Age assessment and migration control: ‘Child as method’

Abstract

In this paper, I critically discuss age assessment and migration control under the analytic category and research tool of ‘child as method’. I start by arguing that for age and its assessment to be explored within the field and practice of humanitarian, migration and refugee studies, it needs to be situated and conceptualised within the pressuring control of migration. Following Burman’s research analytic ‘child as method’, I make a theoretical-analytical argument to discuss how ‘the child’ is understood as a figure or trope within forced migration and displacement, and how ‘childhood’ manifests as a social condition where children are represented and discussed in States’ discourse as victims. In contrast, anyone who employs the legal category of the child is approached by the State and humanitarian sector with suspicion. I conclude by discussing, first, how child, childhood and children as a discourse subjugate refugees by (re)presenting them as children, voiceless and passive. Second, I propose that the figuration of ‘child’ in migration regimes could be strategically understood as an act of resistance.

Introduction

In 2019, as part of fieldwork for my doctoral research, I went into an unaccompanied minors’ structure, which is called a ‘Safe Zone’ in the humanitarian terrain in mainland Greece. The ‘Safe Zone’ in this context and territory was a separate unit and building within the refugee camp, which was ran by a national non-governmental organisation. One day, a boy arrives at the camp, and the usual procedure for ‘new arrivals’ is put in place: completing registration, declaring social history, being assigned accommodation, and being ‘given’ clothes etc. I thought that was it. As soon as the boy went upstairs, to the dormitories, workers started discussing his age, and that he was certainly not the age that he claims for. It was the first time in my working experience and field study, that the concept of age became a determining factor on whether someone could stay in a facility that was for male/boy minors. Quite a few of the workers showed solidarity in this and other incidents of age determination. Solidarity, in the sense that they tried to keep some of the boys in the structure or provide very temporary accommodation until they found a different place to go. Despite these forms of support nevertheless, many times age assessment became the humanitarian, structural and medico-legal determination of approval and access in this type of accommodation.

Inspired by this encounter during my field research, this paper pushes towards a theoretical-analytic argument to build and bridge two main issues; the first is why the research analytic ‘device’ of Burman’s (2019a) ‘child as method’ is fruitful in posing critical questions about child, childhood and children and, or within, the field of migration. Secondly, I suggest how the figuration of ‘the child’ in migration contexts can also be understood as an act of resistance. Although the paper is not an empirical case study devoted to the context of Greece, it draws upon examples and arguments that emerged in my field research during my doctoral study. ¹

Building upon the literature on age assessment between childhood and migration studies, this paper adds to the current literature on age assessment and migration control, then moves onto an in-depth discussion of how Burman’s theory on ‘child as method’ works as a lens to read discourses on child, childhood and children within migration. Burman’s arguments, however, are not only about the analytic productivity of ‘the child’. They are also very much about the importance of mobilising various frames (i.e. feminist, anti-capitalist, anticolonial, postcolonial, psychosocial-psychoanalytic among others) to make sense of the production of child, children and childhood.

In this paper, I theorise specifically how child, childhood and children are presented and understood as tropes in state and humanitarian discourses in the field of migration. Following Burman and other scholars in migration (see Crawley, 2007; Heidbrink, 2021), I also reflect on how ‘childhood’ manifests as a social condition where children are represented and discussed in states’ discourse as victims, and I show how anyone who embraces the legal category of the child is approached by the state and humanitarian sector with suspicion.

Engaging with Burman’s (2019a research analytic on ‘child as method’, I (a) expand ‘child as method’ in the field of migration, (b) connect child with current arguments in childhood and migration studies on age, assessment and migration control, (c) propose how the ‘child’ in migration contexts could also be understood as an act of resistance. Given that childhood has long been recognised as a racialised category (Burman, 2024; Rollo, 2018) and that (im)migration controls are racist and racialised, the ‘child as method’ analysis in this paper also attends to the ways migration practices around children reflect, enact and produce further racialisation in the service of regulating and sustaining national borders and populist discourses of (exclusionary, racialised) ‘nation’.

In the next section, I start by presenting briefly what age assessment is and how it manifests as a screening tool and a form of control within migration in Europe. Building upon critical literature that approaches age as a social construct that aligns with the law, I discuss and add to the current literature on age assessment and migration control.

Age, assessment and migration control

Age assessment is a screening tool that aims to identify whether someone is under or above the age of 18 years old. Hjern et al. (2011) remark that age assessment procedures in Europe include an interview in some form, a ‘visual evaluation’ by police or a migration officer at the point of entry; in some cases, the interview is carried out in more detail by trained personnel or social workers. As authors (Hjern et al., 2011) indicate in some countries in Europe medical examinations are also part of the procedure. These examinations include radiographs of the skeleton and/or teeth to assess bone age and dental maturity, as well as anthropometric measurement as the examination of physical sizes (height – weight growth), and sexual development.

