Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care: Living in Contested Spaces (Studies in Childhood and Youth) 3031151828, 9783031151828

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STUDIES IN CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care Living in Contested Spaces Rachel Larkin

Studies in Childhood and Youth Series Editors

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh University of Bristol Bristol, UK Nigel Patrick Thomas University of Central Lancashire Preston, UK Spyros Spyrou European University Cyprus Nicosia, Cyprus Anandini Dar School of Education Studies Ambedkar University Delhi New Delhi, India

This well-established series embraces global and multi-disciplinary scholarship on childhood and youth as social, historical, cultural and material phenomena. With the rapid expansion of childhood and youth studies in recent decades, the series encourages diverse and emerging theoretical and methodological approaches. We welcome proposals which explore the diversities and complexities of children’s and young people’s lives and which address gaps in the current literature relating to childhoods and youth in space, place and time. We are particularly keen to encourage writing that advances theory or that engages with contemporary global challenges. Studies in Childhood and Youth will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including Childhood Studies, Youth Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Politics, Psychology, Education, Health, Social Work and Social Policy.

Rachel Larkin

Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care Living in Contested Spaces

Rachel Larkin School of Social Policy Sociology and Social Research University of Kent Chatham Maritime, UK

ISSN 2731-6467     ISSN 2731-6475 (electronic) Studies in Childhood and Youth ISBN 978-3-031-15182-8    ISBN 978-3-031-15183-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface: Meeting Amina

In 2012, I was sitting in the spacious home of two foster carers in a small town in southern England. Across from me sat a young woman, Amina. This was the first time we had met. Amina had left her country in northern Africa and arrived at a UK port with an unidentified man who had, seemingly, abandoned her when she was stopped by border officers. He had taken all her belongings with him, so Amina had only a phone, a false passport, and the clothes she was wearing. We sat together on the sofa, Amina and I, while I tried to work out what she understood and what sense she was making of all this. Amina told me she had been coming to live with her sister in the UK. Instead, she had been taken somewhere she had not chosen, by adults she had never met before. It was a place where nobody spoke her language, where the food, the temperature, the smells, and the sounds were unfamiliar. The police officer and social workers who met her at the border thought she was possibly being ‘trafficked’. Amina said they had tried to explain things to her, but she didn’t really know what that meant. Through an interpreter, Amina said her foster carers were ‘nice people’, but an adult was with her everywhere she went and this felt very strange. The social worker had taken away her phone ‘to keep her safe’. Amina asked when she would see her sister again—that was all she wanted. Social work is always about the use of power—the opportunities it gives us and the ethical dilemmas it carries. There are times, though, when the power you hold feels almost tangible and sitting with Amina was one of those moments. Amina was not the first separated young person I had v

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worked with, and she would not be the last, but the vast majority were boys and young men. I was unsettled by how very little we knew or understood about this young woman, and by a sense of her complete isolation in the UK. There were questions about her age, her nationality, and even her name. Who was Amina? What had being a girl meant for her story? What had her life been like before we met on that day? Why was she here and what did she want and need from us? I recall feeling physically aware of my age, my whiteness, my Britishness. Could my lived experiences have any relevance here? Was I part of a process that had prevented Amina from being exploited, or was this really coercion? Did any of the ‘safety planning’ feel remotely like safety for Amina? Chatham Maritime, UK

Rachel Larkin

Acknowledgements

My greatest thanks go to the practitioners and girls who took part in the research project that informs this book, and who agreed to share their stories with me. I am also grateful to all the children and young people I worked with during my social work career, who continually inspired me with their strength and creativity. I have met countless social workers who are tireless in their efforts to support and safeguard children, but whose contributions often go unseen. I am grateful for all that I learned from these colleagues and for the teaching they are now providing to the next generation of practitioners coming through social work education. I am grateful for the support I have received from former colleagues at the University of Sussex and from my current colleagues, and students, at the University of Kent. My doctoral supervisor, Professor Michelle Lefevre, offered steadfast support throughout the research which led to this book, and I thank her for her encouragement. Amber, the Young Women’s Engagement Lead at the Hummingbird Project, was generous with her time and her knowledge. I am also grateful to the social workers in the Brighton and Hove Unaccompanied Asylum-­ Seeking Children’s Team, who impressed me with their commitment and professional wisdom. Finally, I thank my family and friends for their encouragement, patience, and support. I could not have written this without them.

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Contents

Part I Youth Migration and the State   1 1 Introduction:  Barriers, Borders, and Care  3 Bordering Practices and the Criminalisation of Care   4 Why Focus on Separated Girls?   7 Theoretical Frameworks   9 Research Methods and Methodologies  10 Us and (S)he-Poems  12 Social Work and the Insider-Researcher  12 Research Limitations  14 Defining Terms  15 References  16 2 The  Refugee Child: Images and Imaginings 23 Children on the Move  25 Who Are the Children Who Move?  27 Notions of Danger and Risk  30 Notions of Innocence and Vulnerability  33 Traumatised or Agentic—Which Lens?  34 Who Is a Child?  37 References  39

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3 Separated Girlhood 47 Girlhood on the Move  51 Intersectional Girlhood: Agency, Asylum, and Trafficking  57 Becoming Woman  60 References  62 4 Separated  Children in State Care 69 On the Outside Looking in—Bordering Practices  71 Age Assessment—Moral Panic and ‘Burden-Sharing’  74 Making Meanings and Forming Connections  77 At the Margins of State Care  82 Reunifying Family  83 When Childhood Ends  86 References  89 Part II Research Data: Who Do You See?  99 5 Threshold  Stories: Meeting the Giant101 Introducing Grace 101 Introducing Mia 103 Introducing Salam 104 The Practitioners: ‘We’re not Immigration Officers’ 104 ‘I have no idea what’s going on’ 107 ‘You need to think about the welfare of the child first’ 110 ‘They explain to me … but in my head I was like “I don’t trust you”’ 112 ‘I’m a woman and she a woman, she can understand me more’ 115 ‘They touch my hand and they start make me to feel comfortable’ 117 Eva, Helen, and the Giant 119 References 124 6 Living  in Spaces of State Care127 ‘I didn’t have any idea where I am going’ 128 ‘It’s like plonking someone on Mars and asking them to get on with it’ 129 ‘It’s just such a different way of life’ 133 ‘Boys more free … they are important’ 135

 Contents 

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‘Telling is hard … really hard’ 137 The Sheltering Tree 141 References 143 7 Trust,  (Dis)Belief, and Love145 ‘What would I want her to be, in order to look like a worthy asylum seeker?’ 148 ‘When I came my heart was broke’/‘Social Workers should be like cogs’ 152 ‘I see it as having a rope’ 154 References 155 8 Interconnecting Spaces157 ‘I want to add something new to me’ 158 Spaces of Intimacy: ‘Young women have the ability to get pregnant’ 162 ‘You need to talk to me like who I am, not about my religion’ 164 Transnational Spaces: ‘We will probably never know where her family are’ 166 Girlhood to Womanhood: ‘We absolve ourselves of responsibility too easily’ 169 References 172 Part III Implications and New Directions 175 9 Conclusion:  Disrupting the Giant177 Relational (Un)becoming 177 Meaning-Making in the Micro-space 181 Connections to Previous Spaces 186 Trusting and (Dis)believing 188 Looking Beyond the Micro-space 191 Disrupting the Giant 193 A Final Thought … 200 References 200 Index207

About the Author

Rachel Larkin  (CQSW, DSW) is Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Kent, UK. She qualified as a social worker in 1994 and has worked as a social worker in statutory, health, and NGO services. She has worked with children and young people in state care for over two decades, including young migrants who have crossed international borders without their families, and children affected by immigration systems in the UK. Her doctoral research explored how separated girls and social workers construct each other in practice encounters and was completed in 2019.Dr. Larkin is the author of ‘Understanding the Lived Experience of Unaccompanied Young Women: Challenges and Opportunities for Social Work’, Practice, (2015) 27(5), 1–17, and co-editor of the book Social Work with Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Migrants: Theory and Skills for Practice (Wroe et  al. 2019), published by Jessica Kingsley. She is co-author of ‘Unaccompanied Young Females and Social Workers: Meaning-Making in the Practice Space’, British Journal of Social Work (2020) 0, 1–18.

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 9.1

Eva’s Giant Grace’s trees Susan’s questions Salam’s hearts Spatial, relational understandings

120 142 149 153 182

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PART I

Youth Migration and the State

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Barriers, Borders, and Care

This book is about separated girls who come into forms of state care, and the social workers and carers who are charged with ensuring they are ‘looked after’. It is based on doctoral research, carried out by an insider-­ researcher (Kim, 2012), and grew out of the questions that social work practice with separated girls can evoke, and the lack of literature that critically explores them. This book unpicks some of the complex and shifting dynamics that may be shaping social work with separated girls in the UK, and considers what these mean for state responses internationally. The voices of separated young women are still infrequently heard in the literature or in social debates about forced migration, and this book seeks to increase girls’ visibility. There are difficult questions we need to be asking of ourselves and each other, stories we still need to hear, and actions we still need to take. This book is intended to be part of that conversation. In July 2021, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), the charity that provides sea rescue around the UK coast, was criticised in the British press for rescuing migrants adrift in the sea between France and the UK. RNLI crew members are volunteers, mainly fishermen and women from coastal communities who go out to boats in distress. They are usually the epitome of the hero. Yet, in 2021, crews had been met on shore by people throwing objects and demanding that the people they had rescued should be taken back to France. In response, the RNLI issued a statement: ‘Our charity exists to save lives at sea. Our mission is to save every one, our © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_1

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lifesavers are compelled to go to those in need without judgement of how they came to be in the water’ (RNLI, 2021). This unprecedented need to defend sea rescue, on an island nation with a long history of seafaring, is a stark illustration of how dehumanising and polarised the debates about forced migration have become in the twenty-­ first century. These are not just debates about quality of life and the type of care that people should receive; they are debates about whose life is worth saving and whether any care should be provided at all. Social workers play key roles in care, advocacy, reception, and protection processes for people on the move, and they can experience forced migration themselves. As someone who has worked in the profession for almost 30 years I have witnessed countless examples of skilled and informed social work practice with young migrants, but social work is being asked (once again) to reflect on its role in relation to people who cross borders (Wroe et al., 2019). Climate change, the COVID pandemic, conflict, and global inequality are all poised to affect patterns of migration for years to come. An estimated 1.2 billion people could be at risk of displacement by 2050, with children expected to form a sizeable proportion (UNHCR, 2021), but the ways states respond, today and tomorrow, are not fixed. Social work, in all its forms, is likely to play a key role throughout the twenty-first century. The question is, what role will this be?

Bordering Practices and the Criminalisation of Care UNHCR (2022) estimates that 1  in every 95 people on the globe has been displaced from their home, a number that has been rising since 2010, and that half of the current 82.4 million forced migrants are under 18. Yet we are entering the third decade of the twenty-first century with more barriers at national borders than at any other time in modern history. India is completing a fence at the 4000-km border with Bangladesh, Israel has encircled Gaza with a ‘smart barrier’, and Nicaragua has a ‘containment wall’ at its border with Costa-Rica. Since 2015, and the increased migration fuelled by war in Syria, fences have gone up across Europe. This ‘geography of externalisation and exclusion’ (Teloni & Mantanika, 2015, p. 190) aims to push people back beyond the borders of mainland Europe. It is supported by a persistent narrative of ‘crisis’, ignoring the fact that only a small proportion of forced migrants ever reach the Global North, and disregarding the post-colonial power relations that underlie many migration decisions (Bank & Fröhlich, 2018; Danewid, 2017).

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The COVID pandemic has added further complexity to border crossings. In 2020 many borders were closed, and the number of forced migrants crossing national borders sharply reduced (UNHCR, 2022). Forced migration continues, but COVID affected the routes taken by forced migrants, and state responses to the pandemic have varied globally. In 2020 Portugal granted asylum-seekers full citizenship so they could access health care and vaccinations, and Spain emptied its detention centres. However, delays in providing resources in US immigration centres meant detained migrants were disproportionally affected by the virus (Stefanelli, 2021), and South Africa built a fence at the Zimbabwean border as cases increased, fuelled by concerns that migrants may bring the virus with them (Zanker & Moyo, 2020). Across Africa COVID exacerbated the health risks for people being trafficked, as well as the ability of countries to provide safeguarding services (Warria, 2020). Social workers, and many related professions, have been in frontline roles throughout the pandemic, providing food and essential services, and supporting communities to minimise risks from COVID. The pandemic has made access to health care, vaccinations, regular food, and clean living conditions even more fragile for forced migrants, placing them at increased risk from the effects of ill-health. Practitioners and carers have risked their own health to maintain systems for children and young people, and the social work profession has been part of political campaigns for global solutions to health inequalities (WFPHA, 2022). Although it may be years before the long-­ term impacts are known, COVID has brought economic and racial inequality more starkly into the light. Borders are more than fences. They are gendered, racialised, heteronormative spaces, where bordering practices identify certain bodies as unwelcome through the ways they are seen, felt, and heard (Sur, 2014; Weitzel, 2018). They can be dangerous places to be if your body is identified as ‘transgressive’ (Biemann, 2002, 2016). Thousands are believed to have died in the desert south of the US/Mexico border (Dunn, 2021) and, globally, 47,000 migrants have been recorded as missing since 2014 (IOM, 2022), although this is likely to be an under-estimate. The nationalist rhetoric which often supports the building of walls is framed around the idea of homogeneity, of threatened identities within particular spaces. Think of the reports of white nationalists chanting ‘you will not replace us’ in Charlottesville, USA, in 2017 (BBC News, 2017), or India’s BJP’s president calling Bangladeshi migrants ‘termites’ (India Today, 2019). Borders can sit between countries, but they can also be internal. In

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the UK, the policy of creating a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants (Liberty, 2018) has created a series of everyday borders where proof of ID is demanded for rented accommodation and health care. In 2018, the ‘hostile environment’ was rebranded as the ‘compliant environment’, in an attempt to distance the policy from the Windrush scandal (Bulman, 2018), but policies created through hostility remain intact and continue to be introduced. Narratives of migrant ‘floods’ are used globally in media stories (Abid et  al., 2017) to support these policies of spatial exclusion. Counter-­ narratives portray forced migrants as the blameless human in need of rescue and kindness, but these bring their own complications, moving the focus onto notions of worthiness and away from legal rights. There are regular calls for safer routes (Safe Passage, 2021), but more walls are planned, despite the evidence overwhelmingly suggesting barriers are largely ineffective and that the welfare of citizens would be better met by more open borders and less restrictions (Vernon & Zimmermann, 2021). Nationalist rhetoric continues to support more restrictions. These have spread beyond the national border into everyday bordering practices which work to set the boundaries of place. Access to public services has been restricted for people without the right ‘papers’, rendering some lives unliveable (Tyerman, 2022), and leaving some communities with a ‘frontier anxiety’ which erodes (a sometimes already fragile) trust between individuals and the state (Flynn, 2015). These barriers, though, are not the whole story. During the height of the 2015 European refugee ‘crisis’, over 100,000 people were believed to have been involved in activism, in what has been called the largest civic movement since the Second World War (Clayton, 2020). Local residents worked alongside activist groups and NGOs—opening up their homes, setting up kitchens, providing resources, and pulling people from the sea. This is not just a European phenomenon; there are examples of local, national, and transnational activism across the world (Amalia, 2020; Vanyoro, 2019). In Europe, however, the response of some states was to pass laws banning the ‘intentional assistance’ of someone who is not a ‘national’, criminalising individuals who provide forced migrants with food, shelter, resources, or rescue. These laws have been used. Greece has charged 20 aid workers with espionage in the ‘unlawful use of radio frequencies’ during sea rescues (BBC News, 2021). Over 100 activists have been investigated in, what has been called, the ‘criminalisation of solidarity’ (ReSoma, 2020).

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If we define care as ‘the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection’ of someone (Oxford Languages, 2022), we could also understand these laws as the criminalisation of care. States regularly define the boundaries of the social care they do, or do not, provide, but this criminalisation of care sits in sharp contrast to the active encouragement given to community support for other groups or people, or the expectations of caring regularly placed on family members. States are not passing laws telling citizens they are not allowed to make their older neighbour a hot meal or lend a sleeping bag to a family friend. By making the intentional assistance of ‘non-nationals’ illegal, these laws attempt to move forms of care-giving for certain groups away from the individual or community, and locate it only within the state. It privileges state actors with control over all spaces of care, and the power to define where care takes place, for whom, by whom, for how long, and, of course, whether it takes place at all. This does not prevent state actors from carrying out acts of care themselves, or facilitating caring relationships, but it raises questions about how care is being understood and experienced in these contested spaces. Social policy can present care as a one-directional process, but this book explores care as a relational experience, which cannot be fully understood in terms of intentions. Acts intended as care for refugees, for example, can be based on notions of post-colonial ‘white rescue’, which frame people of colour as ‘charitable subjects’ (Danewid, 2017). Such acts have the potential to entrench inequalities rather than undermine them. In this book, care is explored as a response to human need, but whose meaning is situated, shifting, and embedded in power relations. Caring is not a neutral activity—it is always a political act.

Why Focus on Separated Girls? The voices of separated girls and young women are infrequently heard in research and they are rarely the focus. The narrow foregrounding of age and immigration status has left gendered experiences of youth migration under-examined, and UNICEF (2021) notes the ‘critical need for nuanced information that considers the role of gender in childhood migration’ (p. 8). Young women have the right to voice their experiences of girlhood (UNICEF, 1989), and feminist researchers stress the need to foreground women’s voices in studies that examine their lives (Hesse-Biber, 2012; Maynard, 2004). Yet, although UNHCR (2021) estimates women and

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girls make up 50% of any refugee, displaced, or stateless population, female voices are under-represented in debates around migration (Asaf, 2017) and girls’ voices even more so. The literature examining how gender can impact every stage of forced migration offers rich knowledge, but has largely focussed on adult women (Crawley, 2001; Gerard & Pickering, 2014; Haaken & O’Neill, 2014; Hoang, 2011; Kelson & Delaet, 1999; Morrice, 2016; Palmary et  al., 2010). Attempts to hear girls’ stories have often been hampered by the smaller numbers of separated girls in destination countries, making their participation more challenging for researchers. Young women’s voices are present in research with young migrants, but the majority of voices are from boys and young men. Social work practice, in many destination countries, has also developed largely with boys. Boys’ stories offer valuable knowledge about lived experiences within care systems, and the forms of caring practices that take place there, but there is little literature offering a theoretically informed analysis of social work with girls in these spaces of care. Notions of gender and girlhood are always shifting  and located in power (de Finney, 2016). In the twenty-first century there is disagreement about whether gender and sex are chromosomally, biologically, or socially defined (Beauchamp & D’Harlingue, 2012; Hines, 2017). Feminist literature has too often taken a universal view of gender (hooks, 2015; Lorde, 2007), and the way ‘woman’ is constructed has been challenged by black feminists and trans-gendered scholars (Green & Bey, 2017). These debates are significant, but not universal, and girls can still grow up within cultures where gender may be constructed in uncontested binary ways (Ussher et al., 2017; WRC, 2005). Each girl who migrates has a unique lived experience, affected by intersecting identities such as class (Urbańska, 2016), ethnicity (Ahmed, 2000), religion (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh & Qasmiyeh, 2010; Mavelli & Wilson, 2017), age (Slade & Borovnik, 2018), disability (Crock et al., 2012), or identifying as LGBTQIA+ (Fournier et al., 2018). We still know little about the experiences of disabled or LGBTQIA+ children and young people in migration. An intersectional lens (Mattsson, 2014) and non-binary view of gender (Butler, 2006) are used here. Gender, girlhood, and childhood are explored as ‘concepts-on-the-move’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), and femininity and masculinity understood as a set of ‘gendered embodied practices’, continually enabled and constricted by spatial, social relations.

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Theoretical Frameworks This book uses theories of space/time as the key framework, drawing particularly on the work of Doreen Massey (1994, 2004, 2005). It also draws on Margaret Wetherell’s (Wetherell, 2012) notions of relational, spatial co-production of meanings and the ‘affective practices’ of social actors within these dynamics. Massey (Massey, 1994, 2004, 2005) describes the lived world as a multiplicity of intersecting spaces, where identities are being continually constructed through gender-power relations. As we move through the micro-spaces of our lives, our trajectories are continually intersecting with others. Place is understood as a moment in time, when space and power relations are working to try and fix meanings and define boundaries, although these always remain porous and fluid. We can understand the debates about migration as (inevitably unsuccessful) attempts to fix the boundaries of space through power relations. Importantly, micro-level spaces are not seen as reactive to what is ‘beyond’, but as sites of resistance whose potential can support change. The micro-­ space where a young woman meets a social worker then becomes a site of possibility. Wetherell (2012) argues that we also need to pay attention to the role of affect, and the ways we create our world through affective practices, which are forms of relational embodied meaning-making. Emotions are key sources of knowledge in social work practice, although this is not always made explicit and the affective domains can be overlooked in the neo-liberal focus on what is measurable. Affect can underlie how particular bodies, such as the refugee, are constructed (Ahmed, 2000) not only in law and policy but also in the micro-space. This book considers how embodied meaning-making may be intertwined with its political and organisational contexts, and what that might mean for separated girls and social care professionals in the spaces of state care. There has been an increasing focus on space/place in social work (Bryant & Williams, 2020), and theories of space/place have been increasingly used within anthropological studies of migration (Stankovic et al., 2021), but a spatial analysis has not yet been used to consider social work with people experiencing forced migration. This book considers how affect may be working within space and place, and suggests some new ways of thinking about these dynamics in the context of social work and youth migration.

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Research Methods and Methodologies This book draws on data from two pieces of qualitative research completed as part of a doctoral research programme in southern England. Some data has been published in articles (Larkin, 2015; Larkin & Lefevre, 2019) and as a doctoral thesis. There were 11 participants in total, 8 social workers and 3 young women. The young women described encounters with total of eight practitioners and the practitioners talked, specifically, about eight separated girls. The first set of data was gathered from semi-­ structured interviews with four social work practitioners, all from a specialist team for young people seeking asylum in the UK.  The data was analysed using Edley’s model of Critical Discursive Psychology (in Yates et al., 2001), which considers how social discourse is used as a resource for making evaluations, constructing versions of truth, and performing particular actions. Using a multi-perspectival approach, aspects of psychosocial theory were used to consider how the social workers’ emotional responses were impacting on the ways they understood separated girls. The second set of data was gathered through a ‘practice-near’ (Froggett & Briggs, 2012) qualitative study, Who Do You See?, which took a narrative, psychosocial, and feminist lens (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000) to data collection and analysis. This research used both creative and autoethnographic approaches within a qualitative framework, responding to calls for multiple streams of knowledge to build rich understandings of complex dynamics (Hustvedt, 2017). All the young women who participated or were discussed had spent time living in state care. They were all aged between 14 and 21, had come to the UK more than six months before the project, had been identified as separated, and had encountered social work practitioners. The practitioners all had direct practice experience with separated girls. In the Who Do You See? research project, data was gathered over a 12-month period, using unstructured, creative interviews (Mannay, 2016) with eight research participants—five social workers and three young women—within local authorities in the south of England. Autoethnographic data was drawn from an autoethnographic audio diary (Denzin, 2003; Muncey, 2010), kept for a ten-month period during which I worked with separated young men and young women in state care. The main body of data was collected through individual creative interviews, where the researcher starts with an open question and images are then created by the participant (Mannay, 2016). Relational art is a way to ‘create encounters that open dialogue’ (Sunday, 2015, p.  235), and the images were

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understood to be a co-production, as carriers of multiple, culturally situated, meanings (Banks, 2001). Introducing images offers an alternative way for stories to be communicated, involving ways of thinking that may challenge the accepted ways of talking, seeing, and doing (Yates, 2010). This makes it a particularly appropriate methodology for an insiderresearcher attempting to see practice in different ways. Interpretation is understood to be an act of power, but the interpretation of images is not considered intrinsically more problematic than interpretations of voice. Language could be viewed as equally constructed and positioned (Wetherell, 2012). Rather than offering any single ‘truth’ about the images, I recognise that multiple interpretations are available. The intention was to develop multiple streams of knowledge to build rich understandings of complex dynamics (Hustvedt, 2017). The sample was not intended to be representative. Statistical generalisability was not the goal and would not be possible within a study of this size and scope (Robson, 2011). The aim was to develop rich, rigorous, and well-argued research which could lead to analytical generalisability and the development of new theoretical lenses (Polit & Beck, 2010). Analysis was completed using Maclure’s (2013) model of qualitative analysis and Mauthner and Doucet’s (1998) feminist model of Voice-Centred Relational Analysis (VCR), developed from the work of Brown and Gilligan (1993, referenced in Mauthner & Doucet, 1998). Whilst the findings are context-­ specific, qualitative research can provide evidence of some of the ways forced migrants tell their stories, understand their worlds, and act within them (Eastmond, 2007). The voices of social care professionals involved with separated young people are also rarely heard in research. By interweaving autoethnography with stories from young women and practitioners, this book offers a new, multi-voiced lens into practice encounter spaces. The data is drawn from UK practice, and this book written within a European context, but the findings and discussion are relevant for social work as a global profession. Power and agency intertwine in complex ways within social work practice. I agree with Giddens (1984) that power relations are always in flux, but find his model of agency and structure too rigid. Foucault’s (1977, 1980) notion of ‘capillary’ power better describes my experience of power flowing through and between individuals in social work spaces. Yet the subject can become lost here, and Foucault (ibid.) offers no robust explanation of how social change may happen, whether through individual or collective action. This is less useful for social work practice, where change

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is a driving force (Jeffery, 2011). Agency is therefore explored as a concept, always situated within power, rather than defined in fixed ways. Ethical issues were carefully considered and all ethical agreements were granted for both projects. Power dynamics were considered at all stages, and consent was understood to be a continuing, emotional awareness rather than a single act (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). Gaining informed consent can be complex in relation to young people in research which crosses languages and cultures (Boddy, 2014). The girls were contacted through people they already knew, such as social workers, residential workers, and carers. Interpreters were provided by the local authorities to support participation, including during the consent stage. Different information and consent forms were produced for the practitioners and the young women. Participants were encouraged to ask questions or raise concerns throughout. At the end of each interview, participants could withdraw their participation or remove sections of the data. No young women I worked with in my practitioner role were approached. Young migrants in state care are likely to have experienced a number of formal interviews; the creative methodology was seen as less likely to replicate these experiences and to give participants more control over the stories they wanted to share (Yates, 2010).

