Around 1,200 children arrived in Britain seeking asylum last year – often alone, and after long, harrowing journeys hidden in freezers or under lorries. We find out what happened next
Several times a month, social workers in Kent are called to the port at Dover to collect a child who has turned up, usually hidden in the back of a lorry, to embark on a new life in Britain. Last year they collected an eight-year-old boy from Vietnam, hidden in a box in the back of a white Transit van. From time to time, UK Border Agency staff have fished children out of the water at Ramsgate. Usually, the children are in their teens and are pulled from the undercarriages of articulated lorries or found concealed behind crates in the refrigerated compartments designed to transport fresh produce. Sometimes they have cut through the lorry's canvas coverings with a knife and slipped beneath them.
A few weeks ago, a boy arrived with a broken hip, caused by falling from a lorry. "Their physical state depends on how clever or lucky they are," says the Kent council official responsible for unaccompanied migrant children (who asked not to be named). "Some arrive in a very poor state, with broken legs and arms. The majority are very, very tired and dishevelled." Last year, 130 of these children arrived in Kent, aged between eight and 18, exhausted by long journeys from some of the world's poorest and most conflict-scarred nations, including 25 from Afghanistan, 15 from Iran, 10 from Eritrea, 10 from Vietnam.
The younger boys, and girls of all ages, are immediately found foster carers. Almost none of the children have documents, so determining their age is a complex process; but those boys who seem to be a bit older (15 or above) are sent to a converted old people's home that has been made into a hostel for unaccompanied asylum seekers.
This is a peculiar refuge: sparsely furnished bedrooms, along dimly lit corridors painted in faded 1970s institutional colours. The children remain here until their age is confirmed, their health checked, their asylum requests investigated and their educational needs assessed. They are given a few sessions about British life and culture – with a heavy focus on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases – but much of the time they are left to their own devices, allowed to wander into the nearby town or sit in the centre's shabby common room, congregating into huddles of boys with shared languages.
Two days spent at the centre reveal the extraordinary difficulties they experienced on their journeys, and the huge challenge their arrival poses for officials in Kent, charged with caring for children who have been sent across the world in search of a better or safer life.
These are some of the most vulnerable young people in Britain, but on the whole we are not brilliant at looking after them, as a parliamentary report concluded last week. Around 1,200 children sought asylum here last year; hundreds more were detained at the border during spot checks by UK Border Agency staff (who use carbon dioxide sensors to check whether people have been breathing in the back of lorries). UKBA staff cannot check every lorry; many more children make their way into the country undetected, making it impossible to put an accurate figure on the total number: staff say those who arrive at the Kent children's home represent "just the tip of the iceberg". Those who are stopped on the border are often treated with suspicion, subjected to intensive questioning by border officials, and find that there is an inappropriate "culture of disbelief" towards their accounts, the recent parliamentary report notes.
Kent has more of these children than any other authority in Britain, because it is where so many of the big ports are located, and the county is under pressure to improve the care they are given. Support workers are on hand from 8am to 10pm, trying to help them adjust to their new environment. "They have been on the road for such a long time, getting into all sorts of difficulties with people, that there is a sense of relief at having a roof over their heads, a place that is warm and safe," the Kent official says. "But they quickly move on to the next worry: what is going to happen to me now? The relief is momentary. I don't see any of them jumping for joy."
Photographs on the common room wall show images of staff trying to lift the children's spirits – making snowmen in the yard (a novelty for some of the children, who have never seen snow before) and playing football – but the atmosphere remains subdued. Until their English improves, and unless they share a first language, they are restricted to halting conversations along the lines of "Man United good?" "Yes." In the communal dining area, most eat in silence on the days I visit.
Many of the children have been trafficked – willingly or less so. Others may have been enticed from orphanages (particularly in Vietnam) with promises of a better life. A large proportion subsequently go missing, returning to their traffickers, who come to collect them or arrange to meet them in the nearby town. The hostel staff do not have the right to lock up the children and nor are they always able to remove mobile phones; so they find it hard to prevent children leaving if they want to. Last year 44 went missing, from either foster care or the home.
One by one, a handful of boys describe their journey here, sitting awkwardly in one of the home's conference rooms, each talking with the assistance of an interpreter. They recount confused stories of travelling through countries and cultures unfamiliar to them, taking extraordinary risks with such frequency that they become unremarkable.
An Iranian boy, Mohammed – who, like everyone interviewed here, asked that his real name should not be printed, and who says he is 14 – describes how his uncle paid for him to be taken from Iran after his brother was arrested. He doesn't know how much his uncle paid, nor precisely what route he took, although the interpreter says it usually goes through Turkey and Greece, taking more than three months, with 10-day breaks from time to time, staying in houses along the way and surviving mainly on biscuits.