Scholars in critical legal studies have argued that age is a social construct closely aligned with the law. Viterbo (2021: 14) demonstrates that ‘much of childhood, in its modern form, is law’s doing. Law prescribes and enforces norms, confers entitlements and duties, informs language and social perceptions and is thus among the key social forces shaping childhood, adulthood and child-adult relation’. There is a fixation on chronological age in the contemporary state and legal system which overrules any other logic or epistemology. As such, the determination of chronological age seems to be crucial in the territory of humanitarian aid and migration authorities. Yet, there is a small body of literature that explores and critically discusses questions of age and age assessment in asylum decision-making (for instance Sørsveen and Ursin, 2021) in Europe.

Indicatively, Hjern et al. (2011) explain how the fear of migration authorities that adults claim to be minors in Europe led to a request for ‘objective methods’ (as those as part of medical examination) to determine the age of a young claimant. In the UK, Silverman (2016: 33) notes that ‘most age disputes occur at the screening stage when UK social workers and immigration officials are working to establish the identities of asylum claimants as well as their route into the country’. McLaughlin (2018) offers an in-depth analysis of how children’s bodies constitute a ‘political battleground’, where many child asylum seekers are subjected to suspicion about their age upon entering the UK, and thus age assessment disputes are on the rise (see Chase and Allsopp, 2013; Crawley, 2007; Heidbrink, 2021). On that note, the rise of the dispute indicates how the UK is policing entry into its territory.

Crawley (as cited in Prabhat et al., 2019) highlights that there are dominant notions around what it means to be a ‘child’ within migration authorities as quite often the way children look and behave may not be accepted as being children at all. Similarly, Sørsveen and Ursin (2021) depict how socially constructed perceptions of childhood and adulthood manifest in assessment practices, related, as authors argue, to Western and middle-class ideas of what it means to be a ‘child’. From a critical legal perspective, Viterbo (2021) reminds us that these norms and mechanisms are present in international law and/or human rights where the very specific model of childhood transforms ‘the child’ into a global category that is primarily Western.

In the same vein, in Greece where age assessment adheres to a psychosocial model in the refugee terrain (Fieldnotes, 2019, see also Hjern et al., 2011), humanitarian social workers and/or child protection officers interview young people to document their social history and identify their age. If the psychosocial exam is inconclusive regarding the person’s age, then a medical assessment is employed to decide access to certain humanitarian accommodation units, resources and care.

The assessment of chronological age, however, is difficult and many studies highlight the unreliability of medical assessments (Gower, 2011; for a historical perspective see Burgard, 2021). Silverman (2016: 35) states that ‘the likelihood of gaining an accurate age assessment decreases with age’. Even when an age assessment takes place, the medical authorities can provide only an indication of the age range and not an exact age. The latter is approximately ±2 years, which is precisely the crucial number of years that will indicate whether someone is considered a ‘child’ or an adult when disputed about age.

It is on these grounds that I argue along with other critical scholars in childhood and migration studies (for instance, Heidbrink, 2021; Silverman, 2016) that age assessment and migration control need to be conceptually deployed together to consider how both are mutually sustaining each other. Although, as Crawley (2007) argues, chronological age is significant for the asylum process and provision of support, and Prabhat et al. (2019) stress that age determination should be primarily about protecting vulnerable young people, I argue that age assessment within migration underlines the politics of both childhood and migration within the fields of humanitarian and state-immigration authorities. Quite often, as will be discussed in the next section, the politics of childhood and migration lie primarily in notions of vulnerability and victimisation. As such, age assessment within migration exposes the hidden power dynamics of what constitutes ‘a child’ in the Western, European, and middle-class world. It establishes a logic of ‘deserved’ protection and demonstrates what McLaughlin (2018) sharply puts as the ‘child first, migrant second’ approach, put forward by humanitarian organisations.

McLaughlin (2018) analysed the ‘Dubs amendment’, a scheme that ensures that the UK will continue to allow unaccompanied child refugees in Europe to reunite with family members in the UK after Brexit. According to her analysis (McLaughlin, 2018: 1757), while childhood is universalised to provoke sympathy for child asylum seekers, it also highlights how:

. . .representations of child asylum-seekers rely on codes that operate to identify “unchildlike” children’. [. . .] In the context of the criminalisation of undocumented migrants, childhood is no longer a stable category which guarantees protection, but is subject to scrutiny and suspicion and can, ultimately, be disproved.

It is precisely because of this, that I move to the next section. Here I use Burman’s research analytic on ‘child as method’ to depict (a) how childhood is understood as a trope and (b) a social condition where different narratives and institutional discourses are produced. Doing so, I bring into scrutiny (c) how children and childhood function within wider geopolitical axes and dynamics within migration, humanitarian and state discourses about age assessment.