Us and (S)he-Poems An analytic innovation was made in the development of additional relational data ‘poems’, adding to Mauthner and Doucet’s (1998) existing VCR method. I-Poems are an analytical technique which pull out rich data on individualised experience, which is then grouped around a theme (Doucet & Mauthner, 2008). In the data analysis, I found they excluded richer understandings of relationships with other actors, and so developed Us-Poems and (S)he-Poems. These are designed to highlight the relational ways in which young women and practitioners were positioning, constructing, and experiencing each other in the data.

Social Work and the Insider-Researcher I have spent three decades working in children and families’ social work in the UK, including many years working with children and young people in care systems. I am therefore an insider-researcher, someone who shares the same professional or organisational position as the participants

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(Costley, 2010), or has a common social or cultural position (Kim, 2012). Throughout the research which informs this book I worked with separated young people and other ‘looked after’ children in England, meeting regularly with them and involved in decisions about their lives. Policy and law are poor descriptors for what practitioners actually do in their professional roles. Practice is a fluid process of continual thinking, evaluating, and reflecting in a series of unique encounters, a ‘creative act of choosing between myriad possibilities’ (Adams et al., 2005, p. 7). Considering how central practice is to social work, there is relatively little literature that considers what takes place in encounters between professionals and people who use services, and practice ethnographies are rare. Rather than seeing practice as the enactment of legal and policy directives, the practice space is considered as a site of possibility, where a practitioner’s ways of thinking, feeling, and being meet the lived experience of a service user, always in unique and often unpredictable ways. This book makes an argument for the importance of the practice micro-space and its potential as a site of critical, communicative practice. Social work is a global profession which takes place in a variety of organisations and communities, all within different national and local contexts. As an insider-researcher I understand social work to be a political act and take, as a starting point, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) definition: [A] practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes social change and development, social cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. Principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities are central to social work. Underpinned by theories of social work, social sciences, humanities and indigenous knowledges, social work engages people and structures to address life challenges and enhance wellbeing. (IFSW, 2014)

Practitioners can be an easy target for criticism, working in often under-­ resourced organisations and in social contexts of poverty, inequality, and exclusion. It is not my intention to blame practitioners navigating this demanding profession, but neither am I championing social work in all its forms. Social work is embedded in particular social and political contexts, and practice does not take place in a hermetically sealed social bubble. While there are many examples of practitioners promoting rights and offering protection, the profession has been criticised for colluding with

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unjust immigration systems and not consistently holding to the principles of social justice it claims to have at its core (Wroe et al., 2019). The powers and skills held by practitioners may support positive change, but they can also be used to exclude or oppress. Social work makes a claim that ‘social improvement can be achieved by interpersonal influence and action’ (Payne et al., 2006, p. 1), and practitioners intervene in people’s lives on the basis of this claim. Given the potential impact of these interventions, or the lack of them, research has a key role in reflecting on what may be taking place in practice spaces. Rather than examining whether social work is either a conservative profession that serves the needs of the state or a value-based profession that supports social justice, I consider social work practice as simultaneously holding the potential for both. Fook (2016) says the significant questions then become which practices enable participation and create more caring and inclusive environments, and how can these be facilitated and maintained. We still know relatively little about the meaning-making that takes place in the micro-spaces where young migrants meet state actors, and even less about how these narratives play out in the spaces of state care. Rather than defining or evaluating forms of care, this book explores the meanings that are attached to notions of caring for young migrants in different spaces and, significantly, the meanings care can have for separated girls themselves.

Research Limitations As with any research project, there are limitations to be acknowledged. The number of participants in the research is small, particularly in the case of the separated girls. While this allowed for a richer analysis, and for the voices of participants to be foregrounded in thick description, other perspectives may have emerged from a larger sample. The research was conducted with young women who were speaking English as a second language, and one interview involved an interpreter, so there is an increased chance of miscommunication and some cultural cues may have been missed. The practitioners had all worked within services for separated young people, so the voices of social workers who may be less positive about young migrants were not captured. The focus of the research was the relational understandings that emerge between separated girls and practitioners in care systems, and the theme of contested spaces emerged as part of this project. No interviews were carried out with carers, but the

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data does consider interactions with carers, social workers, and young people in care spaces. This book therefore adds to our understandings of separated girls’ experiences within state care, and the perspectives of the practitioners responsible for the provision and oversight of this care.

Defining Terms There are multiple terms and acronyms used for children and young people who migrate. In this book I use the term ‘separated’, defined by the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association as ‘children who are outside their country of origin and separated from their parents or legal or customary primary carer … children who have been deprived of their family environment’ (Crawley, 2012, p. 10). This definition includes young women considered to be ‘unaccompanied’ who have claimed asylum, young women who may not (yet) have made an independent claim for asylum, young women who are still on the move, and young women where trafficking is suspected. Forced migration refers to the ‘forcibly induced movement of people’ (Stankovic et al., 2021, p. 1), which may include fleeing war, persecution, or natural disaster. It is often used to make distinctions between forced migrants and economic migrants, but these terms are in constant tension and I recognise people may feel forced to migrate due to economic conditions. Trafficking is understood as ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit’ (UN ODC, 2022). The terms children and young people can hold different meanings, but for ease of reading I use them interchangeably where these distinctions are not significant. Girls and young women (and boys and young men) refer to separated children unless stated otherwise. Girls refers to separated girls and young women and is used to denote the boundaries of girlhood rather than to infantilise young migrants. The terms ‘citizen’ and ‘indigenous’ children are used to refer to children who come into state care from established lives in destination countries, but I acknowledge these are generalised terms which can also be problematic. In the UK, children in state care are now described as ‘looked after’, rather than ‘children in care’. In this book I return to the idea of being ‘in care’, partly because it is more internationally understood, but mainly because it allows questions to be asked about the gaps and connections between the stated intentions of care systems and the experiences of separated girls within spaces of state care.

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CHAPTER 2

The Refugee Child: Images and Imaginings

What image springs to mind when someone says ‘refugee child’? A thin, inadequately dressed infant who stares wide-eyed into the camera? A child clinging to an unsmiling adult, or crammed into a boat? Is it a white child or a child of colour? Maybe you see a blurry stranger under a hoodie, or think of groups of young people standing together in makeshift camps. Does the image change if someone says ‘asylum-seeker’ or ‘undocumented’? Perhaps it is yourself you think of or someone you know. Any internet search will reveal thousands of images of people on the move. In Europe, depictions of forced migration are all around us, in art galleries, film and books, and faces stare from billboards, research summaries and policy documents. Images of children are always situated in time and place, constructed within particular social, economic, and political contexts. They both reflect and shape the prevailing ideas about children’s developmental needs, their position in society and their rights (Smidt, 2006). The sheer number of terms in use illustrates the ambiguity of being a child who moves across space and place, and the multiple ways young people can be seen and categorised. Being a refugee is a legal status, which children on the move may never be granted, but the ‘refugee child’ is a social construction, imbued with meanings. Images can play an intrinsic part in processes of othering (Baider & Kopytowska, 2017), and in the twenty-first century, representations of the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_2

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refugee or migrant have been highly polarised. Visual and narrative metaphors influence attitudes and belief systems, and pictures of migrant children are carefully chosen for news stories, education materials, and NGO campaigns. These images can create empathetic responses and humanise public debates, but this does not make them unproblematic. Children are rarely in control of how they are represented or categorised, although they may try to resist or disrupt these constructions. Young migrants are often made static and silent in images, their voices rarely heard in public debate, although some notable and creative exceptions have emerged (Becoming Adult Project (n.d.), Hamedullah: The Road Home, 2012). It is adults who write the law and policy, adults who usually determine which images are shared and which stories accompany them. In my social work career I have spent time with hundreds of children and young people, including many young migrants from countries across the world. As social workers, we often position ourselves as listeners and observers in our encounters with service users—we are the gatherers of knowledge. Social work knowledge in this sense is more than information (what is heard): it includes observations (what is seen), affect (what is felt), and analysis (what is thought). Focussing only on what is said can overlook embodied, sensed forms of communication (Broadhurst & Mason, 2014), but social work guidance can still present practice encounters as one-way interactions, minimising how the emotional context also shapes what is said, heard, and seen, and what is ignored and obscured (Lefevre, 2018). This process of knowledge gathering is a key part of the social work process. Good assessments lead to richer understandings of children’s lives, but assessment is not an apolitical act. Knowledge is always partial and positioned, and always gathered through relations of power. Assessment is the practitioner’s narrative of the ‘problem’—even when service user voices are included—and what has been framed as ‘truth’ must always be open to question (Fook, 2016). Young migrants can be aware of narratives which exclude them and they can absorb negative social and political representations into their sense of self (Bareka et al., 2019). These are, therefore, constructions social work needs to pay attention to. Paying attention does not just mean exploring the available ways of thinking about the refugee child. It requires us to consider the ways of feeling involved, the affective practices (Wetherell, 2012) that shape how refugee children are seen, and how they see others, in spaces where state actors and young migrants meet.

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Children on the Move Children and young people are disproportionately affected by forced migration, making up 30% of the world’s population but 42% of displaced people (UNHCR, 2021). Debates about migration often start with numbers, but statistics about people on the move are notoriously difficult to collect. There can be significant differences in the way unaccompanied children are defined and counted (Sigona & Humphris, 2016). In most regions of the world, data on migrant children is not consistently collected, if it is gathered at all. Young people can cross borders multiple times and be counted repeatedly, while others may be seen as adults and not counted once. Statistics highlight what political leaders want to draw attention to—the numbers of people crossing borders, for example—and downplay what they may not, such as figures on detention and return. As they move, children can be seen differently by protective frameworks within each nation state, if these exist. In the UK, separated children can be subject to a raft of bureaucratic, legal, and professional processes, whilst in South Africa the lack of any mechanism for identification means ‘the presence of unaccompanied and separated children in the Republic goes mostly unnoticed’ (Ackermann, 2017, p. 975). The increasing global level of forced migration since 2012 has been accompanied by rising discourses of xenophobia and exclusion from which children are not exempt. Many states have added layers of restrictions underpinned by reconfigured ideas of citizenship and nationality (Popescu & Libal, 2018). The UK ‘hostile environment’ policy, for example, has continually framed ‘illegal’ migrants as draining resources away from more ‘deserving’ citizens (Farmer, 2017; Moore, 2013), and parts of the media frame asylum-seekers as the ‘phantom menace’ who threatens ideas of British (read English) identity (Lynn & Lea, 2003). Other states, such as Sweden, have seen more ambivalence in public debates, where national security is constantly weighed up against the human rights of refugees, opening up questions about who is the most ‘worthy’ migrant (Gustafsson & Johansson, 2018). This can leave social workers facing the dilemma that although inclusion may be their stated aim, practice can be taking place in cultural and policy contexts that are exclusionary. Children on the move are caught up in these discourses and their outcomes. Nation states seek to control borders, and people’s movement across them, through processes of categorisation based on particular social constructions. States often defend border controls and immigration

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processes on the basis of having limited resources to provide for forced migrants, a key theme in the ‘hostile environment’ policy. At the same time, many state-funded border agencies are increasingly directing resources to surveillance technology, a lucrative business marketed with a narrative of providing security against the threats of globalisation and terrorism  (Canham, 2022). Billions of dollars have already been spent on the construction and militarisation of the US/Mexico border, for example, with further works planned (Vernon & Zimmermann, 2021). This increasing use of technology brings young migrants further into processes designed to identify drug smuggling, terrorists, and illegal goods. This shifts power further towards state systems which seek to categorise and exclude, limiting children’s rights to fair and equitable treatment (Dunn, 2021). Childcare law and policy add their own categories—the ‘child in need’ or the ‘child in care’. Each state defines and interprets categories differently within national law and policy, and these are re-interpreted within local systems. When these interpretations reach the micro-level of social work practice they are again re-interpreted by individual practitioners. Using a particular category allows the privilege of defining the terms of discussion and offers professionals a set of pre-existing characteristics to attach to that category (Fook, 2016). Reaching for pre-existing ways of thinking may offer a sense of certainty in social work spaces fraught with anxiety (Ferguson, 2018), but when categorical thinking is normalised, when feelings and meanings not examined through critical reflection, it can support practices which are unhelpful and potentially excluding. When dominant narratives are challenged, however, there is the possibility for change. The UNHCR (2020), for example, evaluated 55 international projects aimed at reducing violence towards children on the move, and found that discussion around norms of child punishment contributed towards a reduction in violence. Policy discourses can shape practice. The Greek government’s ‘pushback’ against migrants was interpreted by a senior Greek police officer to mean he should ‘make their life unbearable’ (TVXS 2013 quoted in Teloni & Mantanika, 2015). In some regions, there can be little or no policy or law, and localised practice knowledge develops at different speeds in different areas. Most Latin American and Caribbean countries, for example, did not have clear laws to enforce the rights of migrant children at the start of the twenty-first century, so few projects were created to focus on migrant children (ECLAC, 2010). Yet, even when policy exists in abundance, it does not simply describe what each state actor will do, feel, or say

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in the micro-space or, significantly, what a young migrant may do, feel, or say themselves. Over the years I have worked with young migrants, I have come to understand more about the complexity of youth migration, and the near impossibility of rigidly applying policy definitions to real human beings. National and international policies can be contradictory, creating tensions which need to be managed, but practitioners can still find ways to use their agency within these contradictions. Social workers in Greece, for example, practising within the same policy context as the police officer (although not the same professional culture), looked to international guidelines to support the development of creative projects for young migrants, aiming to make their lives more bearable rather than less (Buchanan & Kallinikaki, 2018).

Who Are the Children Who Move? For many years migration research and theory paid little attention to children, seeing them as parts of migrating families rather than social actors in their own right, and youth migration was largely invisible in the literature (Rosen & Crafter, 2018). The gendered, intersectional dimensions of youth migration are still under-researched, but research projects have drawn attention to the complexity and precarity of life as a young migrant, and the reasons children and young people may leave their countries of origin. Young migrants are a diverse group and their reasons for leaving are varied. There is no single story to tell and every person’s journey is unique. Although narratives of ‘flood’ suggest most young people are heading towards the Global North, the majority of children are internally displaced or cross into neighbouring countries—in 2020, a quarter of children seeking asylum were in Southern and Eastern Africa (UNHCR, 2021). Children may move because of war; gang and community violence; or political, religious, or personal oppression. Around 3 million children fled the Syrian Arab Republic in 2020, making up one in three of child refugees in that year (ibid.). Migration patterns change in response to national and global events. In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has seen millions crossing the border into neighbouring states. The term unaccompanied can suggest children and young people travel alone, but adults are often involved in facilitating or preventing their movement. Parents or other relatives can pay for young people to leave with agents, some children leave alone or with friends, and others are moved as part of

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government resettlement programmes. Some children leave individually and others in mass migrations, such as the exodus of over 1 million Rohingya escaping the genocide by the Myanmar state in 2017–2018 (Bakali & Wasty, 2020). A lack of safe routes means some children leave with parents but become separated on the journey. Young people can also move after the death or disappearance of their parents, sometimes looking for older family members who have already migrated. Being with family members has been linked to resilience in refugee children (Mohamed, 2012), so separation may remove an important source of emotional support and protection (Fazel et al., 2012). Physical objects can become precious in this context, particularly if they have a relational connection to someone significant, but belongings can easily be lost or stolen (Kidane, 2001). Understanding these migration decisions only in terms of loss and leaving, however, misses a key aspect of youth migration—the desire for change. The stories young migrants tell are rich with their dreams, hopes, and plans for the future. Young migrants in West Africa, for example, often move towards regional economic hubs which offer employment (Carrion et al., 2018), and many young migrants arrive in Europe talking of improved life chances away from systemic poverty and economic inequalities. These life projects can be powerful motivators for young people’s migration, even when they are fuelled by adversity (Chase & Allsopp, 2021), and they can sustain young people on often perilous migration journeys. The whole notion of migration as a movement from ‘here to there’ has been unpicked and we now have richer understandings of the fluid ways young people move, and the complexity of the decision-making required to survive migration journeys. Some journeys are swift and sudden—a single flight between airports—but others can last months or years. Migrating is not just constant movement; it can include periods of being static when borders are closed or when financial, physical, and/or emotional resources are exhausted. Young migrants need both creativity and determination to survive (Clayton et al., 2019; Orgocka, 2012), and not all children remain unharmed. Crossing a border or seeking resources from adults in authority can make young people visible in ways they may be able to influence, but cannot control. They may be welcomed, but they may also be the ‘stranger at the door’, with questions immediately asked about their right to be where they are (Ahmed, 2021). Adults may intervene to support and safeguard children, as state actors, NGO workers, community members, fellow migrants, volunteers, or activists (Jones,

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2019; Wroe, 2019). This does not guarantee safety, however, and there are reports of beatings, extortion, and sexual assault of children in border spaces across the globe (Raddatz & Kerby, 2020; Save the Children, 2021). Young migrants are unaware of which adults they may encounter and so are continually weighing up the risks, gains, safety, and opportunities in each relational space. As they move, young migrants’ bodies can be highly politicised, and narratives frequently construct young migrants in binary ways—the innocent ‘victim’ in need of rescue or the unwelcome ‘stranger’ in our midst. Young migrants are either at risk or they are a risk (Gray & Franck, 2019), and the context of their migration can become lost in these narratives. Child migration is often framed as intrinsically traumatic for children simply because they are children, rather than as a consequence of the conditions and precarity of their journeys (Rosen & Crafter, 2018). Yet the idea that youth migration is a social problem is not universal and Global Northern constructions of youth can have very little meaning in some cultural contexts of the Global South (Beazley et al., 2009). Westernised constructions locate childhood firmly within family and locality, but some young people spend their early years in spaces where migration is normalised or encouraged. In West Africa, for example, mobility can be considered an important life stage and other places viewed as sources of opportunity. Rather than a drain on society, children who move can be seen as ‘agents of innovation in their communities’ (Carrion et al., 2018, p. 46). The meanings of migration can therefore continually shift as young people move. A child may start their journey in a space where their movement is seen as a social asset, or an understandable risk, but find themselves framed as ‘a drain on resources’ when they move into a different cultural space. Becoming a ‘separated child’ is not, therefore, a single, defining experience. Young migrants can be strategically using, and resisting, different categorisations as they move and trying to be seen in different ways in different spaces—as a child when this may bring resources or more security, or as an adult to avoid forced return or ‘protective detention’. They may be agentically performing an identity as they navigate the numerous identities ascribed to them (Wharton, 2020). Surviving may mean adjusting your story—to keep safe, to get a need met, or to achieve a goal. Being seen as separated can also be different from feeling you are entirely alone and isolated. Young people can form bonds with other young migrants during journeys, relationships which can be highly significant but which

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can be difficult to maintain in such precarious situations. Friendships, and more intimate relationships, can be lost when people take other routes or are arrested, hurt, killed, returned, or detained. Research is now considering how young people may be acting as carers for others, forming inter-­ dependent relationships which may not be recognised by state actors when they reach borders (Crafter et al., 2022). Migration can be instigated by a particular loss, of family or carers, but it then becomes a continual process of unique connections and dislocations, the significance of which will differ for each individual child.

Notions of Danger and Risk In westernised states, particularly those seen as destination countries, child migration is largely constructed in terms of risk. Framing child migration as intrinsically unsafe for children is more than cultural difference—it is a political act that negates the argument for safe passage. If we see migration as intrinsically unsafe for children, then preventing movement and controlling borders becomes the moral thing to do. Focussing on risks to children is still problematic for those who argue for more border control, however, because it raises questions about the protection of children who do reach the border. These ethical questions, and the emotional labour it takes to work with potential risk to children, can be partly avoided if children on the move are framed as a risk in themselves. If young migrants are the dangerous ‘stranger at the door’, then the many complexities of safeguarding children at borders can be sidelined, particularly if we do not see them as children or avoid seeing them at all. The movement of young migrants within countries often goes unseen, but when they reach a border, or gather in particular places, they can become suddenly visible and are often framed as the ‘bad’ migrant (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). When a young migrant reaches the boundary of a contested space, they can find their bodies are already being understood, and affectively responded to, in particular ways: [I]f to appear as a stranger is to appear as dangerous, some are judged as dangerous before they appear. The immediacy of bodily reactions is mediated by histories that come before subjects, and which are at stake in how the very arrival of some bodies is noticeable in the first place. (Ahmed, 2021, p. 4)

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Notions of danger and risk from young migrants can take different forms, as can the affective practices which sustain them. When dominant constructions of childhood see child-rearing responsibilities as firmly within the family, the separated child becomes a social ‘problem’. In some US detention centres, for example, migration is understood as a form of pathology which destroys normative family structures (Terrio, 2015). Such normative ideas of the functional family have proved enduring, despite the development of more systemic thinking about family life and the ways we do family continually changing (Williams, 2004). When social stability is understood to rely on families producing ‘good’ citizens, young migrants without their family, and who may be bringing different notions of family with them, can be seen as a risk to the very foundations of society. Across the globe, children on the move are being framed as a threat to social stability, to a way of life that needs to be protected. Metaphors of migrants as ‘floods’, ‘influx’, and ‘burden’ have dominated the media of host and non-host countries (Abid et al., 2017). In the USA unaccompanied children have been called ‘cockroaches’ and ‘border rats’ (Doná & Veale, 2011), and children from Latin America described as future gang members, drug runners, and criminals (Pérez, 2014). Constructions can be gendered and racialised (Larkin & Lefevre, 2019). Young male migrants are more often framed in terms of dangerousness, seen as embodying a ‘primitive masculinity’ (Olivius, 2016). As well as social dangers, young migrants can be seen as bringing physical risks. Stories of individual migrants committing acts of terrorism in destination countries, and the undoubted pain and distress these acts cause, can be represented as a risk brought by all forced migrants. In the Flanders region of Belgium, for example, fear of immigration was found to increase when news media predominantly linked migration to crime and terrorism, particularly when most of the population had little direct experience of migrants themselves (Debrael et al., 2021). The risks that come from denying rights to the majority of migrants who do not commit terrorist acts becomes a secondary matter within this narrative, to be traded off against the need to protect citizens. Young migrants can also be framed as a physical risk, as unhealthy bodies who need to be kept apart. Health has become a more significant concern since the COVID pandemic, with heightened anxieties about the spread of the virus foregrounded over concerns about the impact of COVID on migrant children’s lives (UNICEF, 2020), but it is not a new narrative. In 2014, the identification of 77,200 unaccompanied minors at the southern US/Mexico border led to a moral panic about young people being the spreaders of disease (Terrio, 2015).

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What is noticeably absent in these constructions of risk is an acknowledgement of the conditions which may lead to young people’s ill-health, mental distress, or involvement in crime, and the global political and economic context in which this occurs. It may be tempting to think that children and young people are oblivious to these constructions, that the innocent child is unknowing and unseeing, but young people are not just passive recipients of the ways they are framed by others. Young migrants in Europe have talked of being seen as ‘troublemakers’ or a security threat (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). Children are developing a sense of self as they age into adulthood, forming ideas about who they are and their place in the social world. These ideas of self are connected to how each young person understands and feels about themselves, the story-so-far they develop as they move through gendered and racialised time and space (Massey, 2005). Young migrants look outwards, to public debates in virtual spaces, and can be acutely aware of the ways their identities are portrayed. The precarity of life as a young migrant can also have an impact. While migration can offer opportunities for improved lives, continual instability undermines children’s attempts to develop a resilient identity. Children claiming asylum in Greece, for example, expressed a sense of dislocation from their sense of self, feeling ‘out of their bodies’ when their daily lives were continually unstable and chaotic (Bareka et al., 2019). These constructions also work relationally. Seeing young migrants as a potential threat positions state actors who encounter them as protectors of the state, rather than protectors of the child. During President Trump’s administration, recruitment images for US border guards portrayed officials as ‘soldiers’ in the war against terror and the ‘last line of defence’ against young migrants positioned as criminals, victims, or even animals to be rounded up (Catalano & Musolff, 2019). The contradictory argument, within these binary narratives, frames young migrants as vulnerable and innocent children in need of adult intervention. The laws and policies that inform statutory social work are based on notions of the dependent child who requires adult protection, framing the social worker as the surrogate parent or rescuer. UK policy frames separated children as ‘some of the most vulnerable children in the country’ (DfE, 2017). The ‘vulnerable child’ is a powerful, affective construction—and may be strategically useful—but it is not unproblematic. It, too, can fix ideas of the refugee child in particular ways.

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Notions of Innocence and Vulnerability Cultural constructions of childhood in the Global North often connect childhood to notions of innocence and vulnerability. In 2015, the iconic images of three-year old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach became a symbol of the thousands of people drowned during Mediterranean crossings. An estimated 20,000 people are estimated to have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 (Missing Migrant Project, 2022); the number is still rising, and we are now seeing lives lost in the sea between France and England. Overcrowded boats have become familiar images of migration, the sculptor Ai WeiWei even turning thousands of abandoned orange life jackets into art. Alan Kurdi’s death was, of course, a personal loss for his family, who also lost his mother Rehana and his brother Galup that day (Mattus, 2020), but Alan’s image became more than a record of a personal tragedy. It was selected as a perfect example of the refugee child’s ‘pure innocence’, used to evoke shame and guilt about the European response to people drowning on their doorstep (Ticktin, 2016). Notions of innocence and fragility are key themes in the narratives which support safe passage for children, but they bring their own complications when they are used to think about real young migrants. Images of a separated, refugee child have been shown to provoke more emotional responses and to be more likely to shift rigid perceptions of refugees, than pictures of children with adults (Soylu Yalcinkaya et al., 2018). There were hopes, in some quarters, that the pictures of Alan Kurdi’s body would help move the dominant narrative away from dehumanising representations of migrants, and there were moments when the balance seemed to shift. One British newspaper ran the pictures next to a columnist arguing ‘we have a moral, ethical, and legal duty to help them’ (Daily Mail, 2015). The ‘them’ here refers specifically to Syrians escaping the war, as Alan Kurdi’s family had been. It constructs Syrian refugees as the ‘deserving’ migrants in contrast to others who are, supposedly, less ‘deserving’. Here, for a moment, ideas of childhood innocence have overridden the notion of the dangerous migrant, more frequently propagated in this newspaper—‘the swarm on our streets’ being one of their earlier headlines. A year after Alan Kurdi’s death, however, the same newspaper published the faces of young people brought from the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp into the UK.  These reports placed photos of young men’s faces on the front page and directly challenged the idea that these could be children (Daily Mail, 2016). To be able to frame these young men as ‘dangerous

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strangers’, their age had to be challenged, their status as innocent and vulnerable children undermined. This was made possible, in part, because the reality of youth migration can be at odds with public ideas of what a refugee child looks like—it is the tiny body of Alan Kurdi, not an Afghani young man in a track suit. These reports did not just draw on constructions of age and childhood; they were also gendered and racialised. Girls were positioned as more deserving on the basis of gender—alongside a description of the ‘Afghan man in blue’ were comments that a girl migrant had ‘finally’ arrived (Daily Mail, 2016). Xenophobia and racism can work powerfully to identify particular bodies as dangerous, as more or less ‘deserving’ of rescue or safe passage. The construction of the Muslim as ‘enemy’ has taken a firm hold across western states since 9/11, for example, with Muslim bodies becoming the focus of mistrust and surveillance at US borders (Al-Samman, 2017) . Since 2020, the global Black Lives Matter movement, and the Windrush scandal in the UK, have refocussed attention on systemic racism and the daily impact of living as a person of colour in a post-slavery and post-­ colonial world. Europe is living with a colonial legacy which can construct black and Muslim bodies as ‘charitable subjects’ in need of rescue and position some lives as less grievable than others. It is no coincidence that the estimated 20,000 migrants lost in the Mediterranean were mainly people of colour (Danewid, 2017). Mattus (2020) asks if Alan Kurdi’s lighter skin colour meant he appeared to white European adults as more like ‘their own kids’ (ibid., p. 62), and so more deserving of protection. Social work has its own problematic history of being involved in colonial projects and has roots in notions of ‘rescuing’ children, so questions about which children become the subject of intervention, and which do not, remain highly relevant. That is not to say that social work has no role in intervening in children’s lives at times of crisis or distress, but that the focus of practice needs to be continually questioned and negotiated.

