Unaccompanied children's needs: the difference in priorities of practitioners and young people.

What do unaccompanied, separated and trafficked migrant children need to resettle in their host country and to recover from their experiences?

Practitioners working with unaccompanied children seeking asylum (UASC), child victims of trafficking and other groups of migrant child I'm sure have all attended training on these issues. Social workers and other practitioners have clear frameworks to consider what a child needs which can be repeated by memory. Almost all of the practitioners I have met working with this group of young people have excellent understanding and considerable experience which is invaluable in safeguarding children in migration, however this knowledge is not the whole picture, so how often do we actually listen to what children and young people themselves say they need?

Listening more to children and young people in migration

I am often described as an 'expert' in this area, but I came to learn that often what I would say a young person 'needs' missed the mark, and was different to what they said they need. I learnt this through training practitioners (social workers, support workers, police officers, foster carers etc.) alongside young people with lived experience of trafficking, forced displacement and claiming asylum. In the training there is an exercise on post-arrival and post-exploitation needs and support for young people. Below are just some of the typical responses from (often experienced) practitioners on what children in migration need.

What I learnt over time is after seeing and hearing the responses of practitioners, it would be one of the few times when the co-facilitating young person with lived experience would often interrupt and correct practitioners. Young people would often agree with many of the points that practitioners say, but they would emphasise that this is not the most important thing to them. Instead, the word cloud below shows the most common responses from young people themselves about what children and young people in migration need to resettle and recover from their experiences.

And here, we can see a significant difference between the priorities of young people, and what practitioners think the priorities are. So what do young people focus on, which practitioners can sometimes miss?

1. A focus on the material and the practical

What we see is that practitioners tend to respond with needs of young people which are more intangible, or vaguely defined, for example "stability", "love" or "safety". While these are true and young people themselves certainly agree these things are important, you can see the responses of young people in migration are much more specific and much more likely to be practical and about material wellbeing: "money" "documentation", "accommodation".

This demonstrates that all too often unaccompanied young people are still in 'survival mode' without their basic needs being met. It's important that practitioners recognise when young people's basic needs are not met and ensure that we focus on these first. If we do not recognise when young people are in the survival state, our intervention will completely miss the mark. In the word cloud of needs from practitioners, we see responses such as "therapy", "cultural links" and "education". Yes, these things may be necessary, and often are important to young people, but when young people are in a dangerous, precarious, unstable or unsafe situation, their priority is not education, or developing cultural links. Similarly, research has shown that therapeutic intervention for trauma or mental health difficulties is often ineffective for unaccompanied children when basic needs, such as secure immigration status, are not met[1].

I once was asked in an expert child trafficking report to "assess the credibility of the [young person]'s claim of mental health difficulties as a result of trauma from being trafficked, in the context of him refusing therapy". My answer was simple: you've moved this young person to different accommodation, often in different cities around the UK with very little notice, three times in the last ten months and the young person says he sometimes doesn't have enough money for food. How do you expect him to engage in therapeutic intervention processing his traumatic experiences of the past when he doesn't even know where he's going to be sleeping next week? Or if he has enough money to make sure he can eat two meals a day before his next allowance is given to him? Basic pre-requisites of basic needs, stability and security need to be met first.

Similarly, most children in migration do value education highly, but basic, physical and material needs such as food, accommodation and heating are much more important. Therefore their main priority will be income to ensure basic needs and this will be valued more than education until these needs are being consistently met.

The message for practitioners is clear: listen to young people and what they say they need. Unless basic, physical needs are met nothing else matters, so focus on these first.

2. The importance of information, rights and legal protection

A sense of security, safety and security are absolutely essential for young people in migration. Many practitioners, like me, would have had no experience of being denied fundamental rights and protections: we take the safety and security of citizenship for granted. Therefore we can never truly understand how debilitating that precarity is, that fear of being deported, which for so many young people could be the worse thing in the world is all-consuming and crippling.

This is what young people repeatedly say they need:

A) Information- Information about what is happening, what are the next steps, about what their rights are and how they can get these rights. Information that to us (often specialist) practitioners in this field we would find as 'obvious' is not so obvious for young people, particularly young people from countries where many rights we see as fundamental, are not present.

I once worked with a young person who was struggling to understand what was happening with her asylum case, I sat down to try and help her and it turns out she still had no clue what this word 'asylum' meant. She had been trafficked to the UK under the promises of working, so she thought her asylum application was actually an application for an employment visa and her lawyer had not been able to effectively explain to her what the word 'asylum' meant.

B) Effective legal representation- Many young people learn, often the difficult way, how absolutely essential good, effective legal representation is. Those without good legal representation have their applications refused, are left destitute and vulnerable to exploitation, under a constant threat of deportation.

Therefore its important practitioners support and facilitate children in migration getting access to good, effective legal representation.

3. A focus on basic, immediate needs, not long term goals

This is not to say that longer term goals are not important for young people in migration, but it can only be considered once immediate, basic needs are met. I have worked with young people who have become incredibly frustrated in pathway planning meetings, which have sections on topics like 'integration' or higher education to be discussed. Young people can become frustrated because practitioners are discussing what university course they would like to do when the young person doesn't have enough money for food because their benefits have not come through, or they've been told they will need to move accommodation in the next month, but they don't know where to.

So yes, we can focus on longer term goals, but only if young people's immediate needs are met, and they have the pre-requisite stability to begin thinking about the future.

Conclusion: the importance of continuously listening to young people

From doing this exercise with young people and practitioners that there is often a disconnect between young people's priorities and what practitioners think young people's priorities are. It reminds all of us, even if we have plenty of experience working with children in migration, that we need to be continuously listening to our young people and what their priorities are. It is easy for us to slip into thinking about young people's needs from our own perspective, rather than our young people's, particularly if we have no lived experience of being forcibly displaced, seeking asylum or being a refugee.

And when we listen to children in migration we are reminded about their priorities: ensuring immediate, basic physical needs are met and ensuring that they have the information and legal representation they require to access their rights. If we do this as practitioners, then we can ensure young people have the stability, security and protection they need to build a new life.

To find out more on Safeguarding Children in Migration's training programmes available, please visit our website here, or contact Phil on phil@safeguardingchildreninmigration.com.

[1] Ottisova et al.'s research compared child victims of trafficking with a PTSD diagnosis to non-trafficked children with a PTSD diagnosis. They found child victims of trafficking were much less responsive to treatment, which they did not consider was a result of any fundamental difference in the experiences of trauma, but instead they attributed it to the children's precarious and unstable present situation whilst treatment was taking place. The research: Ottisova, L., Smith, P., Shetty, H., Stahl, D., Downs, J., Oram, S., 2018. Psychological consequences of child trafficking: An historical cohort study of trafficked children in contact with secondary mental health services. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192321.