‘Child as method’ and/within migration: Analytic alliances

Before addressing how ‘child as method’ in migration may anchor discussions about vulnerability, age and victimhood, I would like to summarise Burman’s (2019a, 2019b) conceptualisation of ‘child as method’. Child as method is a research analytic or an orientation, as Burman (2019b) suggests, to critically explore from a cultural and material perspective:

• (a) how ‘the child’ is understood as a figure or trope,

• (b) how ‘childhood’ is understood as a social condition or category where different narratives about and for the child are produced

• (c) whether and how ‘children’ as the living and embodied entities inhabiting these positions mobilise and contribute to a range of institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas.

‘Child as method’ in Burman’s work is built upon, but also expands other works and projects on ‘method’ such as Chen’s (2010) ‘Asia as Method’ and Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) ‘Border as Method’ by intersecting the political economy of childhood and geopolitical dynamics. It is important to remember that Burman conceptualises and grounds this research analytic within Fanon’s work and her Fanonian readings. Frantz Fanon was an anticolonial theorist and psychiatrist, whose revolutionary texts invite us, as Burman (2024: 3) explains, to various psycho-affective politics of childhood. Even more Child as method analysis (especially in migration) sees the work done by child, childhood and children as racialised, enacted within geopolitical axes and dynamics in the service of regulating and sustaining national borders and populist discourses of (exclusionary, racialised) ‘nation’.

Hence, this research analytic is rooted within anticolonial, antiracist and feminist debates and understandings, as well as critical literature on childhood studies. ‘Child as method’ is not, therefore, a technical term or terminology I use and employ within the context of migration, but rather an ‘epistemic angle’ in Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013, as cited in Burman, 2019a: 199) words which attempts to open and pose critical questions within and about childhood and migration studies. Having Burman’s three axes (a, b, c as listed above) as a reference point for bridging ‘child as method’ and migration, I will now discuss how each one of these axes speaks to the concept of childhood within migration control and concerning the tool of the age assessment.

(a) How ‘the child’ is understood as a figure or trope:

How ‘the child’ is understood as a figure or trope within forced migration and displacement, is a critical inquiry into how European and state immigration policies may use children to reconstitute themselves as innocent and good (see Danewid, 2017) within the migration and humanitarian arena. McLaughlin (2018: 1758) elaborates how the foregrounding of children as victims has produced a humanitarian narrative of crisis that is based on a politics of innocence and vulnerability. The iconic figure of the child as portrayed in the media and humanitarian spectacle embodies the very quality of innocence and vulnerability that ‘is seen to define a universal childhood’. Analysing the Dubs amendment in Britain, one of the arguments she is putting forward unpacks how the cultural politics of asylum in Britain and the universalised notion of childhood exclude unchildlike individuals and start suspecting their claims of asylum (see also see Chase and Allsopp, 2013; Crawley, 2007; Heidbrink, 2021). The universalisation of childhood and the exclusion of ‘unchildlike’ individuals not only reiterates a certain figuration of child, children and childhood rooted in innocence and vulnerability, that is white, but it also hides discussion on the broader politics of configuring and approaching migration and childhood within the field of migration studies.

To understand why innocence and vulnerability are crucial for both childhood and migration studies, Heidbrink (2021: 988) points out:

. . .focusing on the vulnerabilities of increasingly narrow categories of individuals, such as unaccompanied children, distracts from examining how state policies produce vulnerability. Second, the humanitarian organisations’ emphasis on vulnerability re-inscribes social boundaries, making state protections and services progressively difficult to access. In so doing, both the state and humanitarian organisations govern youth mobility through vulnerability.

In the case of Greece, for example, the overemphasis on children and ‘womenandchildren’ (Burman, 2008; Sylvester, 1998) in state and humanitarian discourse constructs universal and idealised notions of both children and women. This overemphasis shifts the focus from the state’s actions and obscures the atrocities taking place at the very spaces migrants – including young people and women – are asked to pass, stay and endure. These include the dangerous and deathly crossing of the Mediterranean Sea, the detention centres, the disgraceful conditions within hotspots and camps, not to mention the everyday dead ends and hostilities of the bureaucratic immigration system (see Benvenuti et al., 2024).

These atrocities and conditions are the reason, I believe, we need to think of ‘child as method’ and migration together; not to reiterate medico-legal positionings of age and childhood, but to expose, as Heidbrink (2021) points out, the atrocities and the subjective dimensions that childhood and migration take within the European territory. I offer another indication and example of how age determination and migration control relate to access and space-time. In the UK, Silverman (2016) clarifies that while waiting for a Refugee Status Determination (RSD) outcome, young people are granted fuller access to welfare benefits, health care, and educational opportunities than adults. At the same time, young people who are disputed as adults would be put into the adult asylum system and treated accordingly. Similarly, in Greece, when young people arrive to the country, they are often detained and placed in prison ‘protection units’ until they are transferred to unaccompanied minor structures.