Traumatised or Agentic—Which Lens? Wrapped up in constructions of the vulnerable refugee child are contested notions of agency, resilience, and trauma. Within the literature, trauma and agency are often positioned in opposition to each other. There is a body of research describing the negative impact of war and displacement on young people’s emotional health, and arguing for services to address this (Betancourt et  al., 2010; Bloch, 2014; Sanchez-Cao et  al., 2013;

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Thommessen et al., 2013; Treisman, 2017 are examples). Alongside these sit calls for research to more explicitly consider the social context of young people’s experiences (Denov & Bryan, 2012; Dombo & Ahearn, 2017), to adopt a more robust rights-based approach (Cemlyn & Briskman, 2003), and to develop much richer understandings of young people’s wellbeing (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). Some stories of conflict and violence may be avoided as unbearable, particularly if they jar against more comfortable notions of the resilient, strategic child. Social workers are often met with resistance when they bring attention to things which are emotionally painful to hear—such as familial abuse, domestic violence, or child sexual exploitation. There is little debate about the need to find ways of supporting young migrants’ emotional needs. For some young migrants, emotional distress can lead to suicides, substance misuse, self-harm, and addiction (Cardoso, 2018; Chase & Allsopp, 2021). What is contested is the extent to which this distress can be understood in terms of past experiences of loss and harm, and to what extent it relates to the precarity and struggles of living as a young migrant in a new place. Does a ‘trauma lens’ pathologise an understandable response to inequality and injustice, or is trauma-informed practice essential to understand the impact of children’s past experiences on their current lives? Watters (2008) notes that positioning a child as traumatised may be an act of ‘strategic categorisation’ (p. 185), which gives social recognition to young migrants by framing them as the ‘damaged child’ in need of rescue. The stories of distressed children selected to support humanitarian campaigns could be seen in this way. Ideas about trauma are also frequently used in social work spaces, but the term refers to a range of complex responses to life-threatening, neglectful, or abusive experiences (Treisman, 2017). Social workers can be adept at adjusting the story they tell about a child as they move through the spaces of practice, to access resources or to promote certain changes. The strategic use of categories, does not automatically equate to a narrow understanding of an individual child. Yet, while a focus on vulnerability may provide a temporary and fragile shelter, it can undermine a child’s ability to act agentically and exercise their rights if it becomes the dominant narrative. This is not the only option available for social work, however, and practice is already responding to the complexity of young migrants’ lives. Rather than positioning social work in an either/or debate around trauma and agency, a theory-­ informed critical approach could enable practitioners to consider the

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interplay of both the emotional and social contexts of children’s lives. A reflective approach is already being used effectively in work with young survivors of torture, for example, where ‘common sense’ notions of victimhood are rejected in favour of a practice grounded in developing strengths (Boyles et al., 2019). Treisman (2017) similarly argues that seeing unaccompanied children as inherently resilient or inherently vulnerable is problematic. She promotes practice which foregrounds survivorhood, and seeks to understand the connection between a child’s individual difficulties and their resiliency factors. Social work in the UK has been moving towards a more ‘trauma-informed’ approach, which focusses on building relationship that develop young people’s abilities to enact their agency and to (re)gain a sense of power and control in their lives (Hickle, 2020). There are opportunities, here, for practice to confidently step away from ways of understanding separated children that fix them in notions of resilience, vulnerability, and risk. Rather than foregrounding agency over affect, or vice versa, a spatial analysis offers a way to consider how these may interact. Presenting agency as a solely cognitive, rational process, where motivations are always explicit at the time of action, risks overlooking the affective practices which shape how agency is enacted in place. In Thomson’s (2013) research, for example, separated Somalian girls in Nairobi describe barricading themselves into makeshift housing at night to avoid further physical and sexual harm. Thomson’s (ibid.) analysis is that their silence is agentic but ‘hardly a reflection of the fears they face’ (p.  605). While she provides a powerful account of the girls’ precarious lives, excluding the affective domain in this way may have overlooked how affect—the girls’ emotional worlds—may impact their ability to enact their agency in this space. Understanding the types of relationships separated children may want within state care, and in other spaces of their lives, also requires developing some understanding of what care and separation have come to mean for them. Psychological theory describes how trauma experienced within care-giving relationships—relational trauma—can permeate how children understand themselves, their worth in relationships and their notions of safe care (Treisman, 2017). A spatial analysis could also be helpful here. Wetherell (2012) questions whether the psychological is the primary organising force that psychodynamic theorists, such as Freud and Klein, claim. She allows for the unconscious in her conception of affective practice, but argues for an analysis that also considers the impact of spatial and relational dynamics. Wetherell (ibid.) suggests we move in and out of

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knowing when we act, and our motivations can only be partially understood, even by ourselves: [A]ffective practice sediments and solidifies in individual lives. We can, as result, be surprised by pattern, not because it is deliberately pushed out from consciousness, but because we have not yet had the chance to formulate the conjunctions in just this way, or to engage in the kind of reflexive reconstructions required. Our affective performance bears a complex relation to our past affective practice and relational history. (Wetherell, 2012, p. 129)

This notion of affective patterning offers another way of thinking about forms of trauma—as a way of responding to particular relational interactions which are connected with painful or dangerous events in the past. It offers a means of analysing how state actors may relationally respond to young migrants and how young migrants may respond to them. Wetherell (ibid.) says these relational patterns are brought with us into new spaces of our lives and impact our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Rather than essentialising a child around notions of trauma and vulnerability, affective practices are patterns which have the potential to be reshaped, opening up the possibility of new understandings being formed in each encounter space.

Who Is a Child? Being seen by the state as a child gives young migrants potential access to a range of resources and routes to possible legal security. It defines the duties of care that states have towards separated children and the rights they can exercise. When international law and guidance defines the separated child as under 18, however, it leaves two key questions: How does a young migrant ‘prove’ how old they are, and who can legitimately make a decision on age when this is not agreed? Childhood and the meanings attached to this concept do not provide an automatic route to safe reception for children who move, and the boundary between protection and control is fraught and blurry. It is here that social work becomes involved, called on to arbitrate in the tension between duties to safeguard children and duties to ‘protect’ the nation state, a topic that is returned to in Chap. 4. Defining who is a child, however, is far less straightforward than policy and law suggests. There are multiple barriers for young migrants trying to prove their age. Young

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people may not know their birth date and may never have had official documentation. If they exist, papers can get lost or stolen during migration, and young people may be travelling on documentation provided by traffickers, smugglers, or family. Even if young migrants arrive with valid documentation, there is no guarantee it will be accepted by state officials. In many European states, a young migrant’s age is determined by an age assessment process, but the problematic nature of these assessments has been highlighted many times (Crawley et al., 2007; Gower, 2011; Noll, 2016). Notions of childhood innocence can sit in stark contrast to notions of adult agency. The impact migration experiences may have had on a child’s appearance, behaviours, and interactions can be overlooked, or used to define them as an adult. Agency, for example, can be understood as a marker of adulthood. Crawley (2010) found that when separated young people in UK asylum interviews shared stories of political activism, they were no longer seen as children. UNHCR (2012) states age assessment should be a ‘measure of last resort’ (p. 109) and take place in a ‘safe, child and gender sensitive manner with due respect for human dignity’ (p. 108), but some states continue to use intrusive and contested physical examinations, such as dental checks and genital examinations of boys (Kenny & Loughry, 2018). Gender and ethnicity are intersecting factors to consider here, linking back to notions of what a vulnerable child is expected to look like. In Italy, for example, there is a conception that young black males are more likely to have their ages disputed (Allsopp, 2017). There is also a clear gendered dimension to the UK government’s narrative on age assessment, as Home Secretary, Priti Patel, illustrates when she speaks of the ‘safeguarding issues’ created by having ‘grown adult men in schools’ (Hansard, 2021). It is the adult, male migrant that is evoked here, the ‘dangerous other’ sitting amongst children, who poses a risk through his sheer physical presence in place. Girls and women are rendered invisible in these debates, and the ways that notions of age, race, and gender may impact on age assessment processes are similarly obscured. Age assessment is contentious because it sits at the intersection between childhood and adulthood, at the point at which these binary constructions shift from one to the other, like the flick of a switch on an 18th birthday. These distinctions between childhood and adulthood—between notions of dependence and independence—are problematic for all young people within state care. What makes this child/adult dichotomy so problematic for young migrants is the stark differences in processes for migrant adults

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and children in many destination countries. Being assessed as a particular age can mean the difference between destitution, detention, and facing deportation as an adult, or being given accommodation, education, health care, and access to legal advice as a child. Resourceful young adults, who may have spent months or years navigating precarious lives across multiple borders, may well decide their interests are best served by claiming to be younger, or older, then their chronological age. States create this conundrum and then castigate young migrants for using their agency to navigate through it. Yet, rather than rethinking the stark separation between state provision for separated children and migrant adults, states often entrench themselves further in bordering processes that claim to be able to identify a child from an adult. All this leaves social work in an uncomfortable paradox, and there are calls for age assessments to be stopped (Ortiz, 2019). State actors are part of the social world which creates these notions of the ‘refugee child’, and can bring them into the spaces where they encounter children who move. While particular constructions of the ‘refugee child’ may be strategically valuable within political debate, supporting particular campaigns and policies, they foreground immigration status over the other intersecting identities of individual children and young people. These are unhelpful lenses through which to understand the complexity of life as a young migrant.

References Abid, R. Z., Manan, S. A., & Rahman, Z. A. A. A. (2017). ‘A flood of Syrians has slowed to a trickle’: The use of metaphors in the representation of Syrian refugees in the online media news reports of host and non-host countries. Discourse & Communication, 11(2), 121–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1750481317691857 Ackermann, M. (2017). Unaccompanied and separated children in South Africa: Is return the only option? African Human Mobility Review, 3(3), 975–994 Ahmed, S. (2021). Travelling with strangers. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2020.1859204 Allsopp, J. (2017). Agent, victim, soldier, son: Intersecting masculinities in the European “refugee crisis”. In J. Freedman, Z. Kıvılcım, & N. Özgür (Eds.), A gendered approach to the Syrian refugee crisis (pp. 155–175). Routledge. Al-Samman, H. (2017). Invading Muslim bodies in the era of trump. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 13(3), 483–485. https://doi.org/10.1215/ 15525864-­4179177

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Baider, F., & Kopytowska, M. (2017). Conceptualising the other: Online discourses on the current refugee crisis in Cyprus and in Poland. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 13(2), 203–233. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-­2017-­0011 Bakali, N., & Wasty, S. (2020). Identity, social mobility, and trauma: Post-conflict educational realities for survivors of the Rohingya genocide. Religions, 11(5), 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11050241 Bareka, T., Panhofer, H., & Cigaran, S.  R. (2019). Refugee children and body politics. The embodied political self and dance movement therapy. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 14(2), 80–94. https://doi.org/10.108 0/17432979.2019.1614668 Beazley, H., Bessell, S., Ennew, J., & Waterson, R. (2009). The right to be properly researched: Research with children in a messy, real world. Children’s Geographies, 7(4), 365–378. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733280903234428 Becoming Adult Project. (n.d.). Retrieved January 19, 2021, from https:// becomingadult.net/ Betancourt, T. S., Brennan, R. T., Rubin-Smith, J., Fitzmaurice, G. M., & Gilman, S. E. (2010). Sierra Leone’s former child soldiers: A longitudinal study of risk, protective factors, and mental health. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(6), 606–615. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jaac.2010.03.008 Bloch, A. (2014). Living in fear: Rejected asylum seekers living as irregular migrants in England. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(10), 1507–1525. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.859070 Boyles, J., Tuner, A., & Tolman, K. (2019). Social work with survivors of torture. In L. Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice. Jessica Kingsley. Broadhurst, K., & Mason, C. (2014). Social work beyond the VDU: Foregrounding co-presence in situated practice-why face-to-face practice matters. British Journal of Social Work, 44(3), 578–595. https://doi.org/10.1093/ bjsw/bcs124 Buchanan, A., & Kallinikaki, T. (2018). Meeting the needs of unaccompanied children in Greece. International Social Work, 63(2), 1–14. https://doi. org/10.1177/0020872818798007 Canham, J. (2022). Emerging technologies can transform border management, but agencies must prepare. WCO Point of View. https://mag.wcoomd.org/magazine/wco-­news-­82/emerging-­technologies-­can-­transform-­border-­management-­ but-­agencies-­must-­prepare/ Cardoso, J. B. (2018). Running to stand still: Trauma symptoms, coping strategies, and substance use behaviors in unaccompanied migrant youth. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, 143–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. childyouth.2018.04.018

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Carrion, A., De Gaspari, M., & Zanella, S. (2018). Young and on the move in West Africa. Resource Centre. Retrieved August 4, 2021, from https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/node/14327/pdf/055_young-­a nd-­o n-­t he-­ move.pdf.pdf Catalano, T., & Musolff, A. (2019). “Taking the Shackles off”: Metaphor and metonymy of migrant children and border officials in the U.S. 37. Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education, Nebraska, Lincoln. Retrieved May 13, 2021, from https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/334984379.pdf Cemlyn, S., & Briskman, L. (2003). Asylum, children’s rights and social work. Child & Family Social Work, 8(3), 163–178. Chase, E., & Allsopp, J. (2021). Youth migration and the politics of wellbeing: Stories of life in transition. Bristol University Press. Clayton, S., Gupta, A., & Willis, K. (2019). Unaccompanied young migrants: Identity, care and justice. Policy Press. Crafter, S., Rosen, R., & Mitra, S. (2022). Children caring on the move report 2. Retrieved May 23, 2022, from https://www.ccomstudy.com/wp-­content/ uploads/2022/02/CCoM-­REPORT-­2-­FEB-­2022.pdf Crawley, H. (2010). ‘No one gives you a chance to say what you are thinking’: Finding space for children’s agency in the UK asylum system: Finding space for children’s agency in the UK asylum system. Area, 42(2), 162–169. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-­4762.2009.00917.x Crawley, H., Rowlands, S., & Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. (2007). When is a child not a child?: Asylum, age disputes and the process of age assessment. ILPA. Daily Mail. (2015). PIERS MORGAN: Don’t shut your eyes to this picture because WE did this. Now we have to make it right. Retrieved January 16, 2021, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-­3221090/PIERS-­MORGAN-­ Don-­t-­shut-­eyes-­picture-­did-­make-­right.html. Daily Mail. (2016, October 21). Charity apologises for falsely claiming the ‘38-year-­ old child asylum seeker’ is an interpreter - As a girl migrant FINALLY arrives from Calais. Retrieved January 16, 2021, from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-­3857650/Charity-­apologisesDanewid, I. (2017). White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the erasure of history. Third World Quarterly, 38(7), 1674–1689. Debrael, M., d’Haenens, L., De Cock, R., & De Coninck, D. (2021). Media use, fear of terrorism, and attitudes towards immigrants and refugees: Young people and adults compared. International Communication Gazette, 83(2), 148–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048519869476 Denov, M., & Bryan, C. (2012). Tactical maneuvering and calculated risks: Independent child migrants and the complex terrain of flight. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2012, 13–27.

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Department for Education (DfE). (2017). Care of unaccompanied migrant children and child victims of modern slavery: Statutory guidance for local authorities. DfE. Dombo, E. A., & Ahearn, F. L. (2017). The aftermath of humanitarian crises: A model for addressing social work interventions with individuals, groups, and communities. Illness, Crisis & Loss, 25(2), 107–126. https://doi. org/10.1177/1054137315606830 Doná, G., & Veale, A. (2011). Divergent discourses, children and forced migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(8), 1273–1289. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369183X.2011.590929 Dunn, T. J. (2021). The militarization of the US-Mexico border in the twenty-­ first century and implications for human rights. In N.  Ribas-Mateos (Ed.), Handbook on human security, borders and migration. Edward Elgar Publishing. ECLAC. (2010). Social panorama of Latin America. Retrieved August 19, 2022, from https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/1237/1/ S1000875_en.pdf Farmer, N. J. (2017). No recourse to public funds, insecure immigration status and destitution: The role of social work? Critical and Radical Social Work, 5(3), 357–367. https://doi.org/10.1332/204986017X15029697778471 Fazel, M., Reed, R.  V., Panter-Brick, C., & Stein, A. (2012). Mental health of displaced and refugee children resettled in high-income countries: Risk and protective factors. The Lancet, 379(9812), 266–282. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0140-­6736(11)60051-­2 Ferguson, H. (2018). How social workers reflect in action and when and why they don’t: The possibilities and limits to reflective practice in social work. Social Work Education, 37(4), 415–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479. 2017.1413083 Fook, J. (2016). Social work: A critical approach to practice (3rd ed.). SAGE. Gower, S. (2011). How old are you? Ethical dilemmas in working with age-­ disputed young asylum seekers. Practice, 23(5), 325–339. https://doi.org/10. 1080/09503153.2011.600440 Gray, H., & Franck, A. K. (2019). Refugees as/at risk: The gendered and racialized underpinnings of securitization in British media narratives. Security Dialogue, 50(3), 275–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619830590 Gustafsson, K., & Johansson, J. (2018). A worthy reception? Ambivalences in social work with refugees and migrants in Sweden. Advances in Social Work, 18(3), 983–1004. https://doi.org/10.18060/21656 Hamedullah: The Road Home. (2012). Directed by Sue Clayton. Pictures. Hansard. (2021, November 22). Channel crossing in small boats column 42, UK Parliament. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2021-­11-­22/debates/ 69973F3C-­2383-­4C12-­AB0D6BA1EBEDB7F8/ChannelCrossingsInSmallBoats

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Hickle, K. (2020). Introducing a trauma-informed capability approach in youth services. Children & Society, 34(6), 537–551. https://doi.org/10.1111/ chso.12388 Jones, C. (2019). Social work and the refugee crisis: reflections from Samos in Greece. In M. Lavalette (Ed.), What is the future of social work? Policy Press. Kenny, M. A., & Loughry, M. (2018). Addressing the limitations of age determination for unaccompanied minors: A way forward. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, 15–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2018.05.002 Kidane, S. (2001). Food, shelter and half a chance: Assessing the needs of unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children. British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering. Larkin, R., & Lefevre, M. (2019). Unaccompanied young females and social workers: Meaning-making in the practice space. The British Journal of Social Work, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaa010 Lefevre, M. (2018). Communicating and engaging with children and young people: Making a difference. Policy Press. Lynn, N., & Lea, S. (2003). ‘A phantom menace and the new apartheid’: The social construction of asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom. Discourse & Society, 14(4), 425–452. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926503014004002 Massey, D. B. (2005). For space. SAGE. Mattus, M. (2020). Too dead? Image analyses of humanitarian photos of the Kurdi brothers. Visual Studies, 35(1), 51–64. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1472586X.2020.1731325 Missing Migrant Project. (2022). Retrieved March 30, 2022, from https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean Mohamed, S. (2012). The mental health and psychological well-being of refugee children: An exploration of risk, resilience and protective factors. Thesis. University of East London. Moore, K. (2013). ‘Asylum shopping’ in the neoliberal social imaginary. Media, Culture & Society, 35(3), 348–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0163443712472090 Noll, G. (2016). Junk science: Four arguments against the radiological age assessment of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. International Journal of Refugee Law, 28(2), 234–250. Olivius, E. (2016). Refugee men as perpetrators, allies or troublemakers? Emerging discourses on men and masculinities in humanitarian aid. Women’s Studies International Forum, 56, 56–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif. 2015.12.004 Orgocka, A. (2012). Vulnerable yet agentic: Independent child migrants and opportunity structures. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2012(136), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/cad.20007

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Ortiz, E. (2019). Age assessments of unaccompanied minors. In L.  Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice. Jessica Kingsley. Pérez, R. L. (2014). Crossing the border from boyhood to manhood: Male youth experiences of crossing, loss, and structural violence as unaccompanied minors. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 19(1), 67–83. https://doi. org/10.1080/02673843.2012.708350 Popescu, M., & Libal, K. (2018). Social work with migrants and refugees: Challenges, best practices, and future directions. Advances in Social Work, 18(3), i–x. https://doi.org/10.18060/22600 Raddatz, R., & Kerby, M. (2020). Far from home, far from safe: State violence against unaccompanied refugee children seeking asylum in Kenya. Journal of Refugee Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa017 Rosen, R., & Crafter, S. (2018). Media representations of separated child migrants: From dubs to doubt. Migration and Society, 1(1), 66–81. https://doi. org/10.3167/arms.2018.010107 Sanchez-Cao, E., Kramer, T., & Hodes, M. (2013). Psychological distress and mental health service contact of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Child: Care, Health and Development, 39(5), 651–659. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1365-­2214.2012.01406.x Save the Children. (2021, June 17). Hundreds of migrant children face abuse at European borders. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.savethechildren.net/news/hundreds-­migrant-­children-­face-­abuse-­european-­borders Sigona, N., & Humphris, R. (2016). Child mobility in the EU’s refugee crisis: What are the data gaps and why do they matter? Becoming adult project. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from Research Brief, no. 2 Smidt. (2006). The developing child in the twenty-first century: A global perspective on child development. Routledge. Soylu Yalcinkaya, N., Branscombe, N. R., Gebauer, F., Niedlich, C., & Hakim, N. H. (2018). Can they ever be one of us? Perceived cultural malleability of refugees and policy support in host nations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 125–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.03.018 Teloni, D.-D., & Mantanika, R. (2015). ‘This is a cage for migrants’: The rise of racism and the challenges for social work in the Greek context. Critical and Radical Social Work, 3(2), 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1332/ 204986015X14332581741051 Terrio, S. J. (2015). Whose child am I? Unaccompanied, undocumented children in U.S. immigration custody. University of California Press. Thommessen, S., Laghi, F., Cerrone, C., Baiocco, R., & Todd, B.  K. (2013). Internalizing and externalizing symptoms among unaccompanied refugee and Italian adolescents. Children and Youth Services Review, 35(1), 7–10. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2012.10.007

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Thomson, S. (2013). Agency as silence and muted voice: The problem-solving networks of unaccompanied young Somali refugee women in Eastleigh, Nairobi. Conflict, Security & Development, 13(5), 589–609. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14678802.2013.849473 Ticktin, M.. (2016, June 28). What’s wrong with innocence hot spots cultural anthropology website. Retrieved September 20, 2019, from https://culanth. org/fieldsights/902-­what-­swrong-­with-­innocence Treisman, K. (2017). Working with relational and developmental trauma in children and adolescents. Routledge. UNHCR. (2012, October 25). UNHCR submission to the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights Inquiry. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.unhcr.org/uk/5756ec3e7.pdf UNHCR. (2020). What works to protect children on the move: Rapid evidence assessment. Retrieved May 16, 2022, from https://www.unhcr.org/5fbd213c4.pdf UNHCR. (2021). Global trends in forced displacement. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from https://www.unhcr.org/flagship-­reports/globaltrends/ United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). (2020). Child displacement and COVID-19. Retrieved March 14, 2022, from https://data.unicef.org/topic/ child-­migration-­and-­displacement/covid-­19/ Vernon, V., & Zimmermann, K. F. (2021). Walls and fences: A journey through history and economics. In K. Kourtit, B. Newbold, P. Nijkamp, & M. Partridge (Eds.), The economic geography of cross-border migration. Footprints of regional science. Springer. Watters, C. (2008). Refugee children: Towards the next horizon. Routledge. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE. Wharton, A. (2020). Unaccompanied girls in England: (Re)Constructing spaces of belonging and learning. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Sussex June 2020. Retrieved September 3, 2021, from http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ Williams, F. (2004). Rethinking families. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Wroe, L. (2019). Social work without borders: An interview with Lynn King. In L. Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice (pp. 27–40). Jessica Kingsley.

