The mental wellbeing of young former unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in East Kent - Final Report

Unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) come to the UK to escape war or persecution in their home countries. They enter the UK Care system but many find that they have limited rights to remain in the UK when they reach adulthood.

National MIND funded Mind in Bexley to carry out research with young people in Kent who had arrived in the UK as children. Our aim was to learn about their perspectives with a view to making recommendations for how services could be improved. We interviewed eight young people and all but one of them had been refused refugee status and, as a result, were threatened with destitution, detention and deportation. They describe moving from feeling part of British society, cared for and legally resident, to marginalisation and disentitlement as migrants facing immigration control, detention and deportation. The eight male1 participants in this study originally came from Eritrea, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka and have lived in the UK between three and eight years.

The interviews reveal their perspectives on their experience in the UK and identify specific threats to their mental health and wellbeing.

These threats are:

Being an unaccompanied asylum-seeking child and accordingly having suffered the loss of family and home at an early age

An often-dangerous journey and traumatic experiences in country of birth.

Living within the Care and asylum systems in the UK

Age assessment and asylum seeking processes, especially Immigration appeals, that young people have found confusing and punitive

Girls were not excluded from the study but are heavily out numbered by boys as UASC in Kent. Girls are also more likely to be fostered and to receive positive decisions on their asylum claims.

Rejection of asylum cases and adult immigration controls which include reporting, detention, destitution and the threat of deportation. Mental health and wellbeing

The young people describe their poor mental health and wellbeing detailing how they live with anxiety, loss, sleeplessness and uncertainty about the future.

They describe feeling unsupported and a lack of on-going treatment and care

Recommendations:

We identified a number of gaps in service provision and found that neither therapy to address past problems nor support to develop resilience and to plan their futures has been available to them. We found:

A lack of preventative and holistic work

A need for increased psychosocial support (including legal support) and specialist therapeutic interventions

A need to explore partnership with local and national bodies with a view to creating a post based on a ‘social prescribing’ model specifically to work with young people as they reach adulthood and beyond.

To accompany this Report, a video has been made by an independent filmmaker with the young people supported by Kent Refugee Action Network’s Refugee Youth Project. Along with selections from the interview transcripts and young people’s artwork, this video will be used in an Exhibition that is an additional output of this project.

Throughout this Project we have begun with the testimony of the young people to foreground their experience and opinions. The interviews were clearly difficult for most of the young people but they were motivated by a desire to improve services and the experiences of new arrivals:

“I don’t mind where we start so long as my interview makes some difference – makes things better for young people helps others bring some change …”