In Greece, similar access to benefits in the UK occurs. However, I would like to stress here that access relates not only to benefits but also to different spatial temporalities which may perform as a benefit (Christinaki, 2022a, 2022b). Any young person who is considered an unaccompanied minor, a ‘child’, is accommodated in different units, such as the ‘Safe Zones’. In this way, space and time (as in the spatial and the temporal) matter because when someone is aged over 18 years old, they are usually asked to leave the zone and find other accommodation which often means they have to rely on their existing network.

Usually, these units in mainland Greece are considered better regarding infrastructure (i.e. stone buildings, rather than containers in camps) and provision of commodities and benefits than camps where most of the refugee population lives (and some of them may remain in camps indefinitely). It is important to remember that these units are in mainland Greece, as the situation in the islands, where hotspots ² are, is different. For instance, people who arrive in Greece by sea, enter a hotspot (in Lesvos, Chios, or Samos among others) and are detained upon arrival. This means that there is a ‘pre-removal centre’, namely a detention centre, where people are detained on different grounds. These grounds vary from determining their identity/nationality; being considered a danger to the national threat or public order; their asylum application has been rejected; being signed up for voluntary return; or there is an assumption that the asylum application will be rejected based on the nationality. New arrivals are, also, often detained in the short term, during their registration procedure (as discussed in detail in V. H., 2018).

Returning to the case of young people, space and age assessment, Viterbo (2021) connects the fetishization of legal arguments and institutions. Such arguments speak both to the stay of unaccompanied minors in ‘protection units’ in prison in Greece and overall, how young people are age-disputed and are put in the adult asylum system and treated accordingly as in the case of the UK. In his words (Viterbo, 2021: 19) ‘the tendency to equate law with legal institutions, texts and professionals overlooks the crucial role of ostensibly nonlegal factors and players in animating and shaping the law’. Such factors are how young people may need to use the legal category of child to access different conditions of living or to speed up their asylum process. As Viterbo (2021: 22) explains ‘human rights can help highlight and confront certain instances of inequality, exclusion and oppression. However, in their current institutional and ideational configuration, they tend to focus on technical violations and remedial solutions, without systematically exposing – let alone challenging – the root political and economic causes of injustice’.

To put it differently, the non/inter-governmental sector does not focus on exposing and challenging systematically the dangerous crossings and the lack of safe passages to Europe, the prison-like character and the criminalisation of migrants within detention centres as well as the horrible living conditions in hotspots and camps among other issues. Instead, it focuses on the ‘technical violation of age’ and co-opts with the European and states’ authority to identify who is a ‘child’ in the legal discourse. Doing so disguises crucial discussions around how states and the non/inter-governmental sector produce vulnerabilities. While focusing almost obsessively on the iconic figure of the vulnerable child (and woman), it transforms ‘the child’ into a trope that helps reconstitute the sector as innocent and good.

(b) How ‘childhood’ is understood as a social condition or category where different narratives about and for the child are produced:

Having drawn attention to how age assessment and access related to a certain spatial temporality within migration, I would now like to turn to how the ‘spatial-temporal’ is further connected with subject formation. I am asking, for instance, how the institutional discourses of states and non-governmental organisations spatialise childhood and migration within certain territories and temporalities. Concerning migration, the term ‘spatialise’ reflects the accommodation of migrants in detention centres, hotspots, camps, and hotels but also different neighbourhoods and territories in the outskirts or less often in the heart of the cities, along with the time they must spend there until their asylum application is processed.

Concerning child, childhood and children and migration, the term ‘spatialise’ connotes how ‘womenandchildren’ are also presented as a universalised, monolithic and idealised category in Greece, and how they are accommodated in distinct territories within hotspots and camps. The term ‘womenandchildren’ (see Burman, 2008; Sylvester, 1998) ³ attempts to depict how the non/inter and the governmental sector represents women and children as one category, inseparable from each other. Hyndman and Giles (2011) remind us that this reflects upon the way refugees, overall, are feminised as a space of ‘womenandchildren’ (see also Enloe, 1993 as cited in Hyndman and Giles, 2011), as voiceless and passive subjectivities. Not to mention that child, childhood and children have also been spatialised within specific timeframes where qualities like innocence, play and carefreeness (among many others) are assigned as characteristics. ⁴

Precisely because of this, the second trajectory of Burman’s research analytic on ‘child as method’ looks at how ‘childhood’ functions as a social condition or category where different narratives about and for the child are produced. Attention, therefore, is needed to the way children as a social condition are represented and discussed in states’ discourse as victims, whereas anyone who claims or embraces the legal category of the child but is not recognised as a ‘real child’ is dealt with suspicion.

McLaughlin’s (2018) discussion of the Dubs amendment brings to the forefront how the politics of childhood position, on the one hand, child asylum seekers as innocent victims and on the other hand seek to criminalise and demonise undocumented migrants. As discussed in the first section, the ‘child first, migrant second approach’ is used as a foundation for asylum where the ‘childness’ of children is considered and – I may say – evaluated when given protection.