CHAPTER 3

Separated Girlhood

In 2021, Little Amal, a 3.5-metre-tall puppet of a young refugee girl, was walked across nine European countries from the Syrian/Turkey border to Manchester in the north of England. For Amir Nizar Zuabi, Artistic Director, the purpose was to highlight ‘the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances’ (The Walk, 2022). As she travelled, Little Amal was greeted by artists, musicians, campaigners, politicians, and local people who held welcoming parties and walked alongside her. The project made explicit its desire to challenge dominant narratives about migration, and the figure chosen to represent ‘potential, success, respect, hospitality and kindness’ was a nine-year-old girl separated from her mother: [R]epresenting all displaced children, many separated from their families, Little Amal travelled over 8,000km in search of her mother embodying the urgent message to the world. ‘Don’t forget about us’. (The Walk, 2022)

There are many narratives running through the story of Little Amal and her creation, and they draw strongly on notions of age, race, and gender within place. It is the separated girl who has been chosen to represent the ‘human face’ of migration here, the girl child who is the antithesis of the dangerous stranger landing on our shores. It is the girl of colour who represents the people who are forgotten and the voices not being heard. Gender, race, and age coalesce in the story told about her. Little Amal is a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_3

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child separated, specifically, from her mother, so care-giving is located clearly within the adult, female body. Yet, this puppet is not a fixed representation of loss. Little Amal is in public space; she is moving and she is disruptive. As she walked across Europe, Little Amal closed roads and sparked gatherings in public spaces. ‘Little’ Amal is also far from little; her figure was deliberately made to stand high above the adults. Zuabi notes the intention, in making her tall, was to ‘inspire us to think big and to act bigger’ (The Walk, 2022). There is more here than a connection between a ‘big’ puppet and ‘big’ ideas. At 3.5 metres tall, Little Amal’s body occupies space in a way that disrupts normative adult-child interactions—she towers above adults who are more familiar with (literally) looking down on a nine-year-old child. She challenges neo-colonial narratives of superiority and rescue (Danewid, 2017) because Little Amal is moving along her own path and she dominates the space. She forces those present to reconfigure how they position themselves, not just in relation to the representation of the separated girl, but in relation to the idea of the separated girl itself. The Walk may be an artistic project, but it is also a disruptive political act. Despite bodies of work on migration, we still know relatively little about separated girls. Some voices are captured in NGO reports and project briefings, but there are very few pieces of academic research with separated girls, and these have come out of Sweden, Finland, and the UK (Ekström et  al.,  2019; Kaukko, 2016; Kohli & Kaukko, 2018; Larkin, 2015; Larkin & Lefevre, 2019; Wharton, 2020). Kohli and Kaukko (2018) note that ‘refugee research mainly present[s] the voices of male asylum-­seekers as a norm and leaves the gendered aspects of forced migration untouched’ (p.  3). The smaller numbers of separated girls in the global regions where most academic research is taking place is one factor in the lack of research knowledge. Recruiting girls can be challenging for researchers when numbers are small, and young migrants involved in social work and immigration processes may be reluctant to re-tell their stories. Behrendt et al. (2021), for example, recruited 79 young migrants for longitudinal research in Belgium, but six of the seven girls exercised their right to drop out, leaving one female participant. This knowledge gap is recognised, and there are calls to pay more attention to how age and gender are working together during migration. The Global Compact on Refugees asks states to take account of the ‘rights, specific needs, contributions and voices of women and girl refugees’ (UNHCR, 2018, p.  44), although once again age has become invisible in the

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collation of women and girls. Arguments for a more intersectional approach are also gaining traction (Krumer-Nevo & Komem, 2015; Yacob-Haliso, 2016). Following her research with Muslim refugee girls in Canada, Miled (2020) concludes we need ‘more interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological cross fertilization when it comes to the study of racialized, refugee young women’ (ibid., p. 10). Academic research, however, has struggled to pay attention to girls’ experiences of the world, and not just girls who migrate. Bodies of research have focussed on adult experiences of gender, or children’s experiences of childhood, leaving gendered experiences of age less well examined. As twenty-first-century debates about gender identity illustrate, the meanings we attach to gender, and to gendered bodies, still matter. There have been numerous debates about how bodies identified as female may be shaped through shifting power relations, if they can be defined at all (Ahmed, 2000; Butler, 2006; Hines, 2017; Nast & Pile, 1998; Velte & Ortega, 2015). Since the 1990s, scholars in Girl Studies have been researching how age and gender can intersect for all females (cis or trans-gender) in experiences of girlhood (Kearney, 2009; Rentschler & Mitchell, 2016). More recently, research on black girlhood has begun to examine how girls navigate their lives at the intersections of age, gender, and race (Jean et al., 2022). Rather than seeing girlhood as an identity position, scholars are exploring it as praxis—a ‘situated, collective, relational event, intimately connected to place’ (de Finney, 2016, p. 29), where each girl’s ‘embodied every-day acts of presence’ (ibid., p. 22) are always implicated in relations of power. Place—the moment in time, when space and power relations are working to fix meanings and define boundaries (Massey, 2005)—is central to the ways that girlhood is embodied, experienced, and enacted. Massey understands adult attempts to control the boundaries of space as ‘part of the process of defining the social category of “youth” itself’ (Massey, 1998, p. 127). As well as being a developmental process, youth is formed through adult practices of surveillance, and adult attempts to control the boundaries of place in relation to age and gender. These practices can also be—amongst other things—racialised, heteronormative, and ableist. Parallel notions of boyhood can also work to shape how separated boys are seen, through expectations of being strong, brave, and less in need of care than girls (Pérez, 2014). As children grow they become aware of wider constructions within their communities and peer networks, and these can become internalised. Research with refugee girls in Ethiopia, for example, found that being surrounded by peers who promoted norms that devalued

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girls contributed to the girls having lower self-esteem (Stark et al., 2018). The continued marginalisation of girls in youth research means scholars are still defending the need for Girl Studies to exist at all, and this work is yet to find a firm footing in migration studies or the spaces of social work practice. Notions of place and girlhood, however, can offer a productive lens to think about girls who migrate. Separated girls are rarely seen in images of migration, but when they appear their bodies can be used as markers of innocence. In 2021, Aljazeera carried a picture of three-year-old girl in an Australian hospital bed, ‘fighting a life-threatening blood infection while her family pleads to be released from immigration detention’ (Aljazeera, 2021). Here the distress and separation of a vulnerable, female child is used to represent inhumanity. In other spaces, notions of girls’ innocence can be used against them. In West Africa, girls are four times more likely than boys to be sent into public spaces as unsuspected ‘suicide’ bombers by Boko Haram (Care USA, 2018). While girls’ bodies are evoked within some narratives, they are notably absent in others. When the British Home Secretary argued for increased prevention of boat-crossings, she claimed ‘70% of individuals on small boats are single men who are effectively economic migrants’ (Taylor & Syal, 2021). This figure was disputed by the Refugee Council (2021), who noted that 91% of people arriving were from countries where human rights abuses are common, but this is not just a matter of numbers. It is not children or adult women the Home Secretary evokes here to support a narrative of exclusion, it is the single male. When the British Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) released a statement defending the rescue of migrants at sea, they included accounts of helping boats adrift. In one account it is an unnamed girl who is remembered as evoking the strongest emotional response and who represents the innocent, universal child: The first job I went to that involved a Channel crossing, we rescued this little girl who was five years old and about the same size as my daughter. And she was very scared and obviously exhausted, very cold, hungry. She was wearing the same lifejacket that my daughter wears when we go sailing together and I now can’t look at my daughter in her lifejacket without thinking of this little girl. (Crew Member 1, RNLI, 2021)

This account reminds us that people who migrate, and the people who encounter them on their journeys, are not just subjects to be examined

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and theorised about, but human beings experiencing complex relational responses—in particular places at particular times. Navigating each encounter requires emotional work for everyone involved, and not just in life-threatening situations. As girls move, they are actively navigating the shifting ways their bodies are seen, and the (dis)connections with the meanings they themselves attach to their bodies. Separated girls are, additionally, navigating each relational space without adult family members. Practitioners and academics draw on different theoretical frameworks to consider gender within the family (Risman & Davis, 2013), but there is broad agreement that family is significant in shaping children’s understanding and embodiment of gender, even as we debate the meaning of gender in the twenty-first century. Moving across space without family members means girls may have more autonomy in how they respond to shifting constructions of girlhood. If girls enter state care and form new relationships within and beyond these spaces, the constructions of girlhood they encounter may become highly significant. It is important, then, that state actors examine their own notions of girlhood and the meanings they attach to the intersecting identities of each individual girl.

Girlhood on the Move There are multiple and complex reasons for girls’ migration, and there is no single story to be told. Starting with the point of departure can reinforce the idea that young women’s homelands are only places of danger and anxiety, whereas girls have multiple stories that can include loving families, childhood friendships, and community belonging (Kidane, 2001). Migration is not only a time of risk, and there are dangers that narratives of vulnerability can reinforce dynamics which maintain girls in private space and limit their agency. As more girls’ voices are heard, more stories emerge of migrant young women as ‘strong, smart, resilient, courageous and determined to break through the barriers holding them back’ (Care USA, 2018). Carrion et al. (2018) found geographical mobility amongst West African girls allowed them to enter employment and reduced the economic inequality they experienced. They argue migration can be ‘a strong mechanism of empowerment for girls’ (ibid., p. 46), particularly when young women are aware of their rights and have a robust support network. Becoming separated from family and community—and the support

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this can provide—may mean girls require even higher levels of determination to navigate these barriers alone. In the twenty-first century there has been increasing recognition that girls can be positioned in particular ways at times of conflict and social upheaval (Raddatz, 2013; Stark et al., 2018). Females between 10 and 19 can be overlooked in humanitarian crises, when they take on increased family responsibilities that maintain them in private spaces (WRC, 2014). Accessing public space, however, can increase girls’ social inclusion and their economic and political participation (Nasrullah & Bhatti, 2012), so NGO and community projects have increasingly focussed on making girls more visible, particularly in spaces of learning. Adult women in local communities have been instrumental in these projects. The work of Basima Roshan, and the Kabul Women’s Association in Afghanistan, for example, led to over 4 million girls entering education by 2018 (Care USA, 2018). Maintaining girls’ access to public space requires continual work, however, and continual navigation of how girls’ bodies are framed through the ‘male gaze’ (Glapka, 2018).  When girls enter public spaces constructed around notions of masculinity, their presence may challenge existing power dynamics, but being a transgressive body out of place can leave young women in precarious positions. Attempts to control female bodies can be the first act in establishing patriarchal and gender-normative power. In 2021, the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan reintroduced a ban on girls’ education, acting to contain girls once again in private spaces (Williams & Hamedani, 2021). Migration requires a girl to move across public space in order to cross borders, so different spatial practices may affect migration patterns. In 2020, girls constituted just 4% of children from Afghanistan, making an asylum claim in Europe, whereas Afghanistan was the main country of origin for boys, followed by Syria and Pakistan. The main three countries of origin for girls were the African states of Somalia, Eritrea, and Guinea (UNHCR, 2021). Girls and boys can therefore be arriving at borders from very different regions of the world. When reception services develop around concepts of age, the significance of gender in the context of nationality and culture can be overlooked. There is little evidence about the decision-making processes that take place when girls or boys are sent away or leave, but children are generally understood to have little say in decisions to migrate. Orgocka (2012) argues that terms like ‘separated’ minimise young people’s involvement in migration acts and prefers the term ‘independent child migrant’. Migration is an active process, where young women are making decisions at every

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stage (Thomson, 2013), but this term sits uncomfortably against some girls’ accounts of having no part in the decision to leave (Hopkins & Hill, 2008; Kidane, 2001; Thomas et al., 2004). Wells (2011) concludes that young people’s migration is impossible without a social network, regardless of gender, and so focussing on independence may lose an important relational context. There is some evidence of gendered experiences in the reasons girls and boys give for moving. In research with young people in Europe, for example, more separated boys give conflict, forced recruitment, and political violence as reasons, while the girls focus on personal experiences of community or home-based violence, early marriage, or female genital mutilation (Adams, 2009; Ayotte & Williamson, 2001; Chase et  al., 2008; Hopkins & Hill, 2008; Thomas et  al., 2004). Gender-power relations (Massey, 2005) can also affect how girls can become separated. Parents can play a powerful role and cultural narratives may underpin decisions (Thorsen, 2010). In Senegal, for example, it is common for young women migrating for domestic work to travel with extended family members, who offer ongoing support, whereas girls from Mali have tended to travel alone and can find themselves living without adult support when work is unavailable (Carrion et al., 2018). Constructions of girlhood located in place can be significant during migration decisions. Vietnamese girls from rural areas can be discouraged from moving to cities, which are associated with a lack of chastity and diminished prospects for a good marriage (Hoang, 2011). When movement is seen as a transgressive act for a girl, there may be less community support available to her. Thorsen (2010) found that parents in the Bosa region of Burkino Faso generally agreed girls should not migrate on their own. When girls did move they found it harder to gather support than boys, and were much more likely to be sent away to fend for themselves or returned to the family home. A girl who moves can challenge cultural notions of girlhood and disrupt the gendered power dynamics which seek to fix the boundaries of place. Separation—and reunification—takes place within these complex relational and spatial dynamics. There is evidence that girls and boys may foreground different things when making plans about destination countries and the routes they take. There can be a desire for continuity as well as for change, and girls can move in an attempt to replicate everyday routines after periods of community disruption (Wharton, 2020). The everyday is not always safe, however, and children may leave their communities to escape familial

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abuse and/or domestic violence (Schmidt, 2022). Some girls report fleeing unsafe situations which lead to a series of re-locations, rather than embarking on a planned, international journey (Denov & Bryan, 2012). Other girls may leave with clearer plans for employment and opportunities in a particular destination country. Representations of the successful migrant can be strong drivers for girls’ movement (Thorsen, 2010), presenting attractive pictures of life in other countries. Some of these ideas are underpinned by neo-colonial narratives of connection between parts of the Global South and Europe (Danewid, 2017). Notions of opportunities elsewhere can be bolstered by stories of success shared across transnational families, particularly in spaces where migration is framed as a life chance rather than a transgressive act. When children in Eastern Africa were asked about their reasons for selecting countries, the girls placed more emphases than boys on improved medical care, general security, a better social welfare system, and reuniting with their family (UNICEF, 2021). Temporary migration to economically support the family is common in some regions. Girls may leave with the expectation of return (Hoang, 2011; UNHCR, 2021) only to find themselves unexpectedly adjusting when this plan proves unworkable. The promised employment may not exist at all. Sarkar’s (2015) research in India, Nepal, Thailand, Hungary, and the UK found that trafficking organisations targeted girls using online adverts offering attractive jobs or showing images of handsome young men. Work may be unavailable or short-term. Unknown numbers of girls are thought to be living precarious lives away from families, inadequately housed or using their resources to survive on the streets, sometimes through sex work. While some may come to the attention of NGOs or state services, and be categorised as trafficked or unaccompanied, many do not. While they may be active in their movement, not all girls understand their migration as their decision, particularly when it takes place during crisis or conflict. Migration can be a sudden dislocation from place. Kidane (2007) writes of arriving in London within 24 h of being put on a plane by relatives in Addis Ababa. For other girls, movement and liminality can characterise large sections of their early life. Nadine describes fleeing Rwanda with her parents at the age of 6, and moving through two camps before, at the age of 15, nuns in an orphanage took her to board a plane to England (Chase et al., 2008). Overly focussing on independence may therefore mask the power relations and cultural practices which affect girls’ movement, the ways in which they become separated, and the

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relationships they form with others as they move. The interplay of local migration practices and constructions of girlhood affect how, and why, girls move, and there are gender differences in patterns of youth migration. The intersectional nature of these experiences is invisible in statistics that foreground age and gender. Research with trans adults, for example, found an inability to live a gender identity openly was a key driver for their migration (Rosati et al., 2021), but little is yet known about non-binary or trans-girls or boys. In most populations of separated children, boys outnumber girls, but the margins vary considerably. Figures suggest that separated girls are more likely to remain near their country of origin. This is thought to be linked to family concerns about increased risks to girls and young women’s roles within private spaces. The ways that intergenerational care-­ giving can be organised around gender may also be a factor in daughters remaining closer to families after migration (Stark & Cukrowska-­ Torzewska, 2018). The ratios of boys to girls changes as children move further away from their point of destination. Migration journeys can be hazardous for all young migrants, and girls can be targeted for sexual assault during displacement (WRC, 2014; Yacob-Haliso, 2016), so families may be acting protectively when they keep daughters within the family. Up until the COVID pandemic, girls were more likely to arrive in the UK by air, but some girls make longer journeys by land. Gangs, poverty, and community violence are key drivers for migration in Latin America and the number of separated girls reaching the US/Mexico border is increasing. In 2012, girls made up a quarter of ‘unaccompanied’ children arriving at from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, but by 2020 this had increased to one-third (ORR, 2022; UNHCR, 2021). Journeys can be routes to new opportunities, but as they move, girls can also find themselves at risk of harm, particularly when their bodies are seen in sexualised ways. Smugglers can demand ‘transactional sex’ for help in crossing borders (Freedman, 2016), and armed gangs are reported to target girls at the border of Venezuela, promising jobs and then moving girls to other states to be trafficked (Care USA, 2018). State actors, such as police,  can also  be perpetrators of violence (Raddatz & Kerby, 2020). Sexual violence is so common in some spaces that women act pre-­ emptively to protect themselves. Eritrean women have reported seeking contraceptives before travelling to Libya, to prevent pregnancy in case of rape (UNICEF, 2021). Cultural notions of shame around female sexuality can prevent young women participating in sexual health care services, even when these are available (Ivanova et al., 2018; Ussher et al., 2017),

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so girls may not have the same knowledge or resources to prevent pregnancy in this way. Childbirth complications are the leading cause of death among girls aged 15–19  in developing countries, and babies born to mothers under 20 face higher risks of low birth weight and severe neonatal conditions (WHO, 2022). Girls who are already mothers may move in search of health care and resources to raise their children. Global and racial inequality mean that black young women are at higher risk of pregnancy complications even if they reach the Global North, but pregnancy and motherhood amongst separated young women is an under-researched area, as is fatherhood for separated young men. As well as periods of movement, girls can experience forced immobility (Stankovic et al., 2021), where they are physically prevented from moving or lack the resources to do so. Refugee camps can include spaces of higher risk, but they can also give girls access to health care and education, and provide spaces to form friendships and even reconnect with family members—a point at which a girl may become ‘unseparated’. Girls are not leading static lives, even when their movement has been restricted, and adolescent development continues. When young women can access public spaces and encounter different gendered practices, they may adjust their own notions of girlhood. South Sudanese girls in camps in Ethiopia who participated in a life skills programme were more likely to value schooling and delayed marriage, and more than twice as likely to have friends of their own age than girls who did not take part (UNHCR, 2021). Not all migrant children spend times in organised camps, and unknown numbers of girls are surviving alone in towns and cities, never coming to the attention of researchers or NGOs. African refugee girls can experience ‘triple intersecting disadvantages … as refugees, as females, and as youth’ (Yacob-­ Haliso, 2016, p. 56), which include disrupted or restricted access to education and continued mobility without the ‘ontological security’ (Chase, 2013) of a future rooted in place. IOM (2021) estimates that some 25,800 girls arrived by sea and land into Europe between 2018 and 2020, making up 28% of the almost 91,000 children that arrived in Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria in those years. However, girls made up only one in ten of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Europe in 2020 (UNICEF, 2021). While anomalies are expected when collecting migration data, these differences suggest unknown numbers of children go missing, lose their lives, become trafficked, or build precarious lives without legal security in a new space. Some girls do come to the attention of the state, however, because they make a claim for asylum and/or are believed to have been trafficked.

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Intersectional Girlhood: Agency, Asylum, and Trafficking Gender is invisible in the original definition of a refugee. Since the 1980s, however, gender-related persecution, and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have been recognised as a basis for asylum claims, due in part to the work of feminist academics and campaigners. Women are now seen as a ‘particular social group’ (Crawley, 2001). In a study by the IOM (2021), 51% of the 1100 female respondents reported fear of violence or actual violence as a primary reason for their migration, 17% higher than for male respondents. Although positioning females as a ‘social group’ has created more routes to protection from violence, grounding protection in humanitarianism based on categories rather than rights means states can restrict entry on the basis of categorical constructions (Edwards, 2010). As binary concepts of gender are being challenged, there are increasing questions about how notions of gender are working in spaces where asylum is claimed. The understandings state actors develop in the micro-space draw on available notions of gender—of womanhood and girlhood, of masculinity and femininity  (Kearney, 2021). Some female asylum-seekers can be excluded when they don’t present as ‘passive, dependent, vulnerable victims in need of protection’ (Oswin, 2001, p.  348), and the asylum claims of people who are trans-gender, or gender non-conforming, can be assessed using stereotypical ideas of gender (Avgeri, 2021). Much less is known about the experiences of girls, and most of the knowledge on gender and asylum is informed by research and activism with adult women. In most countries, the asylum claims of adult women generally outnumber those of girls. In 2021, 202 young females claimed asylum in the UK, for example, compared to 6135 adult females and 3112 young males (Home Office, 2022a), making girls a very small, but still diverse, group. Notions of age can dominate how separated children are understood in some spaces, but age can become invisible when women and girls are considered as a single group (IOM, 2021; UNHCR, 2021). This conflation of female experience may overlook the impact of developmental stages and the different positions girls occupy within gender-power relations (Massey, 2005). The literature on human trafficking is particularly concerned with the constructions of female bodies and the gender-power relations that shape and define forms of exploitation. Normative assumptions based on binary notions of the dangerous male and the safe female can overlook the

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complexity of trafficking processes. Women can act as procurers for trafficking groups and males can be trafficked. The line between sex work and trafficking is blurry and contested (Gerassi, 2015), as is the line between trafficking and smuggling (Crawley, 2001). In 2020, girls identified as trafficked outnumbered boys by 3:1, but this may be partly explained by gender differences in forms of exploitation. Girls are believed to be more likely to be trafficked for sexual exploitation and boys more often used for forced labour, which can be more difficult to identify (UNHCR, 2021). Girls aged 15–19 are seen as at greatest risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation internationally (Miller-Perrin & Wurtele, 2017), but shame and cultural gendered practices may prevent young men disclosing sexual violence, and the abuse of boys is thought to be under-reported (Hickle & Roe-Sepowitz, 2014; UNHCR, 2021). Survivors of trafficking can experience physical and emotional harm which needs to be validated, but there are dangers in a ‘helpless trafficked woman’ narrative which diminishes an individual’s own narratives of strength and, paradoxically, increases her vulnerability to exploitation (Hume & Sidun, 2017). Definitions of trafficking have been critiqued for creating a moral panic over sexualised female bodies (Cree et al., 2014), and Palmary et al. (2010) note that agency is a vexing topic for feminist academics thinking about trafficking. Agency does not mean consent, and these are both framed within cultural power relations that affect the strategies girls may be able to utilise (Rushing et al., 2010). Girls living in poverty and from marginalised communities are more likely to be targeted for trafficking, and black children are over-represented in these communities globally. The notions of innocence and vulnerability that may underpin protective responses to white children may not be applied to black children, and black girls’ agency can be seen as evidence of a maturity they may not yet possess. In the USA, for example, black girls can experience ‘adultification’ from professionals, which ‘strips away Black girls’ innocence, taking the protection of childhood away’ (Hines & Menefee, 2022, p.  1). For girls whose bodies are already seen as ‘other’, agency can be framed as a further transgressive act, particularly when a girl’s right to be present in a particular place is already being questioned. The sexualisation of black girls’ bodies, stemming from colonial narratives, can mean social workers are more likely to see black girls as promiscuous, as complicit in their sexual exploitation rather than as survivors (Constance-Huggins et  al., 2021; Jean et  al., 2022). This can place a black girl outside of

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processes which may protect her, and create barriers for black girls attempting to enact their rights. The complex case of Shamima Begum led to international debate on how notions of citizenship, rights, and risk are understood within narratives of the dangerous Muslim and expectations of the passive Muslim girl. Begum is a British Muslim women who left the UK at 15 to join the self-­ named Islamic State and whose citizenship was controversially revoked four years later. Masters and Regilme (Masters & Regilme Jr., 2020) note that although Begum was 15 when she left, no consideration appears to have been given to understanding her situation in terms of exploitation or being trafficked as a child soldier. Instead, she was framed within a single story of terrorism, her intersecting identities as a Muslim young female placing her low down in a hierarchy of belonging: [T]he remnants of colonial ideology reflecting ‘Us vs Them’ narratives, especially directed towards veiled Muslim women, reveal that Britain not only entrenches notions of a two-tiered system of citizenship and human rights (or the lack thereof), but also implements it through political exclusion, dehumanization, and the state’s abdication from promoting the welfare of all its citizens. (ibid., p. 357)

This two-tier system of citizenship is being further entrenched. The UK Nationality and Borders Act 2022 includes powers, in ‘exceptional circumstances’, for the British state to revoke citizenship without prior notice (Home Office, 2022b). Young migrants often talk of getting the ‘papers’ they believe will provide foundations for a more settled life, but Begum’s case highlights that such legal rights are precariously held by people placed low down in hierarchies of belonging. Notions of girlhood innocence are set aside when narratives of the dangerous ‘other’ dominate. Yet, even as they may be aware of this hierarchy, girls can embody agency through small acts of resistance, and in the ways they are present in place. The Muslim refugee girls in Miled’s (2020) research spoke of how they felt ‘othered’ for being both Muslims and refugees in Canada, but also of how their gender and religious identities were a source of strength and resilience in their lives: As a black, Muslim woman I face a lot of discrimination and hate in so many places outside school, especially in malls. My response to these acts is always a peaceful smile. It is part of who I am and part of my personality and char-

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acter. Smiling is my response to the difficult times that I encounter, the racism I face, and my way of being kind and friendly. (Girl Participant quoted in Miled, 2020, p. 7)

Smiling at others may appear a small act in the face of attempts to exclude and will not, in itself, provide the equality of belonging these girls seek. Yet this unnamed girl’s presence in Canada, and the way she embodies these micro-spaces, is still an act of agentic disruption. Drawing on her work with indigenous girls in Canada, de Finney (2016) argues that understanding girls’ presencing strategies opens pathways to alternative stories of girlhood that look beyond colonial formations of girlhood and place. Critically examining how separated girls are present in place, in dialogue with girls themselves, may offer richer stories of girlhood on the move.

Becoming Woman There is no fixed point at which girlhood ends, and the transition from being framed as a girl to being framed as a woman is also situated within place. Reaching puberty in the body of a cis-gendered young women can be a marker for change and a cultural signifier for the transition from girlhood to adulthood (Chakraborty, 2009), but this is not universal. Some refugee young women arrive in ‘host’ countries with little knowledge of menstruation and can associate periods with feelings of shame and negativity towards their bodies (Hawkey et  al., 2017). Girls can be married when menstruation begins, potentially seen by families as a way as providing safety in highly precarious situations following forced migration (Grabska, 2010), but girls can also leave to avoid an unwanted marriage (Hopkins & Hill, 2008). Some remain with their husband and may claim asylum as part of this new family, but girls can become separated following marriage. Early marriage is criticised on the basis that it can lead to increased risks of early maternal death, unsafe abortions, and untreated sexually transmitted diseases (CAMFED, 2017), so there may be potential risks here. Marriage can also move girls out of public spaces, including education, with consequences for their future choices. Girls themselves give avoiding early marriage as a reason for their migration, and there are questions about the power dynamics that may silence young women in decision-making, but there are dangers here for social work and NGO responses.