At Calais, Mohammed was grouped with about eight other young people and hidden in a lorry, late at night. "The traffickers used ladders to get us in through the roof; the driver didn't know we were in there. They were transporting fruit and drink," he says.
They were put in the fridge compartment of the articulated truck. "We didn't speak in the lorry. The agent told us not to speak to each other. The truck was too cold, even though we were wearing winter clothes. I had gloves and a hat, but the fridge freezer was on. I wanted to get out."
Mohammed looks as if he hasn't yet begun to shave, and fiddles with a key looped around his finger as he talks. There is a wobbly vulnerability around his mouth as he describes his journey.
After a while, the cold made him disoriented. "I didn't understand where I was. I was dizzy and didn't understand what I was doing." When the lorry came to a stop somewhere outside Dover, they climbed back out of a vent in the roof and began walking along the road until they were spotted and arrested.
"I had no idea about England. I didn't even know that I had arrived in this country. I had to ask the policemen where I was." He hasn't yet called his mother to tell her he has arrived safely. "Our telephone is monitored. I am afraid of calling her. I don't want to do it. Let me see what happens."
Staff have laminated maps of the world that they show the children to help establish where they have come from and where they are. Often, they have not heard of England or Britain, but know the name London. Some, like Mohammed, are reasonably well-educated; if he is allowed to stay in Britain, he hopes to study further and wants to become a science teacher. Others come from refugee camps where they have had very little schooling, or have spent their childhood working as goatherds in rural parts of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Osman, 17, left Eritrea after his father was arrested. He was also helped by an uncle, who took him by plane to France and directed him to the "jungle" in Calais – the migrant camp where people wait as they make repeated attempts to stow away on trucks to Britain. "Sometimes you get into a lorry at 1am and stay until 5am, then the driver will hear noises and tell us to get out. I tried many times to get on a lorry," he says, in the jerky, stilted narrative of translation, dotted with pauses as he confers with the interpreter in Tigrinya. "There are people who can help you to open a fridge. We went in a fridge; there were five of us in there. There was no space in that lorry – we were all standing, there was no way we could sit down. I don't know what was in the cartons – maybe apples. The motor from the fridge was above our heads; it was so dark you could not see anything. The fridge came on with the motor of the car. I was frightened. I was afraid I might die. It was the most terrifying experience of my life."
Staff are always astonished at the number of young people who travel in lorry freezers. "They bang on the doors if they can't cope with the temperatures," a senior social worker says. "The vast majority of lorry drivers are not aware – they become aware only when they hear the banging on the doors, and they can hear that only if the engine is switched off. The children are putting themselves into real danger. They know that, but they're desperate."
UKBA officials opened up the lorry in a spot check at the port, and the five people were taken out. Osman was dispatched to the children's home because he was under 18. "My uncle told me this would be a safer country," he says.
A second Mohammed, who is 16 or 17, from Algeria, describes how he clung to the bottom of a lorry as it drove from the lorry park near Calais. "I hid between two wheels underneath," he says. "You sit underneath the lorry, you stretch out and you hold on with two hands. You need to hold on like that for 20 minutes, once the engine starts, then you hold on only for as long as it takes to get the lorry on to the train or boat." He describes another spot where it is possible to hide on most lorries: "A tiny platform above the wheel arch where the spare tyre is; you get backache – you can't move once you are in position. They do sometimes check, but they can't see you." He is surprised at my ignorance about hiding places on trucks, says "all people know this", and laughs.
He was caught when the lorry left the boat. "The police came and shone a torch at us. They searched me, asked where I was from. I was really scared they would return me. " Instead, they sent him to the home, where he is waiting until his case is decided.
"Now I am here, I have nowhere to go," he says. "I don't feel young, since I left home: this journey, the difficulty of sleeping rough, cold, snow. I don't feel welcome here. I haven't spoken to anyone, I just have that feeling. I don't know people. I don't speak English." He looks as if he knows how to look after himself, but has unhappy, troubled eyes. He is worried about his future. "What shall I tell you? It is on and off. Sometimes I feel OK, sometimes I don't."
Thomas, from Eritrea, travelled to France via Yemen; a trafficking agent packed him into a metal box, used as a store for tools, underneath a lorry. "The agent took out everything that was inside the box, got rid of it all and put me inside," he says. "I was locked inside this box, with no air inside. I started to suffocate, could not breathe, so I knocked on the door and knocked until the driver came." By that time he was in Britain and was arrested by the police.