The evaluation of who is or performs as a child not only reiterates normalised understandings of development and childhood but also by incorporating a normalised understanding of childhood outside of a historical, cultural, and material context, discourses around nation and development are implicitly (im)posed. In other words, what I suggest, is that by detaining and/or age-disputing young people or providing different accommodations and benefits to those who seem ‘real children’ within migration, age assessment is employed to assess and make sure that they are 'real children', and they deserve protection. Doing so, the trajectory and question states and humanitarian policies open is ‘who is welcomed and who is not’.

Important elements we need to consider in this, are gender and race. ‘Child as method’ analysis helps to attend to the ways migration practices around children reflect, enact and produce further gendered and racialised understandings in the service of regulating and sustaining national borders and populist discourses of (exclusionary, racialised) ‘nation’. Most of the ‘Safe Zones’, I came across in Greece, accommodated male/boy minors. Sørsveen and Ursin (2021) remind us how the body impacts social relationships when small bodies, for instance, tend to be perceived as innocent and vulnerable (i.e. apparent in the configuration of innocence and childhood) whereas ‘adolescent’ bodies, specifically male, tend to be perceived as dangerous and troublesome. Additionally, as Rollo (2018) shows the child/human binary enacts a central feature of racialisation. In his words (Rollo, 2018: 307): ‘Where Black peoples are situated as objects of violence it is often precisely because Blackness has been identified with childhood and childhood is historically identified as the archetypal site of naturalized violence and servitude.’

In her paper, Silverman (2016) highlights the triple discrimination (based on age, gender, nationality and racialised understandings in my view) against male Afghans, who could not prove their age during the RSD procedure in the UK. During the 1980s and 1990s protracted wars in Afghanistan, the Afghan government did not have the bureaucratic or institutional capacity to register births. Further, birthdays are not celebrated in many countries and some children do not know their date of birth. As such, registration of births or celebration of birthdays should not be taken for granted. On top of that, in June 2023 UNICEF (2023) published a report which indicates that one in four children under the age of five do not officially exist.

Thus, considering both race and gender in this case, I argue that age assessments and determination of age within the context of migration need to be contextualised within a postcolonial understanding of gender and nation, as it is not by accident that men are represented as ‘villain’ or ‘dangerous’ and ‘womenandchildren’ (Sylvester, 1998) as vulnerable. The vulnerabilisation of children confirms the feminisation of childhood within globalised (but culturally Global North) discourses of childhood (Twum-Danso Imoh et al., 2023). So, even as migration regimes are most typically concerned with young male asylum seekers, they are obliged to engage with norms surrounding childhood that are alien both culturally, and in terms of gender.

The emphasis on child status and/or ‘womenandchildren’ entails the (re)creation of the perceived contrast between adult male migrants which is in humanitarian and state discourse as the automated antithesis; the ‘unwanted’, the ‘threat’. There is a great amount of literature that connects September 11th in the USA, commonly known as 9/11, with racialised and gendered understandings (see for instance Winter et al., 2022; Winter and Mills, 2020) and we need to think and critically reflect on these trajectories within the employment of age assessment. Drawing borders through age assessment is often about drawing borders to the unwanted, the adult racialised male migrant.

At the same time, it should be indicated that some studies, such as Gower’s (2011) for instance, discuss that one of the factors that contribute to the age assessment’s unreliability is that it does not consider issues like race and ethnicity. Despite the dangers of connecting age (or development) with race and ethnicity, I argue that it is precisely for issues such as gender, race, class and age that we should avoid incorporating a language of more diverse and ‘inclusive factors’ to identify age in the context of migration.

Age assessments are problematic within the field of migration; if we end up diversifying the factors that determine age, besides a reformist attempt at understanding, we will miss the intersectional (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1989) connections of class, race and gender along with age. This is not to say that different factors do not interplay with age. As Sørsveen and Ursin (2021) show the way that age is conceptualised and used in age assessments overlooks social and cultural backgrounds in which age is embedded. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight the dangers of using, assimilating and/or normalising the tool of age assessments for all migrants irrespective of their age within the field of migration. This is where ‘child as method’ analysis works to unpack how migration practices around children enact and produce further racialisation in the service of sustaining national borders and populist discourses of (exclusionary and racialised) ‘nation’.

On the way chronological age is perceived, constructed and performed, Treas (2009: 86) critically comments from a sociological perspective:

Chronological age emerged as an essential piece of information standardizing the personal biography. Today, chronological age determines the timing and the progression of individual lives via the many informal age norms and formal age rules that link people to age-graded social institutions.

Such a social institution is the state together with the non/inter-governmental sector. Both use the tool of age assessment to define who is ‘in need’ of special protection. Furthermore, age assessment is mobilised to evaluate who is ‘credible’ to access the state’s benefits and spatial protection in the field of migration as well as have a chance in the prospect of citizenship.