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Bessa (2019) warns that interventions based on educating girls can promote westernised ideas of the ‘correct choice’ for girls. Rather than experiencing empowerment, she suggests girls can become caught between family, cultural, and westernised narratives of marriage in a situation of ‘informed powerlessness’ (ibid., p.  1943). Marriage decisions are made through specific family dynamics—and some girls can have a voice in these processes—but this is always situated within wider cultural, social, and political contexts. Early marriage rates often increase during times of conflict and displacement. The rate of marriage among Syrian refugee girls increased from 12% within Syria to 37% in the Jordan camps (UNHCR, 2018). In Yemen, more than two-thirds of girls in 2018 were married before they turn 18, compared with 50% before the war started (Care USA, 2018). We need to be wary of post-colonial narratives which construct women of colour as in need of rescue from their ‘oppressive’ cultures (Gray & Franck, 2019). Families are themselves finding ways to navigate new spaces and disrupted lives. During migration, however, different cultural practices around the age of marriage can collide at borders. Legitimacy may be questioned when a young woman is below the legal age for marriage in the country she has entered, or when documents are not recognised. False marriage papers can be used in human trafficking, so questioning these may identify a girl as being trafficked or offer her an opportunity to request asylum. While early marriage denotes adulthood in some spaces, young female migrants can find themselves repositioned as a girl in border spaces when constructions of girlhood clash, separated from the person she sees as her husband and taken into state care on the basis that she is a child. Migration as a girl is more than a physical movement between place. It involves the constant navigation and re-negotiation of girlhood itself, of how girlhood is understood and experienced in relation to each girl’s intersecting identities. As they move, girls’ bodies are seen in particular ways, but girls themselves are active and agentic in their response. Rather than foregrounding practice that seeks to further control girls’ bodies and maintain them in private spaces, social work may benefit from developing richer understandings of how girls enact their disruptive agency and how this may support girls to enact their rights.

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Kidane, S. (2001). Food, shelter and half a chance: Assessing the needs of unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children. British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering. Kidane, S. (2007). Looking back, looking forward. In R.  Kohli & F.  Mitchell (Eds.), Working with unaccompanied asylum seeking children: Issues for policy and practice (pp. 141–153). Palgrave Macmillan. Kohli, R. K. S., & Kaukko, M. (2018). The management of time and waiting by unaccompanied asylum-seeking girls in Finland. Journal of Refugee Studies, 31(4), 488–506. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fex040 Krumer-Nevo, M., & Komem, M. (2015). Intersectionality and critical social work with girls: Theory and practice. British Journal of Social Work, 45(4), 1190–1206. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bct189 Larkin, R. (2015). Understanding the ‘lived experience’ of unaccompanied young women: Challenges and opportunities for social work. Practice, 27(5), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2015.1070817 Larkin, R., & Lefevre, M. (2019). Unaccompanied young females and social workers: Meaning-making in the practice space. The British Journal of Social Work, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcaa010 Massey, D. (1998). The spatial construction of youth cultures. In T. Skelton & G. Valentine (Eds.), Cool places: Geographies of youth cultures (pp. 121–129). Routledge. Massey, D. B. (2005). For space. SAGE. Masters, M., & Regilme, S. S. F., Jr. (2020). Human rights and British citizenship: The case of Shamima Begum as citizen to Homo Sacer. Journal of Human Rights Practice, 12(2), 341–363. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huaa029 Miled, N. (2020). Can the displaced speak? Muslim refugee girls negotiating identity, home and belonging through photovoice. Women’s Studies International Forum, 81, 102381. Miller-Perrin, C., & Wurtele, S.  K. (2017). Sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Women & Therapy, 40(1–2), 123–151. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02703149.2016.1210963 Nasrullah, M., & Bhatti, J. A. (2012). Gender inequalities and poor health outcomes in Pakistan: A need of priority for the national health research agenda. Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons–Pakistan, 22(5), 273–274. Nast, H. J., & Pile, S. (Eds.). (1998). Places through the body. Routledge. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). (2022). Unaccompanied children facts and data. Retrieved April 25, 2022, from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/ about/ucs/facts-­and-­data Orgocka, A. (2012). Vulnerable yet agentic: Independent child migrants and opportunity structures. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2012(136), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1002/cad.20007

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Oswin, N. (2001). Rights spaces: An exploration of feminist approaches to refugee law. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3(3), 347–364. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616740110078176 Palmary, I., Burman, E., Chantler, K., & Kiguwa, P. (Eds.). (2010). Gender and migration: Feminist interventions. Zed Books. Pérez, R. L. (2014). Crossing the border from boyhood to manhood: Male youth experiences of crossing, loss, and structural violence as unaccompanied minors. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 19(1), 67–83. https://doi. org/10.1080/02673843.2012.708350 Raddatz, R. (2013). The moved and the shaken: How forced relocation affects the lives of urban refugee women and girls. Heshima Kenya. Raddatz, R., & Kerby, M. (2020). Far from home, far from safe: State violence against unaccompanied refugee children seeking asylum in Kenya. Journal of Refugee Studies, feaa017. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa017 Refugee Council. (2021, November). An analysis of Channel crossings & asylum outcomes. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://media.refugeecouncil. org.uk/wp-­content/uploads/2021/11/16095953/Channel-­crossings-­and-­ asylum-­outcomes-­November-­2021.pdf Rentschler, C., & Mitchell, C. (Eds.). (2016). Girlhood and the politics of place. Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt14jxn16.5 Risman, B. J., & Davis, G. (2013). From sex roles to gender structure. Current Sociology, 61(5–6), 733–755. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392113479315 Rosati, F., Coletta, V., Pistella, J., Scandurra, C., Laghi, F., & Baiocco, R. (2021). Experiences of life and intersectionality of transgender refugees living in Italy: A qualitative approach. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(23), 12385. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182312385 Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI). (2021, July 28). Statement on the humanitarian work of the RNLI in the English Channel. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://rnli.org/news-­and-­media/2021/july/28/statement-­on­the-­humanitarian-­work-­of-­the-­rnli-­in-­the-­english-­channel Rushing, R., Watts, C., & Rushing, S. (2010). Living the reality of forced sex work: Perspectives from young migrant women sex workers in Northern Vietnam. Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health, 50, e41–e44. Sarkar, S. (2015). Use of technology in human trafficking networks and sexual exploitation: A cross-sectional multi-country study. Transnational Social Review, 5(1), 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/21931674.2014.991184 Schmidt, S. (2022). Child maltreatment & child migration: Abuse disclosures by central American and Mexican unaccompanied migrant children. Journal on Migration and Human Security, 10(1), 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 23315024221078951

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Stankovic, S., Ecke, J., & Wirtz, E. (2021). Forced migration. In S.  Stankovic, J. Ecke, & E. Wirtz (Eds.), Oxford research encyclopedia of anthropology. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.468 Stark, L., Asghar, K., Seff, I., Cislaghi, B., Yu, G., Gessesse, T. T., et al. (2018). How gender- and violence-related norms affect self-esteem among adolescent refugee girls living in EthiopiaGlobal Mental Health, 5. https://doi. org/10.1017/gmh.2017.28 Stark, O., & Cukrowska-Torzewska, E. (2018). Gender differentiation in intergenerational care-giving and migration choices. The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 12, 118–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeoa.2017.11.005 Taylor. D., & Syal. R. (2021, November 2). Priti Patel urged to justify claim that most boat migrants are not real refugees. The Guardian. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/02/priti-­ patel-­urged-­to-­justify-­claim-­most-­boat-­migrants-­not-­real-­refugees The Walk Production Limited. (2022). The walk. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://www.walkwithamal.org/ Thomas, S., Thomas, S., Nafees, B., & Bhugra, D. (2004). ‘I was running away from death’- the pre-flight experiences of unaccompanied asylum seeking children in the UK. Child: Care, Health and Development, 30(2), 113–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-­2214.2003.00404.x Thomson, S. (2013). Agency as silence and muted voice: The problem-solving networks of unaccompanied young Somali refugee women in Eastleigh, Nairobi. Conflict, Security & Development, 13(5), 589–609. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14678802.2013.849473 Thorsen, D. (2010). The place of migration in girls’ imagination. Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 41(2), 265–280. https://doi.org/10.3138/ jcfs.41.2.265 UNHCR. (2018). Global compact on refugees. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from https://www.unhcr.org/5c658aed4 UNHCR. (2021). Global trends in forced displacement. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from https://www.unhcr.org/flagship-­reports/globaltrends/ United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). (2021). Uncertain pathways: How gender shapes the experiences of children on the move. UNICEF.  Retrieved February 10, 2022, from https://data.unicef.org/resources/uncertain­pathways-­how-­gender-­shapes-­the-­experiences-­of-­children-­on-­the-­move/ Ussher, J.  M., Perz, J., Metusela, C., Hawkey, A.  J., Morrow, M., Narchal, R., & Estoesta, J. (2017). Negotiating discourses of shame, secrecy, and silence: Migrant and refugee women’s experiences of sexual embodiment. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46(7), 1901–1921. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-­016-­0898-­9 Velte, K., & Ortega, D. M. (2015). Old turf new battles: Feminism, legislation, and the body. Affilia, 30(1), 5–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109914562298

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Wells, K. (2011). The strength of weak ties: The social networks of young separated asylum seekers and refugees in London. Children’s Geographies, 9(3–4), 319–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.590710 Wharton, A. (2020, June). Unaccompanied girls in England: (Re)Constructing spaces of belonging and learning. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex. Retrieved September 3, 2021, from http:// sro.sussex.ac.uk/ Williams, & Hamedani. (2021, December 8). BBC News Afghanistan: Girls’ despair as Taliban confirm secondary school ban. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­asia-­59565558#:~:text=Girls%20 and%20women%20were%20banned,in%20south%2Deastern%20Ghazni%20 province Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC). (2014). I’m here: Adolescent girls in emergencies: Approach and tools for improved response. WRC New  York. Retrieved January 13, 2022, from https://www.womensrefugeecommission. org/wp-­content/uploads/2020/04/I-­m-­Here-­report-­FINAL.pdf World Health Organisation (WHO). (2022). Maternal mortality. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www.who.int/news-­room/fact-­sheets/detail/ maternal-­mortality Yacob-Haliso, O. (2016). Intersectionality and durable solutions for refugee women in Africa. Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, 11(3), 53–67.

CHAPTER 4

Separated Children in State Care

State care may be one of the first spaces a separated girl enters when she crosses a national border, and state carers sit ‘at the forefront of the nation’s threshold’ (Sirriyeh, 2013, p. 5). Care systems are organised differently in different countries, if they exist at all, and direct comparisons can be problematic, but there are themes which run through responses to separated children. The 2019 UN Resolution on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children urges member states to provide quality alternative care for all children and redirect resources to community-based services, on the premise that children need a family environment to fully develop their potential (Goldman et al., 2020). There are many laudable ambitions for alternative care, and a raft of laws, resolutions, and guidelines detailing the care children should receive—‘child-friendly services’ in Europe (Council of Europe, 2011), a ‘stable, loving and protective home’ in Kenya (Republic of Kenya, 2014), and ‘loving care’ in Australia (DFHCIA, 2010). State care spaces do offer some children safety, support, and, sometimes, loving care. People open up their homes to be foster or kinship carers, and residential workers carry out skilled work that is rarely acknowledged in public debate. There are examples of resourceful, skilled, empathetic, and committed practice with children in care systems across every region of the world (Crock & Benson, 2018; IFSW, 2021), and social work has been at the forefront of maintaining care systems through the

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COVID pandemic. Young migrants in Italy and the UK have talked of carers helping them to realise their aspirations (Chase & Allsopp, 2021), and young people in foster care have described social workers as providers of ‘advice, guidance, and emotional support and encouragement’ (Wade et al., 2012, p. 302). Separated girls in Sweden, Ireland, and the UK have spoken of feeling welcomed, valued, and supported, and of relationships with practitioners and carers which have sustained them (Bjerneld et al., 2018; Ní Raghallaigh & Sirriyeh, 2015). The connections between experiences of young migrants and other groups of children in state care, however, are not well understood. Research with separated young people has tended to focus on the complexities of being a young migrant, and the wider context of state care can remain unexamined. There can be hierarchies of care for different groups of children at different times. Enquiries into historical abuse highlight how any child’s wellbeing can be undermined when systems see them as ‘other’—Maori children in New Zealand, for example, or children with disabilities in Lambeth, England (Independent Enquiry Child Sexual Abuse, 2021; Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, 2020). Children across different national systems, with a range of identities, have said they can feel unheard and mis-understood (Caldwell et  al., 2019). Practitioners have described frustration with the gap between the care they want to provide and what feels possible, even in relatively well-­ resourced systems (Larkin, 2015). Young migrants can be entering systems that are already struggling with caring for all children, including citizen children whose right to be present may be unquestioned but whose care can still be compromised. In 2020, an Independent Care Review was launched in England, to address rising costs and ‘the failure of the system to provide sufficient stable loving homes for children’ (Independent Care Review, 2021, p. 1). Becoming a child in state care can, in itself, lead to being seen as the troubled, ‘unlovable’ child, or the ‘innocent’ in need of rescue. Shame and stigma can be attached to a child living outside of the family, and these narratives can be internalised and may persist over time. This takes us to questions about how children and young people are framed, what types of understandings are emerging, where are they forming and fixing, and who is involved? In 2019, the first Care Experienced Conference was held in England, bringing together adults who had lived in state care as children. One of their messages reads:

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[W]e want more respect shown towards us individually and as care experience people including recognising our achievements, creativity, diversity, and strengths. Stigma and discrimination are hurtful and unacceptable and must be tackled and attitudes improved across care, social work, society, and the media. (Care Experienced Conference, 2019, p. 7)

There is never a simple equation between the type of caring relationships people want for themselves and their experience of the world, and it is important not to create hierarchies of distress which suggest one child’s experience is worse than another’s. Yet, across a number of care systems there appears to be a breach between the type of care young people value and the forms of care they experience. When children have been asked what they value, the messages remain largely consistent—children want access to education, adequate housing, hobbies, and friendships. They want stable relationships with family members, if they feel safe enough, and support from people they trust. Older young people who have left care in the UK say they want connections with trusted adults who encourage them and celebrate their achievements (Coram Voice 2020). In many ways, separated young people are no different. Young migrants of all genders have said they want to feel heard, valued, cared for, and cared about (Ní Raghallaigh & Sirriyeh, 2015; Wade et  al., 2012). Where young migrants differ is the emphasis they put on having the right papers to live in the country of their choosing (Chase & Allsopp, 2021; Coram, 2020)—to have a legally recognised connection to place and a sense of belonging there.

On the Outside Looking in—Bordering Practices The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that unaccompanied children should be ‘accorded the same protection as any other child permanently or temporarily deprived of his or her family environment for any reason’ (UNICEF, 1989, p. 7), including the provision of alternative care. The role that states play in providing alternative care for separated migrants varies enormously, as do the forms of care themselves. Responses are shaped by regional, national, and cultural beliefs about the care and protection of children, and by regional and national economic contexts. Notions of care are highly situated, interpreted within these different spaces. In Europe, the state can be heavily involved in providing alternative care, based on notions of public social services which support the

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welfare of citizens. In many African cultures, the tradition of kinship care means separated children are often cared for within their community, but this has been compromised by conflict, poverty, and global inequality (Assim, 2013), and the COVID pandemic has placed further pressures on community resources. When governments or communities are seen as unable to provide safe alternative care a range of actors can step in—faith-based groups, NGOs, state services, boarding schools, private businesses, activists, and individuals (Petrowski et  al., 2017). Adults who step in do not always provide safety for children; children separated from families can be targeted for abuse and exploitation. Many professionals who provide care do not have a social work qualification or would want to see themselves in such a role. Practices develop from a number of different values and knowledge bases, in multiple professional, organisational, and community contexts. What is less well understood is the significance of mutually caring relationships young migrants can form with each other (Rosen et al., 2021)—relationships that can be severed in systems that see children only as recipients of care. In 2018, the Global Compact on Refugees pledged resources and expertise to develop integrated and age-sensitive services, for both refugee and host community girls and boys, with investment to provide a ‘continuum of protection, care and services’ (UNHCR, 2018, p. 34). This may be the goal, but the key dichotomy—the vulnerable refugee child as a ‘moral touchstone’ (Giner, 2007) and the adult refugee as a threat to society—makes responses to refugee children complex and contradictory. The Inter-Agency Guiding Principles on Unaccompanied and Separated Children define care clearly in terms of children’s rights. This includes the right to participation in decision-making and the right to care and assistance appropriate to their age and developmental needs (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2004). These are rights children cannot individually enact, however, and there can be enormous variety in the reception children receive in different places and at different times. The unpredictable ways in which young migrants arrive at the boundaries of state care makes planning more challenging. Providing services based on individual needs may not be the goal at all at times of mass migration, when thousands of children can cross borders within a short time. Young migrants are not unaware of the differences between state care systems, and share information as they move, affecting decisions about how and where they make themselves visible. The young participants in the Becoming Adult project, for example, weighed up the higher levels of

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support from the ‘iron rod’ bureaucracy of the UK or having less support from the more flexible ‘colander’ services of Italy (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). When young migrants reach the threshold of state care, the primary focus on their immigration status can mean they are diverted into adult provisions or maintained within border spaces. Data about state detention can be difficult to collect and verify, but in the twenty-first century over 100 countries are believed to detain children based on immigration status (Wood, 2018). Young people can be held for a few hours in a police cell or for prolonged time in prison-like facilities or temporary buildings. There is ample evidence of the negative impact of these environments on children’s health and development (Barrie & Mendes, 2011; Robinson & Gifford, 2019; Triggs, 2018). The boundary between detention, secure care, and reception facilities is not always clear, however, and states use these terms in different ways. Migrant children can sometimes be grouped together in large and sometimes makeshift accommodation—a form of ‘soft’ detention. In 2021, the BBC described ‘heartbreaking’ conditions in the tented camp at the Fort Bliss military base at the US/Mexico border, reporting allegations of sexual abuse, outbreaks of COVID and lice, and delays in providing medical attention (Anderson, 2021). Human Rights Watch (2021) described children being held in ‘unsanitary, overcrowded, and degrading’ conditions in Greece. Although the Greek government made the detention of children illegal in 2020, government figures show that children were still being held in ‘protective custody’ up until August 2021, at which point figures stopped being published (ibid., 2021). Detention can sometimes be positioned as a form of protection. In the USA, secure ‘care’ can be used for migrant young people who may ‘pose a risk of escape’, on the basis of indicators such as young people saying they are going to escape, being about to turn 18, or having a final order of removal (ORR, 2021). Here, a child’s rights are rendered invisible when an immigration court defines them as the unwelcome stranger. It is the state’s needs that are seen to be at risk, the ability to remove the young person across the border that is being safeguarded. Secure care is sometimes used for indigenous children, and restricting the liberty of a child is always a contentious decision. In England, the decision to place a child in ‘secure care’ outside of immigration processes can only be made by the courts, but legal oversight is lacking for young migrants held in immigration facilities designed for adults. The UN (2021) has urged states to immediately stop detaining children, as a first step

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towards ending all immigration detention. While detention remains in use for adults, however, the focus returns to defining the age of a person. Delineating state duties towards children from immigration processes aimed at adults, however, involves contentious and problematic age assessment processes.

Age Assessment—Moral Panic and ‘Burden-Sharing’ Governments argue there are serious safeguarding risks if migrants over 18 are placed in settings with children (Home Office, 2016). This does, however, presuppose that migrant adults pose a safeguarding risk to children. At the time of writing, there are no known reports of harm being done to children in state care by a migrant who was later ‘proven’ to be an adult. There are, however, multiple accounts of the negative impact of having your age and identity questioned (Ortiz, 2019; Passarlay & Ghouri, 2018). Young migrants have described age assessment as a dehumanising experience: ‘the worst thing I can remember they made me sit there and like a slave market other immigration officers were told to look at me and guess my age’ (16-year-old boy from Iran, quoted in Children’s Commissioner, 2017, p. 12). It is noticeable that the moral panic about adult males being in services for children is not matched by a similar moral panic about children being alone with adults. British law states that young migrants are children first, migrants second (Ang, 2019), but there are multiple contradictions between these positions. In 2020, two English authorities were criticised by the High Court for leaving young people in hotel accommodation for adults while their ages were being disputed. As the Judge commented, these are concerning steps away from the practice of accommodating young people while their ages are assessed (R v London Borough of Hillingdon, 2020). It also highlights the level of care that can become accepted for particular groups, and what might be considered safeguarding concerns for migrant children and young people themselves. Debates about age and care of young migrants can be touchstones in political debate. Reception facilities in the USA, for example, have been used as measures of policy effectiveness in the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration. In England, several local authorities and the UK government have been engaged in brinkmanship, peaking when Kent County Council announced it no longer had capacity to safely care for any more unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (Wingate, 2021).

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Geographically, Kent sits closest to mainland Europe and has consistently accommodated the highest percentage of separated children entering the UK. Practitioners in Kent have been at the forefront of developing practice with young migrants, but the difference in numbers also led to debates about ‘burden-sharing’ between local authorities, a narrative in which young migrants are framed largely as a drain on resources rather than potential contributors to society. The National Transfer Scheme (NTS), where separated young people could be shared out across English authorities, was developed in response (Home Office, 2016). This voluntary scheme, however, did not result in the distribution of separated children that Kent and several other authorities had hoped for. In August 2020, and again in July 2021, Kent County Council announced they could not accommodate any more separated children and called on the government to make the NTS scheme mandatory (Wingate, 2021). The local authority then, albeit temporarily, closed its doors to young migrants, and other authorities began to follow suit. There is a wider context here. By March 31, 2021, there were over 80,000 children in the care system in England, an all-time record number (UK Government, 2022), and an Independent Care Review had been launched in recognition that the system was struggling to offer stable care to all children (UK Government, 2021). At no stage, however, had a local authority announced it was closing its doors to children experiencing neglect or children with disabilities. A public outcry, and government intervention, could be reasonably anticipated if they did. Games of brinkmanship involving young migrants become possible when the presence of migrant children is framed as a matter of humanitarian goodwill,  which can be withdrawn when it becomes problematic, rather than one of legal rights or social justice. This can also be an effective strategy for authorities battling the consequences of austerity policies and a pandemic; the National Transfer Scheme has since been made compulsory  (Preston & Samuel, 2021). The result of this stand-off for children was prolonged stays at the Kent Intake Unit (KIU), run by the largest contracted provider of immigration removal centres in the UK. In December 2021, the HM Chief Inspector of Prisons strongly criticised the care at KIU, noting: [W]e also saw evidence of very young and vulnerable unaccompanied children being held for long periods, often alongside adults. In one case, a 13-year-old boy was held in Frontier House for over 64 hours and in another, a 12-year-old girl who had disclosed suffering physical and mental

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abuse was held at the KIU for 15 hours with adults and boys. During our visit, we saw a 17-year-old girl who had been held in a holding room with around 30 men overnight, including one ex-offender. We also saw a case in which an eight-year-old girl with serious health conditions was held at Tug Haven and KIU for a total period of 37 hours—we were told that staff at Tug Haven had forgotten that she and her siblings were there (HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, 2021, p. 20).

Social workers were present at the KIU, but government guidelines said their primary purpose was the completion of newly developed, truncated age assessments. The paradox for social work is that age assessment processes can sometimes be the only way of preventing someone being detained, and UNHCR (2015) have called age assessments an ‘important safeguard against the detention of children’ (p. 7). The Chief Inspector of Prisons, however, noted that this single focus on age assessment meant social work skills were not being used to safeguard children at the KIU (ibid.). Instead, social work was utilised in bordering practices which focussed on keeping people out, practices that jar with the definition of social work as founded on ‘principles of social justice, human rights, collective responsibility and respect for diversities’ (IFSW, 2014). In January 2022, the truncated assessments used at the KIU were declared illegal in the courts and taken out of use. Rather than rethinking the stark separation between provision for children and for adults that creates the context in which age assessment becomes necessary,  nation states are entrenching themselves further in questionable processes. EU guidance may stress the importance of rights-­ based approaches (EASO, 2018) but, like the USA, many European countries have continued to place faith in ‘imprecise, inaccurate and inconclusive’ (Mishori, 2019) methods of measuring bodies. Decisions about young migrants are also becoming increasingly centralised, entrenching the focus on immigration status as the primary concern. When the power to influence what may happen for young migrants is pulled further away from local spaces, how social work practitioners use their power becomes an even more critical question. English Directors of Children’s Services are themselves asking for more debate and dialogue about the meaning of care for unaccompanied young people, questioning whether current approaches are working (ADCS, 2017, 2021). Notions of care and rights were erased in the state’s  construction of social work as age-assessing

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border guard at the KIU. In this context, claiming rights-based care as a primary responsibility of social work towards young migrants may increasingly become a necessary, political act.