Sometimes it is clear that the children are very young. An American social worker recently collected an Afghan boy she believes is around 12 from Dover. "He was extremely tired. He fell asleep as soon as he was in my car – that was quite precious," she remembers. A brief interview at the dock was done with a telephone interpreter, with officials and the boy leaning over a phone switched to loudspeaker. Initially they asked only essential questions: do you need to see a doctor? Do you have any allergies? UKBA guidelines make it clear that the children must be allowed to sleep, eat and wash before they are questioned at length. It emerged later that the boy's father had been killed by the Taliban and that his mother and maternal uncle had arranged for him to leave. He was wearing several layers of clothes when he arrived, but beneath them he was clearly malnourished. "He put on quite a bit of weight in the first few weeks of foster care," the social worker says.
Often, the younger children are more cheerful about their experiences, another social worker says. He recently collected two boys picked up at the dock – a 15-year-old and a 10-year-old, both from Afghanistan, who had travelled here hiding behind the triangular windbreaker that sits above the driver's cabin on an articulated truck. "The 10-year-old thought it was a great adventure; when I spoke to the 15-year-old, he said he was very worried that the child would fall off the roof, that he was going to lose him on the way over."
Many of the children seem quite resilient initially, the social worker says. "Sometimes they are fine for the first week or so, just physically exhausted. The adrenaline is so high from never being able to trust anyone on the journey; they only break down later, letting down their guard when they understand that these carers are nice people. A lot of the young people, particularly the Afghans, have witnessed their families being killed, have had difficult journeys to the UK, have seen people who are too ill to travel being left by the roadside to die."
A doctor at the practice that looks after the children's home residents says scabies is a common problem, from sharing clothes and sleeping rough. Many are underweight from surviving on one meal a day. "I see young men with terribly painful injuries from their journey," the doctor says. "Many of these young people haven't had any medical care throughout their life." Their uncertain asylum status makes many of them very anxious.
Establishing the age of the young people is important, because it helps determine whether they will be given leave to remain or whether they will be removed from the country. Social workers compile an age assessment, based on conversations about their background and judgments about their emotional and cognitive development. Staff say they suspect that some young people would like to be classified as younger than they are because that means they are able to remain longer in the immigration system; by law, the Home Office cannot forcibly remove under-18s who claim asylum. But the parliamentary report into the care of migrant children expresses concern that "funding pressures could be incentivising local authorities to assess children either as adults, or as older than would otherwise be the case", because of the huge costs involved – last year, in Kent alone, £14m was spent caring for these children.
Social workers consider how they interact with their peers, whether they are reserved or shy, whether they have shaved hundreds of times before or if they have never used a razor. They look at whether children are still growing physically during the time they are at the centre. Dental x-rays can be used.
"Some young people are very confident when they arrive, can go out into the community, can get their hair cut, can use English currency, socialise. Others would be very much more dependent on their peers," a social worker says, explaining that this may be an indication of age, or simply of fluency in English. The age assessment process remains fairly unscientific.
Staff are struggling to reduce the number of children who disappear again almost immediately. Usually, these are the children whom they suspect may have been trafficked, and whose trafficking agents have arranged for them to travel separately into the country to avoid exposing the agents to unnecessary risk. Often they have given the children detailed instructions on how to make contact with them once they have cleared the border.
Those children who have been trafficked tend not to claim asylum, because they prefer to steer clear of the immigration system. "If you don't, you are more under the radar, there is less detailed information about you," says the Kent official who heads the team responsible for migrant children. "The problem with identifying trafficked children is that it is not always something you can immediately see. We wouldn't know on day one, but we might have suspicions by day four."
Children who arrive with a mobile phone are more likely to have been trafficked. "How do you know if they are trafficked? They will ask if they can go out, how far is the town, how do I go on the mobile network; they will be trying to use other people's phones," the official says. They may go out and return with new clothes. Children who are thought to be trafficking victims are put in bedrooms near the reception, so their movements can be monitored, though staff are not allowed to lock them up.
"We are working with teenagers, and teenagers have got legs," the official says. "They will vote with their feet. We detest it when anyone goes missing. It is every social worker's nightmare. We're working with a system where we can't lock them up. That's just a fact. They will go if that's their plan. They're not babies any more. We do what we can to ensure national alerts are put out."
Children from Vietnam are more likely to have been trafficked – for work in restaurants and cannabis farms, and for sexual exploitation – and will often know that their families have paid large sums of money for them to be brought to the UK to work. Often they disappear within 24 hours, before staff have had a chance to alert the police that they are possible victims of trafficking. "They or someone in their family is in a lot of debt; there is more fear about how they are going to pay off those debts," the male social worker says. "The trafficker will know their families back home and has a very, very powerful hold over them. While we can support the young people here, we can't support their families back home."
Occasionally, the young people will leave thank you notes, apologising for leaving. A recent note from one Vietnamese boy told staff: "I don't want to go, but I have to go."
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