(c) Whether and how ‘children’ as the living and embodied entities inhabiting these positions mobilise and contribute to a range of institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas:

Whether and how ‘children’ as the living and embodied entities inhabiting positions mobilise a range of institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas, is related to the need to assess and the need to know from the part of the state and humanitarian authorities about ‘the real age’ of young people. This ‘will to know(ledge)’ in Foucauldian terms (Foucault, 1978) or to put it differently the ‘will to age-assess’ has opened crucial encounters and enactments of power mechanisms within migration. It has also opened questions about the role of workers, and it brings us back to how the ‘spatial-temporal’, this time in the form of work, age and assessment is further connected with subject formation.

The role of frontline workers relates, therefore, to the third aspect of ‘child as method’ because the idealised notion of ‘children’ as living and embodied entities reflects workers’ practices. The way ‘children’, by inhabiting these positions, mobilise and contribute to a range of institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas will be developed in the next section.

Concerning the role of workers in this temporal spatialisation, Gower (2011: 333) argues that ‘when a social worker decides whether a young person is under or over 18, they are essentially deciding whether the local authority will provide them with a service or not’. In this way, there are questions concerning the profession, co-optation by state and humanitarian policies and practices, as well as ethical dilemmas. I will come back to this point at the end of the paper. Furthermore, when it comes to subject formation about understandings and considerations of childhood(s), it is of primary concern how in the context of migration, children’s custodians are performed by the local authorities and the state as the ‘corporate parent’ (Silverman, 2016). At the same time national and international non-governmental organisations play out as the occasional intermediary between state and migrants.

It is in these interconnections between non/inter and governmental authorities where discourses of ‘nation’ engage and enact structures of racialisation as part of their immigration control regimes that Gower (2011) argues that there is a culture of disbelief that is epitomised, in my opinion, on the employment of the age assessment. It is an area for inquiry, therefore, how a young person under the age of 18 is considered a victim and potentially vulnerable, whilst anyone who does not look like a ‘real child’ in the eyes of the state and humanitarian sector is approached with suspicion or as if is a villain. Crawley (2007: 27) enlightens the ‘culture of disbelief’ by stating that in her research ‘social workers spoke of being put under pressure by managers to assess children as being over rather than under 16 or 18 years of age. They also described a general atmosphere in which a client’s account of his or her experiences is disbelieved, and credibility increasingly used as the basis for disputing a child’s stated age’.

Hence, I agree with Silverman’s (2016: 31) provocative concept of ‘imposter-children’ as an attempt to expose cynically ‘the state’s antagonism [. . .] that some foreign nationals are manipulating the RSD process by consciously pretending to be something they are not (children)’ and are represented as a new threat. According to Silverman, this representation of young people as a ‘new threat’ relates to the state’s attempt to safeguard the RSD process. As we saw in Greece, this also refers to arguments for protecting the available spaces in which unaccompanied minors are accommodated and protected. It is worth noting, however, that protection of territory and resources is always the case in migration regimes and control. Protecting available spaces (nations) and perceived limited resources (as in national resources). Consequently, the state’s moral outrage when adult asylum seekers pose as children or do not look like ‘real children’ open the two main issues that ‘child as method’ interrogates about childhood and migration: development and nation.

As Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019: 138) sharply puts it: ‘The politicocultural framing of children as the enemy and thus as unworthy of protection has created racially constructed categories of the nonhuman (including the nonchild) that are perpetually assigned a value of difference which is always liminal and always open to revision.’

Although Shalhoub-Kevorkian makes this claim specifically for the positioning of the Palestinian children, ⁵ her argument still opens a crucial encounter between childhood studies and migration control; the representation of vulnerability and who deserves the most safety. Undoubtedly, and I will discuss this in the following section, both connect with development and nation. For that reason, I think we need to ask the following questions: ‘Which children are we talking about’, ‘Where’, and ‘Whose best interests’? ‘Who is excluded and why from protection’? ‘Who protects whom in the first place?’ ‘Safety in what’? At the same time, it is then significant to think and acknowledge, how migrants resist the categorisation of not being ‘in need’ or deserving protection in ‘terms and conditions’ within the field of migration, by mobilising positions of childhood.

‘Child as method’ within migration: Resistance and subjectification

So far, I have shown that ‘child as method’ is an analytic sensibility and methodological point that I move to the field of migration to discuss how child, childhood and children are mobilised as a trope, discourse, and social condition that together generate and mobilise certain institutional practices (such as the age assessment). In doing so, ‘child as method’ generates space to raise and reflect on two important and concluding points about child, childhood and children and migration. The first is how the child as a category opens discussions about resistance in the field of migration. The second is how child, childhood and children are a discourse that provokes refugees’ subjectification by (re)presenting them as children, voiceless and passive.