Making Meanings and Forming Connections From the moment a young women is identified as potentially separated, professionals begin to gather information about her, to construct a narrative. In the UK, there can be multiple agencies involved in these processes. Police officers may be seeking evidence of trafficking or criminal activity. Border officers, Home Office staff, and solicitors will be seeking information about immigration status and asylum claims. Social workers are looking for knowledge to inform their assessments. Doctors want a medical history and teachers an educational one. All this at a time when a girl’s emotional and physical resources may be low and she is trying to navigate a new and complex space. In social work, understanding a young person’s lived experience is seen as an essential step for assessment and emotional support, and this requires effective engagement with each individual child (Ferguson, 2017). Done well, assessments are processes of ‘complexity thinking’ (Adams et  al., 2005), offering spaces for practitioners to consider, with a child, what is known about their lives and what interventions are needed. Yet, understanding a child is also a culturally specific concept routed in western humanist philosophies. Assessment tools developed within one cultural context may result in superficial, fixed understandings of children from different cultural backgrounds. Girls from some indigenous cultures, for example, develop their sense of self through connections with place (de Finney, 2016), and separation from these places can disrupt a girl’s sense of who she is becoming and which stories she can now tell. There are significant tensions between the state’s requirement for information (to categorise and potentially to protect), the practitioner’s need to develop a narrative (to assess, understand, and plan), and a child’s inability or reluctance to tell her stories. Practitioners may know nothing at all about a girl when they first meet, just as she knows nothing about them. Separated young people have described their difficulties in understanding what practitioners do in these early stages (Chase, 2010). This is unsurprising, as social work takes many forms across the globe, if it exists at all. After almost 30 years, I still find it difficult to describe what social

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work practice actually is, and the focus perpetually shifts. The importance of communication remains a constant, however, and the ability to engage—to establish a trusting and mutually respectful relationship (Megele, 2015)—sits at the heart of practice. Practitioners have said they want to be better able to communicate with separated girls and to understand more about their pasts (Larkin, 2015), but a number of barriers to communication can exist. These include language differences, access to interpreting services, different cultural practices, fear, and mistrust (Kohli, 2007; Merry et  al., 2011). Communicating with interpreters is skilled work which requires planning and additional time (Morsch, 2019). The sources of knowledge usually used for children—family members, schools, medical records, social care records, and so on—can be irrelevant for young migrants. The main source of knowledge then becomes the girl herself, and girls can feel under pressure to speak: They keep asking you question. It makes me angry, it makes me want to shout. It makes me remember all the bad things and they don’t understand that. If they ask me questions, I will suffer for months. (Hellen, a young woman quoted in Chase et al., 2008)

There is a clear affective dimension to communication in this context. Anxiety and fear can be present, and girls have described their lack of trust in authority figures (Groark et al., 2011; Hopkins, 2007). Trust develops, and stalls, relationally. A separated girl in Ni Raghallaigh’s (2014) research said her social worker did not seem to trust her story so she did not feel able to tell her everything. Staying silent can also be an act of agency, when young migrants feel under surveillance from social work and immigration authorities (Chase, 2010). Engagement is still possible, however, when practitioners are skilled, reflective, and knowledgeable (Boyles et al., 2019; Treisman, 2017). Everyday acts of practical care can build relationships which persist over time. Bonds are formed, for example, when carers position themselves as allies in navigating asylum processes and share in the emotional shifts this brings (Drammeh, 2019). Notions of boyhood and girlhood can also inform the understandings that develop between practitioners and a separated child. The extent to which girls and boys have different needs, and the extent to which these notions are formed through binary notions of gender, is a matter of

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continuing debate. The smaller number of separated girls in most care systems means that, even in specialist teams, practitioners are often mainly working with boys, who may also come from different regions of the world than girls. Ekström et  al. (2019) note that reception systems in Finland and Sweden are designed around the perceived needs of boys. The idea that separated girls are more in need of family-based care persists. Girls are more likely be placed in foster care than boys in a number of countries, with boys more likely to be living in ‘semi-independence’ or shared houses with other young migrants. Boys can be seen as more able to manage independently. Pérez (2014), for example, found the Mexican shelters in Tijuana, just south of the US border, would accept females aged under 16, but no males over 8. At nine years old boys were seen as more problematic to care for than girls and ‘expected to locate resources on their own’ (ibid., p.  76). Notions of the ‘vulnerable’ refugee child can become erased within narratives that construct boyhood in terms of strength, self-responsibility, and resilience. Agency in boys is expected within this construction and may lead to the withdrawal of care, whereas acts of agency can be mistrusted in girls, with similar results. One separated girl, Genevieve, said her social worker did not believe she was held by an adult abuser because she was assertive and could navigate the London underground without help (O’Higgins, 2012). Her story was disbelieved when it did not fulfil the practitioner’s construction of the innocent, female victim of trafficking. For Genevieve, foregrounding acts of survival worked against her finding the safety she was seeking. UNICEF (2018) argue that services for adolescents should draw on both gender analysis and a life course perspective, to consider how age and gender identity are impacting on children’s lived experiences. Yet the overarching focus on immigration status within services for migrant children can overlook the impact of their intersecting identities, and leave gendered, racialised, and heteronormative practices unexamined. Racialised constructions can underpin the ways practitioners intervene in children’s lives. Black young people are consistently over-represented in western children and families services, with racial bias reported as a key factor in different practice decisions (Cénat et al., 2021). Critically examining which notions of girlhood and boyhood are being utilised in spaces of state care is therefore an essential first step in developing, and maintaining, ethical and anti-oppressive practice.

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When the State Separates States are encouraged to work to change norms, beliefs, and attitudes that drive the separation of children from their families (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2004), but decision-making that is focussed on border control can create conditions where states themselves are separating migrant children from parents. Not all parents are able to safely care for their children, but there has been fierce international debate about separation practices at borders. Reports clearly show how social work was involved in the process of separation at the US/Mexico border after 2017, for example, raising questions about the role of social work within practices designed to exclude. Poverty, crime, and insecurity in several Latin American countries have led to families heading north to the USA, most coming from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and Venezuela (UNHCR, 2020), but in 2017 the former President Trump’s administration introduced a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards forced migrants reaching the border. Between 2017 and 2018, over 2500 children were separated from a parent or legal guardian and taken into state care (OIG, 2019). A further 1178 children were separated between June 2018 and November 2020, the number reducing after a Federal court halted most family separations (OIG, 2021). These events show how child separation can occur when parents are seen primarily in terms of their immigration status, rather than their legal or relational connection to the child. Decisions to detain or deport parents may leave the child without an immediately available family carer. Bringing them into a care system then becomes seen as a necessity, the moral action of the state towards a child left alone. Yet, some of the reasons recorded for separation decisions include ‘the parent’s gang affiliation, illness or hospitalisation, immigration history, a parent presenting a fraudulent passport’ (OIG, 2019, p. 11). Any legal rights adults may have as parents, so sacrosanct for many citizen families, have become a secondary consideration. A migrating parent’s ability to enact any rights can be severely restricted when they may be navigating difficulties in communication, lack of information, limited resources, and the highly affective nature of forced migration. Children’s ability to understand and enact their own right to family life (UNICEF, 1989) can be even more compromised. This places migrating families at a significant disadvantage in hierarchies of power within

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border spaces, where social work can take on the role of negotiating cultural ideas of worthiness (Gustafsson & Johansson, 2018). There are dangers that the ways migrant families navigate borders—the use of false papers, for example—become absorbed into assessments of their parenting, seen as predictors of future behaviours and measures of their general trustworthiness, rather than situated, strategic acts. Criticising practice from a distance, with limited facts, is always problematic. Practitioners are often providing care for children as a result of circumstances they think were avoidable if different decisions had been made, or if political and social contexts were different. Written records can never fully reflect the complex decision-making that takes place and the significance of what was observed, sensed, and unwritten. Warner (2013) notes how the demonisation of social workers as ‘cold-hearted bureaucrat folk devils’ (ibid., p. 229) can occur at times of moral panic, when social work is seen to be in close proximity to a ‘dangerous other’. Working with refugees—framed as modern-day ‘folk devils’ themselves—can expose social workers to the moral outrage of those who want social work to protect refugees from the state and, simultaneously, to the outrage of those who want social work to protect the state from refugees. False documents are used by adults moving children across borders for forms of trafficking, so overlooking them entirely may leave a child at risk (Kelly, 2012). An estimated 25 million people were ‘trafficked in person’ across the globe in 2020, 30% of these children (US Department of State, 2020), and professionals at borders are key actors in the identification of trafficking. The lines between trafficking, smuggling, and migration, however, are not as distinct in the border-space as they appear within policy frameworks. A number of inter-agency protocols and toolkits are available to help practitioners identify trafficked adults and children (Greenbaum et al., 2018; Vera, 2022), but making these distinctions is rarely straightforward in practice. There are also relational paradoxes here. An approach based on unquestioned belief may leave children on a trajectory to exploitation, but a practice based on disbelief may also leave children unprotected or separated from parents. This ethical tension, between valuing people’s narratives and critically questioning what is being said, sits at the centre of safeguarding processes with any child, and it is a line practitioners—and families—are continually navigating.

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At the Margins of State Care Bordering practices can also take place within state care systems. European social work with young migrants is rarely embedded into ‘mainstream’ services for children and families, unless the numbers of young people are very small. There are concerns that splitting off specialist services can leave separated children occupying border positions within care systems— ‘deported to the margins of daily organizational practice’ in Sweden (Ottosson et al., 2013, p. 247) or located in the ‘permanent refugee camps’ (Isfahani, 2008) of specialist teams in the UK. Separated children over 15 are the only group of looked-after children in Norway not under the care of the child welfare system (Lidén & Nyhlén, 2016). This separation from citizen children can be maintained even when young people’s welfare may be compromised. Some young migrants spent months in overcrowded police stations in Greece, waiting for ‘specialist’ accommodation to become available (Buchanan & Kallinikaki, 2018). There is evidence of good practice across different teams, sometimes based on whole-team approaches but more often located within individual practitioners (Chase et  al., 2008; Kohli, 2007; Meloni & Chase, 2017; Wade et al., 2012). Separated young people themselves have said they are less concerned about the organisational location of the practitioner than their individual knowledge base, their experience, their access to resources, and their ability to engage (Wade et al., 2012). The skills and knowledge developed in social work education may also be a factor. Mitchell (2007) found a procedural approach by unqualified workers in a specialist team was less popular with young people than the more engaged work of qualified social workers in a mainstream team. While there is no clear evidence that specialist teams provide higher standards of care, there are concerns that skills and knowledge are lost when teams are disbanded (Sigona et al., 2017). Engaged and sensitive cross-cultural practices, legal knowledge, and skills in working with interpreters may be more developed in teams that work regularly with separated children. Specialist teams may also be more likely to recruit practitioners with specific interests in migration, and who explicitly ground their work in inclusive and anti-oppressive approaches. One local authority in the UK disbanded its specialist team only to reinstate it again when it recognised the negative impact of losing the skills and practice wisdom the team had developed. However, not all young migrants have access to such specialist practice. Teams are created within organisations that develop from national or regional frameworks

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and from state law, but not all facilities are located within the borders of the nation state. The Australian policy of offshore detention has been the subject of national and international concern, held up as evidence of ‘the persistence of the very structures of colonialism and practices of control’ (Giannacopoulos & Loughnan, 2020). Since 2015, the EU have pursued a similar model of outsourcing immigration controls beyond member states’ borders, where people are categorised in ‘a network of sorting spaces’ (Chase & Allsopp, 2021, p. 8). The UK government now has plans for their own system of offshore asylum ‘processing’ in Rwanda (BBC News, 2022), raising serious concerns about who will be rendered invisible in these spaces and what forms of monitoring will be possible. There are also gendered constructions of risk and vulnerability within the narratives that support these plans. It is single, adult male migrants the UK government states will be the most likely to be moved offshore. Creating spaces beyond national borders can place both adults and children outside the reach of national laws which may define their rights, and practitioners may have limited, or no, legal authority to act. The question for social work is how it responds to the role it is asked to play in these spaces.

Reunifying Family Globally, all children are understood to be best cared for within their families (when this is safe), and family life for children has been defined as a right (UNICEF, 1989). Internationally, countries approach family reunification in two broad ways. Children who have been granted forms of legal protection can apply for reunion in countries such as Iceland, Norway, and most EU states, whereas in countries such as the UK, Canada, and the USA, family reunification is heavily restricted and difficult to achieve (Nicholson, 2018, 2021). Applying for parents to join a separated child in the UK was once considered routine practice (Larkin, 1994), but is now rarely attempted. Critiques of family reunification argue it encourages families to send a child ahead, who then applies for whole family migration—the so-called anchor child. NGOs, advocating for reunification, claim there is no evidence for this phenomenon (Amnesty International UK et  al., 2019), but Downes (2021) points to reports from Austria, Finland, and Belgium, suggesting policy can indirectly encourage families to use these routes to better their lives.

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While still supporting a child’s right to be with family, Downes (ibid.) argues state actors need to acknowledge the complexity of migration when making decisions in children’s best interests, rather than dismissing aspects which do not fit with liberal western notions of parenting which cannot conceive of a ‘safe’ parent sending a child ahead. The focus on parental decisions also overlooks how young migrants may act strategically within complex relational dynamics. Kulu-Glasgow et al. (2018) report that ‘easier’ family reunification polices was one of many factors young migrants themselves considered when making the Netherlands their destination. These hopes for family reunion can be used against a child, however, when their presence is premised on being separated and when they are viewed as a singularity. Some young people are reluctant to disclose contact with transnational relatives, concerned this may result in them being removed from the country. When family reunion policies are designed to serve migration policy, rather than centred on legal duties to promote children’s wellbeing, attempts to reconnect with family can be framed as attempts to manipulate the system. Meanings of family are complex for any child in state care. For children who have fled violence from within families, expectations of family life can be emotionally difficult to bear. Some children are not able to contact relatives, due to death or imprisonment or because they are missing. There is a lack of research on states’ decision-making on reunification applications. Kulu-Glasgow et al. (ibid.) note that girls in the Netherlands were much more likely to receive a positive outcome, but this could be related to their countries of origin as much as gender as the majority of boys were from Afghanistan. In some countries girls who are married before their arrival can apply for a spouse to join them as part of family, but this is a complicated area of law where different cultural notions of girlhood clash. The possibility of forced marriage can mean young women may be asked about coercion and marital rape by state actors at borders. Nicholson (2018) says this requires a ‘careful evaluation of the individual circumstances’ (p. 175), but little is known about how this evaluation is achieved or girls’ experiences of these processes. Reunification can be a bureaucratic process filled with obstacles. Attempts to enact rights to family life can sometimes foreground normative ideas of family (Banda & Eekelaar, 2017), and this can overlook how ‘family ties’ may develop between individuals who are not blood relatives during migration. Even less is known about LGBTQIA+ young people in intimate relationships with partners they may see as family, but which are not recognised by state systems.

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The reification of family can also lead to reunion being presented as an unproblematic, unquestionable solution for separated children. This can mirror a narrative found in adoption, where family life is presented as a panacea for the abused or neglected child, but (re)forming any family after a period of disruption brings challenges as well as opportunities. Essentialising cultural, romanticised ideas of family, and losing sight of the situated and temporal nature of family practices, may be unhelpful for the separated child. Polarised constructions of parents as either blameless victims (who would never send their child away) or abusers of generous liberal systems (who would use their child as a pawn for their own gains) are poor starting points for understanding complex family dynamics. Lalander and Herz (2018) argue that separated children and their families are often framed as ‘deviant’ in relation to westernised, gendered notions of the nuclear family. Understanding how place is implicated in reunification dynamics—and transnational family lives—may help practitioners to avoid framing any reunion difficulties as further evidence of ‘inadequacy’ or ‘deviance’. States frequently use time as a key deterrent to family reunion when they foreground immigration concerns, but extending separations can make reunifications more challenging for both children and their families. In the Dutch context, Kulu-Glasgow et al. (2018) found that waiting for family could add to the liminality of separated children’s lives, and when family members did arrive, children could take on adult responsibilities because of their experience of living in the country. These are not unexpected dynamics, however, and the political, social, and economic contexts are important factors here. Access to resources such as employment, housing, language support, and health care can all affect a family’s experiences of migration and their adjustment to a child re-entering the family. Promoting the rights of children to family life (UNICEF, 1989) and providing access to robust legal advice remain essential. However, experienced social workers will recognise the complexities of working with any child during family reunion, and the levels of skilled, emotional work this entails from the child, family members, and professionals. Social work has a key role to play here, but there are concerns that when separated children have been placed with family members in the UK, some relationships may not be sufficiently understood or supported, and are breaking down (Ortiz, 2019). Facilitating a separated child’s family life needs to begin with exploring the meaning of family—and of ‘family-like ties’—for that

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individual child and, when possible, their family. This can then inform practice that supports the re-making of family, if this takes place, and that sensitively supports the child if it does not.

When Childhood Ends For all young people within the UK care system, turning 18 is a highly significant moment, the point at which they stop legally being a ‘child in care’. While some young people relish this move to adulthood, the ending of care can be problematic, even when planning, preparation, and ‘independence work’ may have taken place. When I teach university students about youth migration, it is the lack of legal security that many find the most shocking. This is, in part, because notions of family and permanency are so embedded in western social work, underpinned by research, theory, and policy which stress that children need secure, consistent care from trusted adults (Burge, 2022). It is easy, therefore, to assume that if you are taken into care as a separated child the state would act as a ‘good’ parent and secure your future in the country. In the UK, however, none of the four possible decisions on a child’s asylum claim provide an indefinite right to remain (Ang, 2019), and this is replicated across many destination countries. When social work meets the separated child ideas of permanency become fragmented. While there are European frameworks based on principles of finding ‘durable solutions’ for those without a right to remain, any ideas of permanency are ‘trumped starkly by the imperatives of immigration control at the age of 18’ (Allsopp and Chase 2017, p. 6). In many destination countries, decisions about immigration status are separated from organisations that provide forms of welfare. Here sits a key tension for state care globally—states claiming to be acting as substitute parents for young migrants while simultaneously offering time-limited care which could end in deportation or destitution (Terrio, 2015). Just as care is contested, so are notions of parenting and permanence. In England, most separated children are accommodated under section 20 of the Children Act 1989, which does not give legal ‘parental responsibility’ to a local authority (Ang, 2019). Some young migrants maintain contact with parents in transnational families but many do not, leaving them without a legally recognised adult in the role of parent. Age is a factor here. Notions of permanency are complex for all adolescents who come into state care, when family relationships may already be internalised

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within their sense of self and they are looking to relationships beyond that of parent/child (ADCS, 2021). That does not mean, however, that security in place, and in relationships, are unimportant. Chase (2013) argues that young migrant’s wellbeing is strongly connected to their ability to imagine a possible future, but that this is undermined by a precarious immigration status. Rather than experiencing a sense of permanency, separated children can lead liminal lives within state care, and reaching 18 can be particularly challenging. In the UK, practitioners are involved in ‘triple planning’ with a young person, exploring what they will do if they receive legal status, if they return to their country of origin (voluntarily or not), or if they stay in the UK without a legal right to remain (Gupta, 2019a, 2019b). In practice, this is an emotionally challenging process for young people, who may manage the uncertainty by avoiding their social worker or going missing from state care all together (Meloni & Chase, 2017). When young migrants have no legal right to remain in the UK, they can be supported by local authorities following a Human Rights Assessment. This can provide essential resources, but these, too, are time-limited. There has also been little guidance on completing assessments, so decisions can be influenced by the practitioner’s assumptions, value-base, and organisational culture (Gupta, 2019b). Destitution is not a byproduct of immigration systems, but built into policies that aim to deter asylum applications and encourage ‘voluntary’ return. Institutional terms—‘appeals rights exhausted’, ‘no recourse to public funds’, ‘refused asylum seeker’—can mask the social and emotional realities of living without legal documentation, and without access to social and welfare services available to citizens (Bloch, 2014; Farmer, 2017). Being considered a child, or having lived in state care before 18, does not exempt you from removal. Little is known about separated girls’ experiences of deportation or voluntary return, but there is some evidence that gendered and racialised practices can affect decision-making. There has been a specific UK scheme to return groups of young men to Afghanistan (Finch, 2012), for example, but no comparable projects for girls. Cleton (2021) notes that the Dutch Minister for Migration decided against deporting a Somali girl, whereas Chinese girls over 16 were seen as being able to take care of themselves. These decisions, Cleton (ibid.) suggests, were based on notions of western liberal governments rescuing oppressed Muslim girls. In England, leaving care can also mean young migrants lose access to legal advocacy and can be living with the stress of unresolved immigration

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claims (Coram, 2020; Henry, 2021). Robust legal representation in immigration processes is essential, but research with young migrants in Italy and the UK found this was inconsistent (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). Not all areas of the UK have specialist solicitors, and the changes to legal-aid funding has reduced access to legal advice, meaning some children now have to travel to find someone to take their case (York & Warren, 2019). Law and policy may state that immigration processes need to take account of children’s best interests (Ang, 2019), but immigration courts are separated from family court processes. Immigration Judges can be making wellbeing decisions on complex situations, within under-resourced systems and in highly politicised contexts. Terrio (Terrio, 2015) describes how Marcy, a 15-year-old girl from Sierra Leone, was framed within two conflicting narratives in a New York immigration court—as the traumatised victim of sex trafficking or the dishonest girl involved in prostitution. The Judge felt unable to make a ruling, saying the complex issues were not immigration concerns, and lamenting the lack of court-appointed child advocate to speak to Marcy’s best interests. The outcome for Marcy was a return to child detention and a deterioration in her mental health. Wright (2012) suggests that separating welfare services from decisions about removal may be helpful for UK social workers, who can then offer support from a ‘neutral’ position. It is difficult, though, to see where such neutrality could exist and how this aligns with social work values. Ideas of being neutral may offer the social worker a defence against the emotional impact of feeling involved in removal, but in doing so, it serves the professional more than the young migrant. When systems fail to see young migrants as children first, ‘neutrality’ can too easily blur into unknowing or ambivalent collusion. The separation of care and immigration systems offers a false dichotomy—the child experiences the impact of these systems as a whole lived experience. Decision-making within state care is connected to what happens to young people in other spaces. In the UK, for example, children can have their credibility questioned in immigration court if, it transpires, they did not request family-tracing services on arrival (York & Warren, 2019), but it is usually social workers who make these referrals. Separated children are often unsure about starting family-tracing in the early weeks, worried about risks to family members or themselves, or reluctant to start waiting for news that may never come. Agreeing not to make a referral without knowing the implications for immigration claims, however—and without discussing these with the young person—may undermine the legal security the separated chid is seeking. Looking out across the whole

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system, with all its paradoxes and discomforts, is essential if practitioners are going to promote a young migrant’s wellbeing and critically examine the role of social work in this context.

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Children’s Commissioner. (2017). A review of evidence on the subjective wellbeing of children subject to immigration control in England. Retrieved June 3, 2021, from https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/wp-­content/uploads/ 2017/11/Voices-­Immigration-­Control-­1.pdf Cleton, L. (2021). The time politics of migrant deportability: An intersectional analysis of deportation policy for non-citizen children in Belgium and the Netherlands. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1080/1369183X.2021.1926943 Coram. (2020). What makes life good? Care leavers views on their wellbeing. Retrieved August 3, 2021, from https://coramvoice.org.uk/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/11/1883-­CV-­What-­Makes-­Life-­Good-­Report-­final.pdf Council of Europe. (2011). Council of Europe Recommendation on children’s rights and social services friendly to children and families. Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/Displ ayDCTMContent?documentId=090000168046ccea Crock, M., & Benson, L. B. (Eds.). (2018). Protecting migrant children: In search of best practice. Edward Elgar Publishing. de Finney, S. (2016). Under the shadow of empire: Indigenous girls’ presencing as decolonizing force. In C. Mitchell & C. Rentschler (Eds.), Girlhood and the politics of place (pp.  19–37). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j. ctt14jxn16.6 Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (DFHCIA). (2010). National standards for out of home care. Retrieved March 2, 2022, from https://www.dss.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/ facs_37724_out_home_care.pdf Downes, C. (2021). EU or UK child-sponsored family reunification policy: Who’s right? Whose rights? European Journal of Migration and Law, 23(3), 245–283. https://doi.org/10.1163/15718166-­12340102 Drammeh, L. (2019). Spaces of belonging and social care. In S. Clayton, A. Gupta, & K. Willis (Eds.), Unaccompanied young migrants: Identity, care and justice. Policy Press. Ekström, E., Bülow, H., & P., & Wilinska, M. (2019). ‘I don’t think you will understand me because really, I believe’ - Unaccompanied female minors re-­ negotiating religion. Qualitative Social Work, 19(4), 719–735. https://doi. org/10.1177/1473325019848481 European Asylum Support Office. (2018). ESAO practical guide on age assessment second edition European Asylum Support Office. Retrieved March 14, 2022, from https://euaa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/easo-­practical-­guide-­on-­ age-­assesment-­v3-­2018.pdf Farmer, N. J. (2017). ‘No recourse to public funds’, insecure immigration status and destitution: The role of social work? Critical and Radical Social Work, 5(3), 357–367. https://doi.org/10.1332/204986017X15029697778471

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Larkin, R. (2015). Understanding the ‘lived experience’ of unaccompanied young women: Challenges and opportunities for social work. Practice, 27(5), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2015.1070817 Lidén, G., & Nyhlén, J. (2016). Structure and agency in Swedish Municipalities’ reception of unaccompanied minors. Journal of Refugee Studies, 29(1), 39–59. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fev015 Megele, C. (2015). Psychosocial and relationship-based practice. Critical Publishing. Meloni, F., & Chase, E. (2017). ‘Transitions to institutional adulthood’ Becoming Adult Research Brief no. 4, London, UCL. Merry, L., Clausen, C., Gagnon, A. J., Carnevale, F., Jeannotte, J., Saucier, J.-F., & Oxman-Martinez, J. (2011). Improving qualitative interviews with newly arrived migrant women. Qualitative Health Research, 21(7), 976–986. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1049732311403497 Mishori, R. (2019). The use of age assessment in the context of child migration: Imprecise, inaccurate, inconclusive and endangers children's rights. Children (Basel, Switzerland), 6(7), 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/children6070085 Mitchell, F. (2007). Assessment practices with unaccompanied children: Exploring exceptions to the problem. In R.  Kohli & F.  Mitchell (Eds.), Working with unaccompanied asylum seeking children: Issues for policy and practice. Palgrave Macmillan. Morsch, A. (2019). From ‘translation machine’ to trusted colleague. In L. Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice (pp. 251–262). Jessica Kingsley. Ní Raghallaigh, M., & Sirriyeh, A. (2015). The negotiation of culture in foster care placements for separated refugee and asylum seeking young people in Ireland and England. Childhood, 22(2), 263–277. https://doi. org/10.1177/0907568213519137 Ni Raghallaigh, M. N. (2014). The causes of mistrust amongst asylum seekers and refugees: Insights from research with unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors living in the Republic of Ireland. Journal of Refugee Studies, 27(1), 82–100. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fet006 Nicholson, F. (2018). The “Essential Right” to Family Unity of Refugees and Others in Need of International Protection in the Context of Family Reunification, UNHCR Legal Protection Policy Research Series, PPLA/2018/02. Retrieved March 12, 2022, from https://www.unhcr.org/uk/5a8c413a7.pdf Nicholson, F. (2021). The right to family reunification. In C. Costello, M. Foster, & J. McAdam (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of international refugee law. Oxford University Press. O’Higgins, A. (2012). Vulnerability and agency: Beyond an irreconcilable dichotomy for social service providers working with young refugees in the UK. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2012(136), 79–91. https:// doi.org/10.1002/cad.20012

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Office of Inspector General. (2019). Separated Children Placed in Office of Refugee Resettlement Care HHS OIG Issue Brief January 2019, OEI-BL-18-00511. Retrieved August 3, 2021, from https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-­ BL-­18-­00511.pdf. Office of Inspector General. (2021). Characteristics of Separated Children in ORR’s Care: June 27, 2018-November 15, 2020 OEI-BL-20-00680. Retrieved May 12, 2022, from https://oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/OEI-­BL-­20-­00680.pdf Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). (2021). Children entering the united states unaccompanied: Section 1: Placement in ORR care provider facilities. Retrieved October 3, 2021, from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/policy-­guidance/ children-­entering-­united-­states-­unaccompanied-­section-­1#1.2.1 Ortiz, E. (2019). Age Assessments of Unaccompanied Minors. In L.  Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice. Jessica Kingsley. Ottosson, L., Eastmond, M., & Schierenbeck, I. (2013). Safeguarding a child perspective in asylum reception: Dilemmas of children’s case workers in Sweden. Journal of Refugee Studies, 26(2), 247–264. https://doi. org/10.1093/jrs/fes024 Passarlay, G., & Ghouri, N. (2018). The lightless sky: An Afghan refugee boy’s journey of escape to a new life. Pérez, R. L. (2014). Crossing the border from boyhood to manhood: Male youth experiences of crossing, loss, and structural violence as unaccompanied minors. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 19(1), 67–83. https://doi. org/10.1080/02673843.2012.708350 Petrowski, N., Cappa, C., & Gross, P. (2017). Estimating the number of children in formal alternative care: Challenges and results. Child Abuse & Neglect, 70, 388–398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2016.11.026 Preston, R., & Samuel, M. (2021). Councils across UK required to take unaccompanied children. Community Care, November 23, 2021. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2021/11/23/councils­across-­uk-­required-­to-­take-­unaccompanied-­children/ R v London Borough of Hillingdon. (2020). EWHC 2847 (Admin). Republic of Kenya. (2014). Guidelines for the alternative family care of children in Kenya. Retrieved February 16, 2022, from https://bettercarenetwork.org/ sites/default/files/Guidelines%20for%20the%20Alternative%20Family%20 Care%20of%20Children%20in%20Kenya.pdf Robinson, K., & Gifford, S. M. (2019). Life (forever) on hold: Unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors. In S.  Clayton, A.  Gupta, & K.  Willis (Eds.), Unaccompanied young migrants: Identity, care and justice (pp.  257–278). Policy Press. Rosen, R., Crafter, S., & Meetoo, V. (2021). An absent presence: Separated child migrants’ caring practices and the fortified neoliberal state. Journal of Ethnic

