our babies, but view refugee children as adults.