Regarding the first concluding point, I argue that when a young person embraces the legal category and the subjective position of a child within the context of migration, it could be understood as an act of resistance to the state and humanitarian governance. Yet, this is not about reducing or romanticising children’s actions and subjectivities inhabiting of ‘unaccompanied child’ to resistance. People’s relations to legal and social categories are more complex and contradictory than this suggests. It is, nevertheless, a way to open and discuss what this positioning ‘does’ within the field of migration, migration regimes and control. Walker (2023), for instance, highlights in her research how young African migrants in Italy utilise the status of ‘minor’ to demand and construct better futures. She makes sharp comments on how this ‘ambiguous agency’ strikes back normative assumptions of the nature of childhood and shows how ‘unaccompanied minors’ are more than a universalised vulnerable subject position that is imposed on them. By utilising their ‘ambiguous agency’ and the category of the minor, Walker argues that these young men not only contest the spatio-temporal control of the migration regime, but they dare to regain control of the time they got ‘stolen’ (see Khosravi, 2018 for a discussion on ‘stolen time’).

This is precisely what I approach as an opening to discussions on resistance. However, my intention is not to reduce ‘children’s actions’ and/or subjectivities inhabiting of ‘unaccompanied child’ to a romanticised notion of resistance but to show how this ‘ambiguous agency’ garbles the production of categories (like universalised, idealised and Western notions of children and childhood and/or passive children) and their material consequences (i.e. age assessment to ensure they are 'real children'). In a way, then, it depicts the limits of universalised notions of childhood and age ‘determination’.

Similar to the discussions of the previous section, Walker shows how Europe presents the migration regime as a space of protection for child victims, especially those that attain and perform the European idealised notions of childhood. Not surprisingly, those who are seen as ‘unchildlike children’ end up embodying the dual notion of ‘subject at risk’ and posing as ‘risk’. It is this ‘risk’ that I think welcomes the opening and failure of the legal category in the field of migration because it contests the pretentious liberalism of Europe’s promises of protection.

Walker, also, reminds us that child migration is not a new phenomenon. Fass (2005, as cited in Walker, 2023) showed how children were tied to labour migration during the colonial era. El-Enany (2020) elucidates this point further by drawing on postcolonial critique to offer a counter-pedagogy to that of the law of the emperor Britain. While nationalists, xenophobic and neoliberals argue that immigration control is necessary for nation-states or ‘host countries’ to keep out people who are not entitled to access, El-Enany conceptualises irregular migration in a very interesting way. She looks at the (neo)colonial production of categories and their material consequences, to show the limits of any legal categories, precisely when they are grounded in colonial terms of extraction.

In this way, she argues (El-Enany, 2020: 227) that ‘in being illegal it amounts to a forcible return of something that was stolen in a context in which the laws being breached, immigration and border controls, are designed specifically to obstruct such an outcome.’ Far from romanticising irregularised migration, she shifts the discourse from the mercy of legal status recognition processes and intervenes how ‘racialised people must both be understood, and understand themselves, as being collectively entitled to the reclamation of wealth accumulated via colonial dispossession’.

Following El-Enany, I am suggesting reconceptualising the legal category and the subjective position of a child within the context of migration as a call for an intimate unpacking of immigration control and nation-states’ complex power mechanism (as in the neocolonial and racialised, legal, State power, humanitarian governance) and resistance to them. I suggest reconceptualising the legal category and the subjective position of a child as a force that shifts the focus from the universalised notions of childhood to resisting nation-state tactics and power mechanisms that enforce migration control in the name of ‘entitled’ recognition and citizenship. Situating ‘child as method’ within the migration matrix, not only opens different ways to discuss child, childhood and children within migration. It also reverses the discourse of age assessment as a necessity or proclamation of ensuring rights, access and recognition. As such, it consequently facilitates discussion around the limits of legal categories, like age, ‘who is worthy of protection’ and how this is granted.

Regarding the second concluding point, attention is needed on how childhood as a discourse provokes refugees’ subjectification by (re)presenting them as children, voiceless and passive. This attention should be directed to broadening ‘child as method’ as a research analytic within migration by considering how the UK and European state authorities like the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (EUROPOL) and European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation (EUROJUST) along with the state’s asylum service, the Ministry of Migration and the humanitarian sector have already used children as a method to mobilise and reproduce specific positions and dynamics about both children and migrants. These positions reflect statuses of vulnerability and access to different welfare commodities as well as evaluate who is deserving of immediate and better forms of protection. They also reflect Rollo’s (2018) argument that the child/human binary presents ad hoc as a central feature of racialisation.

In this sense, we need to explore and expose how the same institutional practices represent migrants and refugees as ‘children’ or as I was often hearing during my work and field study ‘behaving childishly’ within hotspots and camps. Hyndman and Giles (2011) embraced these practices under the concept of ‘feminization’, in the way refugees are, overall, feminised as a space of ‘womenandchildren’ as voiceless and passive subjectivities. Viterbo (2021: 17–18) adds to this conceptualisation by offering the term ‘infantilization’ which is ‘the portrayal or treatment of adults in the legal sense of the word, as children’.