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and Migration Studies, 47(7), 1649–1666. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369183X.2019.1608167 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. (2020). Research Report November 2020. Retrieved April 3, 2022, from https://www.abuseincare.org. nz/assets/Uploads/Research-­Report-­for-­Interim-­Report.pdf Sigona, N., Chase, E., & Humphris, R. (2017). Protecting the ‘best interests’ of the child in transition to adulthood, Becoming Adult Research Brief no. 3, London: UCL. www.becomingadult.net Sirriyeh, A. (2013). Hosting strangers: Hospitality and family practices in fostering unaccompanied refugee young people. Child & Family Social Work, 18, 5–14. Terrio, S. J. (2015). Whose child am I? Unaccompanied, undocumented children in U.S. immigration custody. University of California Press. Treisman, K. (2017). Working with relational and developmental trauma in children and adolescents. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Triggs, G. (2018). The impact of detention on the health, wellbeing and development of children: Findings from the second National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. In M.  Crock & L.  B. Benson (Eds.), Protecting migrant children: In search of best practice. Edward Elgar Publishing. UK Government. (2021). Terms of reference for the independent review of children’s social care: A bold and broad approach to support a fundamental review of children’s experiences. Retrieved September 21, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/952624/terms_of_reference_independent_childrens_social_care_ review.pdf UK Government. (2022). Children looked after in England including adoptions. Retrieved May 3, 2022, from https://explore-­education-­statistics.service.gov. u k / f i n d -­s t a t i s t i c s / c h i l d r e n -­l o o k e d -­a f t e r-­i n -­e n g l a n d -­i n c l u d i n g -­ adoptions/2021 UNHCR. (2015). Options for governments on care arrangements and alternatives to detention for children and families. Global Strategy Beyond Detention 2014–219, Options Paper 1. Retrieved May 12, 2022, from https://www. unhcr.org/5538e4e79.pdf UNHCR. (2018). Global compact on refugees. Retrieved July 3, 2021, from https://www.unhcr.org/5c658aed4 UNHCR. (2020). Global trends. Retrieved February 19, 2022, from https:// www.unhcr.org/60b638e37/unhcr-­global-­trends-­2020 UNICEF. (1989). United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://www.unicef.org.uk/what-­we-­do/ un-­convention-­child-­rights/ UNICEF. (2018). Programme guidance for the second decade: Programming with and for adolescents United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) October

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2018. Retrieved February 21, 2022, from https://www.unicef.org/ media/57336/file United Nations. (UN). (2021). UN human rights experts urge States to adopt alternative measures and put an end to detention of migrants. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://reliefweb.int/report/world/un-­human-­rights-­experts-­ urge-­states-­adopt-­alternative-­measures-­and-­put-­end-­detention US Department of State. (2020). Trafficking in persons report 20th Edition. Retrieved June 8, 2021, from https://www.state.gov/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/06/2020-­TIP-­Report-­Complete-­062420-­FINAL.pdf. Vera. (2022). Out of the shadows: A tool for the identification of human trafficking. Retrieved May 2, 2022, from https://www.vera.org/publications/ out-­of-­the-­shadows-­identification-­of-­victims-­of-­human-­trafficking. Wade, J., Sirreyeh, A., Kohli, R., & Simmonds, J. (2012). Fostering unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people: Creating a family life across a ‘world of difference’. British Association for Adoption and Fostering. Warner, J. (2013). Social work, class politics and risk in the moral panic over Baby P. Health, Risk & Society, 15(3), 217–233. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369857 5.2013.776018 Wingate, J. (2021, June 7). KCC warns that the unaccompanied child migrant crisis threatens to overwhelm Kent’s Children’s Services again. KCC Media Hub. Retrieved December 12, 2021, from https://kccmediahub.net/ enough-­is-­enough-­kcc-­issues-­legal-­proceedings-­against-­the-­home-­secretary-­ after-­u naccompanied-­c hild-­m igrant-­c risis-­t hreatens-­t o-­o verwhelm-­k ents-­ childrens-­services-­ag745 Wood, L.  C. N. (2018). Impact of punitive immigration policies, parent-child separation and child detention on the mental health and development of children. BMJ Paediatrics Open, 2(1), e000338. https://doi.org/10.1136/ bmjpo-­2018-­000338 Wright, F. (2012). Social work practice with unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people facing removal. British Journal of Social Work, 44(4), 1027–1044. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcs175 York, S., & Warren, R. (2019). Dilemmas and conflicts in the legal system. In S.  Clayton, A.  Gupta, & K.  Willis (Eds.), Unaccompanied young migrants: Identity, care and justice. Policy Press.

PART II

Research Data: Who Do You See?

CHAPTER 5

Threshold Stories: Meeting the Giant

When young women enter a national port and become identified as potentially separated, they enter a space that is simultaneously at the threshold of the UK and the threshold of the state care system. International borders are contested spaces formed through a network of legal and social rights, and based on disputed notions of nationality, citizenship, and belonging. The ways in which individuals navigate borders, if they can navigate them at all, can differ starkly. When separated young women meet social workers in the micro-spaces of a national border, their unique trajectories intersect, and relational understandings begin to form between them: ‘a simultaneous co-existence of others, with their own trajectories and their own stories to tell’ (Massey, 1994, p. 11). Practitioners bring particular notions of the social work role, their own values, experience and knowledge, and their individual ways of embodying these. Each girl brings her own combination of motivations, experiences, fears, and hopes: her own affective patterning (Wetherell, 2012). Arriving at a border is not the beginning of a new life, but rather a stage in a complex, incomplete journey.

Introducing Grace Grace said she entered the UK after travelling from South Sudan and across Europe, crossing the Mediterranean by boat with other migrants. She was very clear she wanted to be identified as Sudanese in the research, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_5

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insisting this went into the writing and saying her nationality and cultural heritage were central to understanding her story. For Grace her migration was a choice she had made, and she spoke of her journey as a time of personal reinvention: I want a better life, to be safe, to protect myself, so that’s why I choose to live in the UK Education I found is very important because a lot of women or young lady in my country, they’re not allowed to complete them education I wear a hijab or not, so it is my choice. In my country I do not have that freedom Here I be like, if I’m 15 or 16 I’m underage .. no one can force me to marry. I can have a better future, if I have a bad past experience I have a voice. (Grace I-Poem 1)

Grace always described herself in active rather than passive ways, talking of her migration in terms of wanting a ‘better life’ rather than in terms of escape. For Grace, this ‘better life’ meant access to education and freedom of religious practice. She wanted to have the ability to make choices: about what she says, when, who, and if she marries, what she wears, if she goes to school and which subjects she studies, where she lives, and how she spends her time. These were things Grace says were denied to her as a young woman in South Sudan, and these hopes sustained her during her journey to Europe. Grace wanted to have a voice in both private and public places, and this is central to the way she explains her migration. The ways she was seen by others—as she moved across and between micro-­ spaces—were something Grace particularly highlighted. She talked of frequently experiencing disbelief from other migrants who were unwilling to believe she was Sudanese. Grace linked this to the cultural view that Sudanese Muslim young women did not travel alone: [I]t’s just people they shock because it’s not easy for a girl to come alone from Sudan … I’m Sudanese girl and all in my whole journey a lot of people asking me, even the Syrian people because they know the Sudanese traditional for girl is very hard, but I still found it is interesting how people they can know I am Sudanese girl and I can do what I want. (Grace)

Rather than remembering these questions with frustration or anger, Grace often laughed as she described the disbelief she met on her journey. Grace is a Sudanese, Muslim girl of colour. As she moves she is disrupting

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not only gendered power relations but social imaginings of the passive, disempowered Muslim girl, and post-colonial ideas of African children waiting to be ‘rescued’ by the west. She was a body out of place in these spaces even amongst people who were themselves migrating, but for Grace this had opened up the possibility of change, not just for herself but for other Sudanese girls. Although her presence was contested, Grace talked of feeling pride that she was also altering what it might mean to be a Sudanese young woman. As she discovered more about what might be possible for her in differently gendered spaces. Grace’s re-imaginings created aspirations, some of which she was still trying to fulfil two years later. Although she talked of life in South Sudan in terms of limitations, Grace also talked of her love for her country, her religion, and people she had left behind. She spoke little of the logistics involved in leaving South Sudan and shared nothing more about her ‘bad past experience’—as is her right—but there were hints there may have been adults making decisions for her at some points. These adults were only faintly visible in Grace’s account of her migration. Her narrative is one of choice, strength, and self-determination.

Introducing Mia Mia talked of her migration as a time of self-development, an opportunity to ‘discover different culture, different people’. She said her main hope was to maintain the lifestyle she had already experienced, but in a ‘safer’ country for someone of her faith. Mia said she was put on a plane, at the age of 16, by family members from her country in the Middle East. She knew she needed to escape religious persecution as a Christian following a separation from her parents: ‘I’ve fled from my country. I had a distressed life, a distressed journey’. When I asked Mia what she knew about England before she arrived, what she had pictured during her journey, she shook her head and said, ‘nothing, nothing, nothing’. She talked of having no idea where she was going, and her shock when she realised where she was: [W]e have a London in the geography and we study a little bit about every country … US and England and everywhere and when I arrive here and someone tell me you are in England I am crying. I say really? England is so far to my country. Why I am here? And no I don’t have an idea about England and I didn’t have a picture in my head at all.

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Mia had already been attending school, and this had helped her locate herself geographically, but it gave her little sense of what being in England might mean for her. As a girl Mia had been used to accessing private and public spaces, and she talked less of the significance of gender in her childhood than Grace and Salam. It was her religious identity, Mia said, that prevented her from being able to continue her life safely. Mia talked about the city life she had left behind, her friends, and her school. These were all things she hoped she could replicate in whatever country she landed in. For Mia, her migration was framed around continuity rather than change.

Introducing Salam Salam framed her migration clearly in terms of escape. She talked of arriving in the UK at the age of 14, wanting to escape the ‘bad things’ that happened during the war in her Central African country following the death of her mother and the disappearance of her father. Salam spoke little about her past life, saying that her living arrangements before she left were unsafe: ‘I was with someone even back home … even to ask something you’re just scared you don’t get slapped or something’. Salam saw her migration as a journey away from something dangerous rather than towards a particular place. She said all she knew about the UK was it was a ‘safe’ country, and the man she had travelled with said her Dad would be there waiting for her. It was only later, when she had passed through the threshold space, that Salam reflected on the ways in which her age and gender had shaped her early experiences: [A]s a girl you have a lot of obstacles … in the home more work is for you, for the young woman but in here [UK] you go to college, go to school … but back home it’s not like that. They just broke your plan and then make you down … [UK] woman they got rights … but back home you are just under the rule. I live like woman in this life, back home you don’t have a value.

The Practitioners: ‘We’re not Immigration Officers’ The practitioners (Joe, Faith, Alice, Eva, Agnes, Laura, Susan, and Elaine), all worked within specialist teams that provided a Duty Social Work service at a national port, spending time there as part of a rota system. There was a consensus among the practitioners that a national border was not a

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‘social work space’ and that being a social worker at a port felt very different to being a social worker elsewhere. The practitioners spent their Duty days completing work, while waiting to be notified of any ‘new arrivals’ by the UK Border Agency (UKBA). As social workers, they were usually asked to get involved when children had arrived with ‘false’ documents, had been found alone at the port, or when suspected traffickers had been stopped with a young person. These are liminal spaces for social workers, who sit at the junction between a child entering state care or taking another trajectory. The practitioners’ waiting, though, had a different quality to that described by Mia, Salam, and Grace. Their positions as professionals, and particularly as adults with a legal right to live in the UK, meant they navigated these national border spaces very differently. They talked of their heightened awareness that they could leave this place at any time. Each practitioner had different levels of knowledge about how and why separated girls might come to the UK, a variability that has been found in other studies (Kohli, 2007). Some practitioners said they had small pieces of specific information about the girls they worked with, without a richer context, whilst others talked of having generalised understandings without specific details. They said they understood that gender could affect girls’ migration, the types of journeys made and the places they may arrive into, but the small numbers of girls reaching the UK made it difficult to continually develop their practice knowledge. There was a sense of novelty in working with girls: [T]hey’re quite a rarity especially when I worked in [another county] and we picked them up from [motorway service station]…so it was only those that were robust enough to deal with the back of a lorry journey, which rules out a huge amount of girls, probably for the parental concerns as much as their own but they were just rare. (Alice)

The ways the practitioners understood their role were underpinned by the particular set of beliefs and values that formed their worldview—the lenses through which they made meanings. Policy is not simply enacted in these threshold spaces, but is continually interpreted by practitioners through their own ‘affective-discursive practices’ (Wetherell, 2012). Agnes said she had chosen to qualify as a social worker specifically to work with young refugees, and she made a direct link between her professional value-­ base and her role with separated girls. Elaine, in contrast, had moved to

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the team following organisational restructuring and said she was still trying to understand what the role with migrant young people was all about. Particular worldviews can become embedded in agencies and institutions (Flanagan, 2020). Joe and Agnes both talked of tensions they experienced in border spaces, where their worldviews clashed with dominant narratives: [I]t can be difficult, that sort of tension between what their [immigration] remit is and what ours is. I’m very pro-immigration, very supportive of these young people and often you’re meeting people who don’t share the same worldview and don’t have the same sensibilities, or the experience of working with vulnerable young people. That can be really difficult, particularly in the detention centres. (Agnes, stressed words underlined) I don’t look at it that we’re being swamped by people who are taking resources, that other people are having to do without. I see it as we’re not creating as much resources as people need. If we actually create resources for the people who are here then it’s fine. It’s a resource issue not a people issue, that’s my view. (Joe)

Although girls’ rights were acknowledged, it was notions of care that were central to how the practitioners understood their role, and how they aligned their professional and personal values with their practice. Joe talked of having to continually work to distinguish his role from that of immigration authorities: ‘I think we’ve got a really important role. I think you’re just there to meet the kids and work in the best interests of the child and see what’s going on’. For Joe, members of the police, or immigration services, were understood as potentially uncaring; they were agents of control that needed monitoring themselves. Demonstrating acts of care meant holding to the distinctive value-base of social work, a counter to the potentially oppressive nature of the border space: I think one of the difficulties is making sure that you maintain social work values and understand what you’re there for. It’s OK to work in partnership with the Home Office, but we’re not immigration officers and we’re not part of the Home Office. It’s important to make sure that our focus is about care, giving the best care possible. (Joe—stressed words underlined)

UK guidance says separated children at borders should have an initial Welfare Interview (Home Office, 2020), to identify any welfare and trafficking concerns. The interview is part of a ‘meaningful booking-in process’

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(ibid., p.  25), which includes the collection of ‘bio-data’. Practitioners may also speak to girls alone to assess their welfare needs and attend the interviews as a responsible adult. Although a responsible adult (such as a social worker) must be present, the guidance states: ‘there is no requirement for legal representation at first encounter when the welfare interview is conducted because the child should not be asked questions about issues that relate to the asylum claim’ (ibid., p. 23). The threshold stories from this research suggest the line between questions about asylum claims, welfare, and trafficking can be blurry at best. Girls can know very little about their rights in the hours after their arrival and can have few resources to enact them if they do. When social work practitioners focus on care, and a legal representative is not yet present, questions arise about who is then promoting the rights of girls sitting in these threshold spaces. Welfare Interviews are not just procedural events, however, they are unique processes of relational and situated ‘embodied meaning-making’ (Wetherell, 2012, p. 19). Separated girls do not appear at a national border as blank slates, waiting to be ‘assessed’ by state actors. Neither are communication and understanding one-directional—just as practitioners are ‘meaning-making’ about a young woman, she is ‘meaning-making’ about them. Other state-actors, present in these micro-spaces, are involved in their own affective-discursive practices (ibid., 2012). Even when practitioners identified a clear role for themselves, they recognised that social work may have little meaning for separated girls, and that being in threshold spaces could be a bewildering experience.

‘I have no idea what’s going on’ Grace, Salam, and Mia all described their arrival in the UK as a time of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty. They said it was hard to judge the passing of time in this liminal space, particularly after landing in a different time zone and not having sight of the outside world. Grace said she spent a whole day and night at the border but, at other times, said she was unsure how long she had actually been there. Mia found it difficult to locate herself in place. She said she had been put in detention but was then unsure if this had actually been rooms at the port, and she was unsure what the difference might actually be. She was very aware, however, that adults in authority were preventing her from leaving. Mia’s age, and previous family life, was a factor here. As a young woman of 16, Mia said she had no idea about how to speak to people in authority, because the adults

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in her family had always done those things for her. She had no previous experience of interacting with authority figures, other than those in her school, that she could use to navigate this space—to know how best to act, what to say, and when to say nothing. When a separated girl arrives at a national border there is usually very little known about her, often nothing at all. The documents young migrants carry can be false, even down to name and age. There are no other adults who can provide a story, or professional colleagues to advise on how this girl prefers to communicate, what she likes and dislikes: ‘you don’t have that back history, you don’t have a social worker saying this is how best to work with them, this might be their triggers or this is what they really need help with’ (Susan). This can be starkly different to children who enter state care from established lives in the UK. In the absence of information, girls are asked to explain why they are in this threshold space and what is understood in these moments significantly affects what happens next. Girls are not passive in these encounters; they are working to shape how they are seen and understood. The paradox is that the information social workers may need to act can be contained in the very stories separated girls can find so difficult to tell. The young women all spoke of feeling confused about who different people were and what they wanted from them. They struggled to understand how communication worked within unfamiliar cultural practices— the communication patterns between adult and child, between border official and traveller: ‘in the port they ask you something … I was like what? What? I don’t know any English. I don’t have idea what I have to say’ (Salam). Derrida says that the first ‘act of violence’ of hospitality is requiring someone to request the hospitality in the host’s language (Derrida, 2000c, quoted in Gibson, 2012). Mia, Grace, and Salam all talked of waiting for interpreters, while adults in uniforms asked them questions in a language they did not understand, adding to their sense of disorientation. The practitioners were aware of this potential disorientation and the difficulties young people could have in absorbing information, even in their first languages. They described moving away from ‘talk’ at these times, to forms of embodied communication (Lefevre, 2018)—showing concern and welcome through facial expression, tone of voice and body position. Once an interpreter was present, they prioritised providing information, seeing this as the first step in young people understanding their legal situation and their rights. They were very aware, however, that this information was not easily understood in threshold spaces:

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[W]e do a lot of work with the kids at the beginning when we have to say this is the system in the UK and this is who we’re not - because they have to go to the Home Office and explain their story and they make the decision on asylum or trafficking. I’d say that we look after them but they don’t really understand what that means. (Laura)

Social workers become involved at borders if a young migrant is seen as potentially a child, so by the time Grace, Salam, and Mia met a social worker they had been asked about their ages and thought this had been accepted. None remembered having their ages assessed in any formal way. Grace’s journey had taken several months, and she arrived in poor physical health. She said the language difference, her fear, ill-health, and exhaustion, all limited her ability to understand what was happening and communicate what she needed and wanted: ‘I am so nervous and I am so ill and I can’t even talk and I’m scared from police and I can’t, because I don’t know them and I do not speak any English in that time’ (Grace). As well as confusion and uncertainty, Mia also described feelings of relief when she reached the UK border. Mia had arrived from a country with a recent history of state brutality towards people of her faith and saw all adults in uniform as potentially dangerous. She described how relieved she felt in the first hours: [S]he was so scared and she had a lot of fear … she got big relief when people were OK dealing with her … even people in police uniform and immigration officer or social worker, everyone treat her in the best way and she didn’t expect. (Mia, interpreted)

The lack of trust young migrants can have in authority figures is well documented and the practitioners expected separated girls would not trust them and had no reason to do so. The practitioners said girls were often anxious, fearful, tired, and unwell when they reached the UK border. They were aware of reports of violence against young migrants at borders and understood girls’ fears of harm as a rational response to their current situation and what may have happened in their pasts. For the practitioners, their ability to engage effectively with girls—to build a communicative, relational bridge in a short time—was seen as critically important. Engagement was understood as central to the process of assessment, to the gathering and analysis of available information to inform the decision about whether a girl would enter state care.

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‘You need to think about the welfare of the child first’ Laura said the main social work role was facilitating communication, to help all the agencies understand why the girl was there and help her have some understanding of what was happening. The practitioners recognised they had a role in the Welfare Interviews, but positioned themselves in different ways within these spaces. They said the immigration control agenda meant questioning styles dominated, even with younger children. Laura felt social work was undervalued within agency power dynamics in border spaces, and her skills were underused. Laura knew immigration officers were supposed to have specialised training to interview children, but was frustrated by (what she saw as) a lack of age-appropriate communication skills in interviews. Here the focus was often on adult ‘talk’: ‘she was 7 and they sat her down and the first thing they said to her was “I’m an immigration officer”. She’s 7 and I was doing pictures’ (Laura). While there are numerous toolkits and processes used to identify trafficked or separated young migrants, the practitioners spoke little of these. Instead, they focussed on the knowledge they developed through observation and listening—on what they saw and heard—and their role in facilitating a space where a story could be told. Joe, like Laura and Eva, wanted to disrupt the interrogative ways young women could be interviewed. To do this he focussed on embodied communication to provide emotional containment (Lefevre, 2018) in the threshold space. He saw this as an essential part of safeguarding young people: ‘it’s about encouraging them to reveal what their stories are, in order that you can help them, so that you can provide services for them’. Stories were the key which unlocked Joe’s ability to offer services—and therefore care—to a girl at the border. Adams (2009) describes the stories of young refugees as ‘dramatic moments’ (p.  160), a meaningful performance of what is necessary and convincing. These accounts suggest girls’ stories are also relational, spatial moments, and that practitioners can be engaged in co-constructing what is ‘necessary and convincing’ with separated girls. Joe framed his role as offering emotional support to co-construct a story-­ so-­far (Massey, 2005) with each young person, one that would provide a basis for social work intervention. Co-constructing any knowledge in these threshold spaces, however, was a complex process which the practitioners approached in different ways. Joe talked of working to disrupt how separated girls were being seen, and his efforts to shift the narrative away

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from the ‘unwelcome stranger’ to one of ‘fellow human being’. Joe was particularly concerned that girls may have internalised dehumanising narratives that shaped how they saw themselves and which reduced their ability to have a voice. He aligned himself with the girls, rather than the immigration officers: [E]ven if I can help or show her, in some small way, that she is important, as a human being, as a person, then be able to just share a little bit of her journey and her pain and help her in some way. (Joe)

Yet, while Laura and Joe positioned themselves as disrupting conduits between immigration processes and the girls, not all the practitioners saw themselves as continually in tension with other agencies. For Faith, the priority was practical acts of care, which she understood as responding to the basic needs of girls who may be unwell, cold, or hungry: I base the start of my work looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of need. I think that’s a good place to start because I think it just makes so much sense that somebody cannot start to address their emotional distress, or build up trusting relationships, until their basic needs have been met. So that’s always the starting point. (Faith)

Faith is describing more than a humanitarian response of providing sanctuary at a time of crisis (Kohli, 2007). Rather than framing acts of care as disruptive, Faith saw them as essential first steps in a longer process of creating stability through relationship-building. This process started in the border space, but continued in the spaces of state care: ‘that’s when you can go on and develop a more personal relationship and spend time talking about past experiences and getting to know each other’ (Faith). Here, Faith is drawing on Maslow (1943), whose work underpins the person-centred approach developed by Rogers (1961). Rather than foregrounding engagement as the central aspect of her work in the threshold space, it was the practical tasks Faith prioritised. She saw the communication approaches used in social work as a barrier to gathering vital information, and said Welfare Interviews could be helpful spaces: ‘they [immigration officers] have to ask these quite abrupt questions, which we wouldn’t necessarily ask in the way that they do, but it is quite useful to get the information’. All the practitioners—including Faith—talked of the emotional impact interviews could have on girls: ‘a lot of women [are] really upset and

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traumatised by their experience of being interviewed, they find the experience very very negative’ (Joe). In this threshold space, Agnes, Eva, Joe, and Laura located the task of information gathering with the police and immigration officers, positioning themselves as the monitors of the relational, affective dynamics. Laura spoke of stopping interviews (temporarily) when a girl became distressed: ‘I know that the paperwork needs to get done but you need to think about the welfare of the child first’ (Laura). For Faith, time was the most important consideration, and her assessment role was prioritised over her role as care-giver. While she understood separated girls could find it very difficult to talk to authority figures, her priority was to gather the information required to assess needs and, most significantly, to provide ‘evidence’ to bring a girl into state care. Faith is weighing up (what she sees as) the short-term distress girls may feel in interviews against the longer-term protection and support she believes to be available in the spaces of state care. The stories of Mia, Grace, and Salam, however, suggest that these threshold experiences, while relatively brief, can have longer term effects. The emotional impact may settle into affective patternings (Wetherell, 2012) which girls may enact in the other spaces of their lives. Affective patternings (ibid.) created through girls’ past experiences can also affect relational dynamics in the border space.

‘They explain to me … but in my head I was like “I don’t trust you”’ Feelings of trust and distrust were continually highlighted by the practitioners and the girls: ‘it was hard for me to believe them … to trust them’ (Mia). The difficulty of telling an asylum story—the ‘impossibility of bearing witness’ (Gibson, 2012, p. 1)—has been a repeating theme in research with people claiming asylum. Salam talked of how hard it was to navigate her first hours in the UK without any adults she trusted. The hopes and expectation she had nurtured during her flight—that she would be seeing her Dad again—disappeared as soon as she entered the border. It is common for young people to be told by smugglers or traffickers they are travelling to be reunited with family members, particularly if they are being trafficked for exploitation. Salam describes herself as a refugee, rather than a trafficked young women, but says she was told by the man she travelled with that her father would be there to meet her. She described her distress and confusion when she arrived to find he was not there: ‘only thing I just need is my Dad … why don’t they just bring my Dad?’