It is critical, therefore, to reflect on what the homogenised category of childhood serves to do within the state and humanitarian sector regarding migration. Or, to interrogate which are the standards that outline who a minor is in the category of ‘unaccompanied minors’. Child, children and childhood in this context diffuse the binary conceptualisation of ‘childhood v. adulthood’ by exposing the limits, neocolonial implications and material consequences of legal categories grounded in colonial terms of extraction, as El-Enany (2020) argues.

As previously argued, age is a social construct. As Viterbo (2021: 4) states ‘neither “children” nor “adults” are merely pre-existing groups to be served, regulated, or governed by law and human rights. Rather, each is in large part a socially manufactured category, one that is delineated, reinforced, challenged, and weaponized by historically and geographically contingent forces’. The turning point here, is not the social constitution of age, but how childhood as a distinct category and age in relation and always in contrast with adulthood became as Viterbo claims ‘an intervention of modernity’. The relation or connection of age and childhood with modernity is how the Western and legal conceptualisation of childhood created a framework to think for and about children. This is a point that should be taken forward by scholars that use ‘child as method’, scholars in humanitarian, migration, refugee and childhood studies and practitioners.

When age becomes that important to the migration authorities to know and define who is or is not a child in legal terms by using age assessment as a tool, it is equally vital to ask how aid workers and immigration officials are implicated in the imposition of age assessment. What does age assessment mean for the profession itself and its code of conduct? What about these workers who refuse to employ age assessment and take the role of the advocate?

To make these questions and positions a little bit more complicated, there is an argument (Crawley, 2007: 39) that suggests that ‘the risks of wrongly treating children as adults are considerably higher than the other way around’. This position has often reiterated the necessity to proceed with age assessments within the context of migration. I argue that these binary positionings between child-adult within migration reiterate precisely a nationalist, Western, gendered and racialised dynamic of who should be considered ‘vulnerable’ and for what reason because they justify who will get access to further national and state-wide ‘benefits’. ‘Child as method’ becomes, therefore, the analytic tool to expose and critically work on the intersection of nation, development and childhood within the context of migration.

Conclusion

There is, thus, the outstanding and crucial question about the role of age assessments within the state and humanitarian landscape in migration. As discussed in this paper, age assessments have been used as a screening tool not only to define who is legally considered a ‘child’ or an ‘adult’ but most importantly who deserves different conditions of living – ‘who is worthy of protection’. At the same time, those who are not recognised as ‘real children’ or may embrace the legal category and the subjective position of a child to demand a better form of living have been looked at with suspicion and arguments of being imposters or villains.

Mobilising, engaging with and expanding the research analytic of Burman’s (2019a) ‘child as method’ in migration, I argued that child, childhood and children play out as state and humanitarian tropes to indicate and define ‘who is welcomed and who is not’ in another’s territory. In this way, ‘child as method’ is stretched in the field of migration to further interrogate the politics of racialised innocence and help manifested by European and humanitarian aid overall and more specifically in the deployment of the age assessment. It also questions how children and migrants are positioned as passive while universalised and idealised notions of children, childhood and migration are capitalised on within the European territory and humanitarian governance to define who can have access in the fortress Europe.

One of the points Burman (2019a) makes in her book is how trope, category and lived experience sometimes amplify each other and sometimes pull in different directions. To me, the discussion on age assessment and migration control not only illuminates how childhood becomes a trope. It also formulates and deconstructs the idea of ‘Europe’ itself. Namely, while Europe is trying to promote a coherent front and image on equality and rights, age assessment (among of course other atrocities, like the ones we see every day in the Mediterranean Sea) comes to depict that rights come with terms and conditions. Terms and conditions are reinforced with building fences, pushbacks in the Mediterranean Sea, detention centres, extreme policing, militarisation, violence and dehumanisation. This is why I emphasise that age assessment and migration control need to be cross-examined to consider how both are mutually sustaining each other and push towards their abolition.

Moreover, considering race and gender, where discourses of ‘nation’ engage and enact structures of racialisation and gender as part of their immigration control regimes, the determination of age within migration requires an anticolonial, antiracist and feminist conceptualisation and understanding. As shown, it is not a coincidence that males are often represented as ‘villains’ (Silverman, 2016) and ‘womenandchildren’ (Sylvester, 1998) as vulnerable. Even more and following El-Enany (2020), if reconceptualise the legal category and the subjective position of a child within the context of migration as an act of resistance, then the focus can be shifted from universalised notions of childhood to the complex and neocolonial power mechanisms of immigration regimes, control and nation-states. In this sense, ‘child as method’ is not only ‘about’ children and childhood in childhood studies and/or within the field of migration. Rather it brings into scrutiny how children and childhood function within wider geopolitical axes and dynamics, the better to interrogate and, where necessary, challenge these.