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Chase (2013) argues that the building of trust with young migrants, often eroded by chaos and disruption, is a key part of developing a stable sense of self anchored in ‘a degree of certainty’ (ibid., p. 860). Salam saw her mistrust not only as a barrier to understanding what was happening to her but also as a necessary protection. Her continual vigilance about her safety made it difficult to take anything in or to understand what was happening in the moment: ‘they explain to me what they mean but in my head I was like “I don’t trust you”’ (Salam). She spoke of how impossible it felt, trying to explain why she was there and understand what was happening, while she was still reacting to her father’s absence: [I]n the airport they ask you something and they ask me and I was like … What? What? I don’t know. I don’t know any English. I don’t have idea what I have to say or what’s going on and then finally they just called for an interpreter - on phone interpreter - and I just explain to them and then after that I was really sick. I’m really sick and I just ask them to sleep. (Salam)

Salam’s account is a powerful reminder of the levels of physical and emotional distress young people can experience in these threshold spaces, and the difficulty they may have understanding anything when their emotional distress is unrecognised or unattended to. Questions about why a young woman was in the threshold space inevitably led to questions about truth, and about what could be believed. The practitioners further distinguished themselves from immigration officers by framing their professional culture as one of belief: [O]ne of the things as a social worker you have to be really careful not to get into a culture of disbelief, because there’s a culture in the Home Office and immigration of disbelief, because that’s their job, to ‘man the borders’ or be sort of gatekeepers. There’s a paradigm of ‘we need to keep people out’, as opposed to ‘we need to let people in’. Culturally they work very differently. (Joe)

Separating social work from decision-making about a girl’s immigration status was therefore seen as essential if these professional cultural distinctions were to be maintained. The practitioners talked of finding ways of bringing children into care, in opposition to immigration officers looking for ways to keep young migrants out. This did not mean, however, that girls were unconditionally believed by social work practitioners. They were aware young people could tell strategic stories, and practitioners

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could be engaged in co-constructing the necessary story with separated girls themselves. This was not a process of fabrication, but of facilitating and encouraging narratives that would evidence a need for care. The practitioners recognised there can be multiple ‘truths’ about migration, even as it is taking place: [T]hey don’t know that they’ve been trafficked because when you intervene in a trafficking case at a point that we do, at the point of arrival the crime hasn’t necessarily been committed yet, because the young people being brought in have been groomed, told that they’re coming here for a better life. (Faith)

Rather than a fixed culture of disbelief, the practitioners spoke of an affective shifting, moving between doubt and belief in the relational spaces of the border. Their feelings could change from moment to moment, as the space changed over time. Laura reflected on the emotional dimension of making decisions about whether a young woman was being trafficked, deciding whose narrative to believe. She talked of the fears that professionals, from all agencies, could have about making the ‘wrong’ decision, and their anxiety about the consequences for the child and for themselves. Laura thought this fear could lead to decisions which were risk-averse and potentially unjust: I think there’s this massive fear of trafficking, they’d rather get social workers to take the responsibility by saying that we don’t think they’re trafficked, rather than making this decision themselves. It’s hard because you feel a lot of responsibility when you say someone isn’t trafficked. (Laura)

Approaching girls’ stories as functional narratives—as carriers of the necessary information required to categorise girls—could prove unworkable in these spaces, and this could provoke anxiety across different professionals. The decision-making about whether a girl had been trafficked could be passed between state actors as they worked to manage this uncertainty. The social work practitioners felt they were often left holding this anxiety. To resist, they would offer their professional view, but continually return to focussing on their role of care. This anxiety could play out in interview spaces, where immigration and police officers might seek a story to provide certainty, only to find the stories offered by the girls were partial and ambiguous. When girls stories did not provide the certainty that

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categorising processes demanded, they could be met with disbelief, challenge, and hostility: [O]ften [young] women who’ve been trafficked are frightened to say what the actual truth is because they might have been given a script before they came here. They’re often worried about family members back home. When they’re confronted by immigration [they] don’t believe their stories because they’re not clear themselves … then they get a really, really hard time. (Joe)

While borders may be technical and process driven, these findings suggest they are also highly relational and affective spaces. Yet the practitioners said emotional responses were rarely acknowledged in threshold spaces, where ‘categorical fetishism’ (Crawley & Skleparis, 2017, p.  2) dominated. While the practitioners described internally reflecting in the moment, and discussing the emotional impact of the work with colleagues in the specialist team, there were no examples of critical reflection amongst state actors within these threshold spaces.

‘I’m a woman and she a woman, she can understand me more’ Salam and Grace said it was very important to them that they only spoke to female professionals in these early encounters, but the reasons they gave for this differed. Salam said she thought all men were a risk to her safety, relating this to the unspoken ‘bad things’ that happened before she came to the UK. Grace said she had very little experience sharing spaces with adult males during her childhood in South Sudan and could not speak to men about her personal life. She spoke of shyness and embarrassment in the presence of males. There were numerous examples of females being framed as safe care-givers and males framed as dangerous bodies. Grace drew on notions of a universal female experience, saying another woman would be more likely to understand and believe her story: [W]hen I have social worker woman is better because it makes me to explain to her more what I feel or what I want … if I talk to man I’m going to shy and I won’t talk to him … because I’m a woman and she a woman she can understand me more. (Grace)

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The associations of care-giving and safety with female bodies could be used strategically by the female practitioners. Some deliberately foregrounded their female identity as a way of lessening the anxiety girls may feel, and Laura framed social work as a feminised profession which, in itself, communicated safety: ‘quite a lot of them seem relieved … especially as all of us are women’ (Laura). Place was important in how the girls navigated these gender-power dynamics. Grace was called back to the border, about six days after her arrival, for a further interview. She told Kate (her social worker) that she was too nervous to see the police, and Kate arranged for a female officer to visit her where she was living. Grace drew on the power of her social worker to change both the place where she was spoken to and the gender of the police officer: I’m very nervous about police, is big thing in my country to go to police or something. I so nervous. I’ve never been to doctors or police … they told me I need to talk to the immigration … I don’t want to do it at all … I think Kate call them … I’m so scared from men as well, so they call and the police station sent a woman to my home. (Grace)

This fear of men in authority positions was something Joe highlighted. As a black, male social worker, Joe was struggling against constructions of the dangerous black, male body, and spoke of constantly working to be seen as a safe man. He was acutely aware that his masculinity could mean girls were fearful of him: ‘particularly being a male worker … often the women that we do work with have often been brutalised by men’ (Joe). To position himself as a safe male, Joe stressed embodied care, paying careful attention to his body language and his tone of voice. All the practitioners talked of approaching their encounters with young women, thinking they had probably experienced forms of sexual and/or physical violence and were more likely to be trafficked than be seeking asylum. This was sometimes based on knowledge from research, but it was also informed by their own practice: ‘some of the young women I work with have had horrendous experiences, experienced such huge amounts of violence towards them’ (Faith). The narrative of the ‘vulnerable’ refugee girl could mean girls’ stories of harm were more readily accepted. The practitioners thought UKBA officers assumed girls may have experienced sexual violence and trafficking, and were therefore more likely to believe them: ‘I think the girls have an easier time than the boys’ (Laura); ‘I think boys are probably given a

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rougher ride maybe, than girls’ (Joe). What concerned the practitioners was that seeing trafficking for sexual exploitation as a predominantly female experience could leave boys’ abuse overlooked. It also raises questions about how girls may be treated when they are not claiming protection from exploitation or abuse, but for activities in the public sphere such as political activism. Laura also questioned whether a racialised view of the dangerous male was affecting how state actors viewed girls travelling with black men who did not pose a risk: ‘I’ve had really young girls, 7, 8 and immigration think that they’ve been trafficked. One girl came in and immigration thought she’d been trafficked and she was with her Dad and her Mum had given consent’ (Laura). These threshold stories suggest gendered and racialised affective practices can affect how key concepts are interpreted at the micro-level. It is Grace’s threshold story which shows the potential impact of relational, embodied acts of care in minimising dehumanising practices in threshold spaces. Grace’s story suggests that effective engagement can be experienced as a form of care and act as part of a route to protection, but that this requires skilled and knowledgeable intervention.

‘They touch my hand and they start make me to feel comfortable’ Grace described meeting two social workers, Kate and Paula, in the border space. It was these practitioners she linked to her emerging sense of safety in her first hours in England: [T]hey just make me to calm down and they talk to me and they touch my hand and they start make me to feel comfortable and not cry. ‘I’m here, alright’ they try to say to me ‘you’re all right here’ and they try by different way. I didn’t understand English, they can’t talk my language but still they try to make me to feel better and they talk to me and they say they are listening. ‘You all right here, no one can do anything to you and we will be with you’ and they try. They try until the interpreter come and then they explain to me that I’m all right here and they are very nice really. I spent from 12 am until 2pm in evening, the second day in the port and they be with me all that time. They very nice. They bring for me free chocolate. I’m not well and I’m cold. They try to call doctors and they ask me if I need doctor or anything. They bring for me clothes and they try to find out where I’m going to stay. (Grace)

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Grace is talking about an encounter that took place before she could understand spoken English, yet she attributes phrases to the social workers which may not have been intelligible to her. It is possible she has remembered these phrases from a later time, when the interpreter was present. Narratives shift over time and memories alter. Grace may also be providing words for embodied acts of communication—touching her hand and bringing her food. It is Kate and Paula that Grace says made her feel safer and cared about in the threshold space. Mia, in contrast, talked of an absence of care. After an initial meeting, with what she thought were immigration officers, Mia spent a night in a shared house before being taken back to the border for a longer interview. It was only retrospectively that Mia realised some of the adults she met were actually social workers: ‘those social workers, it wasn’t about look after me and not about take action or have a duty to look after me. It seems to me those persons just were there to get me to airport to get interviewed, that’s it, nothing else’ (Mia). Lefevre (2018) describes effective engagement and communication in social work as threefold: ‘being’, ‘doing’, and ‘knowing’. Grace gives a powerful description of the first two domains, when she conveys a sense of practitioners working to create a feeling of safety around her, something that Mia did not experience. Kate and Paula are actively being present in place with Grace, at a time of distress, but they are also doing. In the absence of a shared language, both physical touch and the bringing of food were experienced as acts of care and, perhaps, are being articulated by Grace through remembered words of reassurance. Paula and Kate came from a specialist team for unaccompanied young people and the approach Grace is describing also suggests knowing. Kate and Paula have an understanding of the potential experiences of young migrants and their needs on arrival, as well as the confidence to respond with embodied communication when there is no shared, spoken language. Kate and Paula are positioning themselves as the carers in this space. For Grace the fact they stayed in the room and showed concern for her meant they were not the same as the immigration officers. Years later, she talks of Kate and Paula as the people who made her time at the UK border bearable. Grace’s story suggests the need for embodied care and emotional containment can be very real for young people in these threshold spaces. Questions remain, though, about whether this mitigation role is, in itself, enough to meet social work’s values of achieving social justice, and the limitations of social work power are also visible here. Grace talks of being at the border for an extended period, of her nationality being

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questioned, and of feeling ill, cold, exhausted, and hungry. Even though Grace remembers that Kate and Paula ‘try to call doctors’, she has no memory of getting any medical attention. Grace is clear, though, that had Kate and Paula not been there she would have felt more afraid and alone.

Eva, Helen, and the Giant The practitioners all said that distinguishing themselves from other agencies was essential in defining their role, but these distinctions were often invisible to Mia, Salam, and Grace in this threshold space. Even if girls start to understand differences between professionals, they could still be uncertain about the scope of social work power: ‘young people often think that we have more say than we do and it’s hard for them to understand that we are a separate organisation from the Home Office, even though we work for the government’ (Faith). Multiple processes could coalesce in one powerful system or around one individual—into what Eva called the Giant. Eva drew a large figure, much larger on the page than herself or Helen, the young woman she was describing (see Fig.  5.1). Above she wrote ‘agencies, institutions, country, meetings’. For Eva, this Giant represented the complex range of state systems, processes, narratives, and practices that young migrants encounter at the UK border. It created Eva’s professional identity and gave her power to act, and it could intervene between a girl and an adult trafficker who may be trying to harm her. In Eva’s threshold story, though, she moved herself towards and away from the Giant, constantly shifting between belonging and resisting. What most concerned Eva was the impact this Giant could have on young people in these threshold spaces, that it may increase the risks for girls rather than minimise them: [A]ll of these meetings, all of these people need to be involved. Why do they have to give their fingerprints or their DNA or their photos taken, their age assessments done. Do you know what I mean? It’s huge thing trying to minimise the impact of that…hang on a minute, you’re employed by this, this is your job, this is who I am in a sense, this is what I studied. I want to make sure that the risk is minimised and that these young people stay in our care. (Eva)

In Eva’s account we see practitioners are able to form complex understandings of girls, which avoid binary ideas of vulnerable or agentic, but

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Fig. 5.1  Eva’s Giant

that this involves continual critical reflection and skilled communication. Eva said Helen had left her country with a man she believed would help her have a better life. She believed Helen had been working to support herself but had still been seeking a relationship of care with an adult: [T]his was a person who she believed was trying to help her, because she met him while she was in [country]. She was working in this café bar. She had lost her mother and she had nobody to look after her. (Eva)

Eva avoids the construction of Helen as victim by framing her as agentic in the ways she navigated life in her country of origin, and she locates Helen’s migration decision in a specific time and place. In framing her decision to leave with the ‘man’ as an act of agency, she avoids the construction of Helen as ‘unknowing victim’. Eva believes this man was grooming Helen for exploitation, but frames Helen herself as a competent young person who found ways to manage in a context of loss and inequality: ‘she has formed a relationship with someone and she was brave enough to go’ (Eva). Eva understands Helen’s agency relationally and located in place. She started drawing Helen as a larger figure, but reflecting on their encounter at the border she changed her mind. In this threshold space Eva

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positioned Helen as small in relation to herself and to the Giant: ‘in a big huge space, very big huge space, [she’s] very small. I was there and I was much bigger and seemed bigger to her’ (Eva). Eva acknowledges the position of power and privilege she occupies in this space, not just as a social worker but as an adult, as a white woman, and as someone with a legal right to live in the UK. It is Eva who has the power to move here, not just to enter and leave the port, but to express herself bodily through gesture. Helen’s voice and movement have become limited by her position in power: ‘she was really shy you know, introvert person at that time. I just seemed like this huge, very forceful woman’. Initially Eva frames some aspects of her identity as barriers to trust: ‘I am a white European female in front of her … who am I to tell her?’ Yet Eva had left her own country of origin at a time of war, and she felt this experience was a potential point of connection with Helen. As an adult women who had survived war and forced migration, Eva was an embodied representation of the possibility of a future life. Although Helen had been physically separated from the alleged trafficker, Eva saw this man as still relationally connected to Helen, and understood Helen leaving with him as a significant risk to her safety. He was a key person in Helen’s story-so-far (Massey, 2005). Eva drew him much larger than her in the space, because of the position of trust and dependence he had established in relation to Helen: ‘why would she trust me, more than the person who brought her from her own country and saved her from this miserable life that she had?’ (Eva). It is the potential trafficker that is framed as the rescuer here, as Eva attempts to construct a story from Helen’s perspective, a process she saw as central to disrupting Helen’s narrative. As she talks of her relationship with Helen, and their work together across time, Eva redraws the figure of Helen in increasing sizes. Size is described relationally, rather than as an intrinsic quality of Helen as an individual, strongly situated in place and time: [she’s] not tiny in the sense that she doesn’t have strength you know. She is bigger than that but … that first arrival, the first time, there is this body language, the face, the way she looked … that thing of complete and utter bewilderment and not understanding what the hell is going on. (Eva)

Noticeably, Eva frames herself as the ‘unknown other’ here, avoiding framing Helen as the post-colonial ‘stranger’ (Ahmed, 2000). Instead, it is Eva who is strange to Helen in her bodily movement and the expression of her intersecting identities. It is through these ways of thinking that Eva

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constructs herself as the relational ‘other’ and understands it is she who will have to work to bridge the gap in trust, not Helen. Eva vividly recalled the tension between her desire to protect Helen from being trafficked and her wish to minimise any fear and anxiety for her. By critically considering her own intersectional identity (Bernard, 2022) as a woman, a refugee, and a social worker, Eva foregrounded aspects of herself she believed would build a connection. The difficulties of individual workers trying to adapt their practice within micro-spaces are apparent here. While Eva does have power in this space, her actions and embodied presence are shaped by her professional identity, the relationship with who she is and what she represents—by the meanings attached to social work by herself and others. This complexity is heightened by the temporal nature of place and space. Rigby and Whyte (2015) suggest assessments of potential trafficking of children could be strengthened by ‘engaging with children in a therapeutic relationship that permits children … to share their stories in a safe environment that is not associated with the immigration/prosecution paradigm’ (ibid., p.  47). While this may be a possibility within other spaces of state care, Eva is meeting Helen within a national border space, constructed around notions of movement and border control, creating a pressure of time in which she needs to act. For Eva the priority is to show acts of care which create feelings of safety for Helen. She directly connects the extent to which Helen feels safe to the effectiveness of any communication with her and to the spatial moment in which this occurs: [T]he most important thing is for them to feel safe. If they don’t feel safe and they don’t feel that they have time to breathe, before we attack them with loads of things, there’s heightened risk of them going missing. (Eva, stressed words underlined)

Although she acknowledged Helen’s agency, Eva believed she had to disrupt the ways Helen was expecting to navigate in the UK. She attempts to co-construct a new map with Helen, one she believes will better safeguard Helen when she moves on from the border space. Eva has to present a different version of ‘truth’, but is aware this challenges Helen’s version of her own story and may potentially disempower her in that moment: ‘the only thing that’s connected to [her] ability to navigate is taken away from her, by me saying to her no no no no no … this is not what this person wanted to do’ (Eva). Helen’s understanding of what would happen in the UK becomes radically reframed when she encounters Eva, just as

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Salam’s did when she found her Dad was not waiting for her. In Massey’s (2005) terms, their expected trajectories are suddenly altered. While Salam’s father is not physically present in this space, Helen travelled with a man who (Eva believes) she is still able to contact. Whilst Salam goes on to describe an extended period of adjustment to this new and unexpected life, Helen is being asked to start this adjustment in a matter of hours, to choose the trajectory Eva is attempting to create for her. It is here that the impact of the Giant re-emerges in Eva’s story, as the space Eva and Helen have together, with an interpreter, is altered. In the room where she sat with Helen, an inter-agency meeting takes place: ‘there were about four different professionals afterwards asking her lots of questions, trying to get intelligence about this supposed trafficker’ (Eva). Eva spoke of her frustration as the engagement she felt she had started to form with Helen began to unravel: ‘I felt that this big meeting kind of destroyed that initial starting to get to know each other’. The power relations that construct the micro-space of the meeting between Helen, Eva, and the interpreter differ from those that form the micro-space of the inter-agency meeting, even though they occupy the same physical space. Eva’s story shifts from a description of herself as powerful and expressive to an account of her having a minimal voice in the face of practice she disliked. Her communicative capacity alters when the purpose of the space shifts and the people within it change. Eva’s story of meeting Helen focussed on what she felt, what she thought Helen was feeling, and what she wanted to say, but these emotions were not voiced to the other professionals. Instead, she said she talked to Helen: ‘I just kept confirming with her “is that what you meant? Is that what you said?”’ Practitioners are on their own trajectories, developing their skills and experience and bringing their own stories-so-far to these threshold spaces (Massey, 2005). Eva identifies this meeting as a changing point in her practice: ‘the more confident I became as a worker the more I was able to say “no I don’t want it done like that”’. Eva’s solution is to plan to visit Helen within social care, a ‘social work space’ that is familiar to her and where she feels more able to use her skills and knowledge. She talked of wanting to quickly re-establish a connection with Helen, showing an instinctual awareness of the situated and temporal nature of communication. Eva’s Giant is specifically located in place, within a national border and its spatial power dynamics, but the struggle between notions of care and the demands of state systems continues as girls cross the threshold into state care, and as the Giant shifts and changes in its manifestations.

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Separated girls are not passive in their encounters with this Giant, as Mia, Salam, and Grace’s threshold stories show. They can be continually working to shape how they are seen and understood. These threshold stories suggest embodied care and moments of connection can be powerful acts, but that ideas of care can also underpin practice that blur the boundaries of social work. Border spaces are both technical and affective, but the findings suggest affective practices can remain unacknowledged and unexplored within multi-agency dynamics, and in spaces where meanings of care and girlhood are continually contested.

References Adams, M. (2009). Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: Young migrants’ narratives of arrival in Britain. Children’s Geographies, 7(2), 159–171. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14733280902798878 Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge. Bernard, C. (2022). Intersectionality for social workers: A practical introduction to theory and practice. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Chase, E. (2013). Security and subjective wellbeing: The experiences of unaccompanied young people seeking asylum in the UK. Sociology of Health & Illness, 35(6), 858–872. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­9566.2012.01541.x Crawley, H., & Skleparis, D. (2017). Refugees, migrants, neither, both: Categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 48–64. https://doi.org/10.108 0/1369183X.2017.1348224 Flanagan, R. (2020). Worldviews: Overarching concept, discrete body of knowledge or paradigmatic tool? Journal of Religious Education, 68(3), 331–344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40839-­020-­00113-­7 Gibson, S. (2012). Testimony in a culture of disbelief: Asylum hearings and the impossibility of bearing witness. Journal for Cultural Research, 17(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2011.613221 Home Office. (2020). Children’s asylum claims version 4.0. Retrieved March 19, 2021, from https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/947812/children_s-­a sylum-­ claims-­v4.0ext.pdf Kohli, R. (2007). Social work with unaccompanied asylum seeking children. Palgrave Macmillan. Lefevre, M. (2018). Communicating and engaging with children and young people: Making a difference. Policy Press.

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Maslow, A. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. Massey, D. B. (1994). Space, place and gender. Polity Press. Massey, D. B. (2005). For space. SAGE. Rigby, P., & Whyte, B. (2015). Children’s narrative within a multi-centred, dynamic ecological framework of assessment and planning for child trafficking. The British Journal of Social Work, 45(1), 34–51. https://doi.org/10.1093/ bjsw/bct105 Rogers, C. (1961). Client centred therapy: It’s current practice, implications and theory. Constable. Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE.

CHAPTER 6

Living in Spaces of State Care

Although their individual experiences varied, Mia, Grace, and Salam agreed that where they lived, and particularly who they lived with, had a significant impact on their lives in the UK: ‘the important thing is where you live because that home’ (Grace). Grace first lived with a family who offered semi-independent care in their own home. Mia initially went into a private residential service with residential staff available 24 h a day. Salam first moved into family-based care with a foster carer. All the girls moved at least once while they were in state care. Notions of home can be complex for any child in alternative care. Care-experienced children have asked professionals to avoid bureaucratic terms to describe where they live, seeing the use of impersonal language as a lack of sensitive care (TACT, 2019). For the practitioners in this research bureaucratic terms—such as supported lodgings or foster care—signified different levels of support, but they recognised they had little meaning for separated girls and said they tried to avoid them. Grace, Mia, and Salam focussed instead on their relationships in, and around, these new living spaces, the extent to which they felt cared for, and the times they felt excluded or unheard.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_6

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‘I didn’t have any idea where I am going’ Salam, Mia, and Grace all said they knew very little about their destinations when they left the UK border and crossed the threshold into state care. For Mia, the emerging sense of relief she had felt on arrival began to evaporate on the journey: [I]t wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t good because it was long distance, late in the evening or afternoon. It was dark. I couldn’t speak the language English. I couldn’t actually ask any questions. I wasn’t able, so no one explained to me where we going and my destination and where we’d be settled down. So no one explained to me about this, so it wasn’t easy journey from the port to here. I didn’t have any idea where I am going. (Mia)

Mia was driven through the night to an unknown destination with adult strangers who did not speak her language, hours after arriving in a new country. She described a renewed sense of relief when she arrived at a house and was met by staff, who took her to a bedroom and gave her a key. Mia went to bed, thinking she was the only person who could enter this room. Later that night she woke: ‘I was sleeping, wake up suddenly because of noise. I could see someone standing in room, beside the bed, without permission. I was so scared’ (Mia). Later, Mia realises this member of staff was probably entering her room to check on her welfare, but, in the moment, she does not experience this as an act of care: ‘the staff worried, wants to check everyone’s room but should be in the best way, not go in room without permission and wake someone and scare someone’. Mia is newly arrived from a country with a history of state brutality and she thinks her new carers will understand this. It is possible, of course, that someone told Mia they would be checking on her and she was unable, in that place and time, to take in this information. Mia described how hard it was to understand what was happening at the border only hours before and how confused she had felt on the journey. She has understood her room to be a space where she could control the boundary, and the unexpected crossing of this boundary is experienced as an intrusion. Mia wakes and is afraid. Rather than a protective barrier, the door of the room has become a contested, internal boundary, where the power of state actors overrides Mia’s sense of privacy and agency. The staff’s communication, if it was attempted, has not effectively conveyed what Mia felt she had a right to know before she went to sleep. Mis-communication has increased her anxiety in these first hours, rather than reduced it.

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‘It’s like plonking someone on Mars and asking them to get on with it’ The weeks after arrival were described, by the girls and practitioners, as the most difficult period, often peppered with misunderstandings and missed cues. The unplanned nature of girls’ arrival meant carers and practitioners were often responding at short notice, when interpreters for particular languages or dialects could be unavailable and when very little was known about the girl herself. The practitioner who met a girl at the border may continue as her social worker, but this was not guaranteed. For the practitioners, the initial focus was on providing immediate care and protection—finding somewhere for a girl to stay, transporting her there, and ensuring she had food, toiletries, and clothing. New living spaces could feel strange on arrival, each with their particular combination of smells, sounds, and tastes. The importance of sensory experiences in forming secure relationships is well-known and contributes to feelings of safety and security (Winnicott, 1990). Having carers who developed an understanding of the individual sensory connections was seen as important—the smell of food, the sounds of certain music—‘it’s these little, little things that make a huge difference in their lives’ (Eva). Eva linked these sensory experiences to young women re-establishing a sense of self and maintaining emotional connections to disrupted relationships that were still significant. Reaching the stage where carers understood which relationships were significant, however, came out of a much longer period of relationship-building. Each living space was a complex relational site, each described and experienced differently, but carers were seen as essential sources of support for the girls. Some living spaces were described as highly nurturing, and Salam saw her foster carer as a maternal figure: ‘I want to say thank you to her … my Mum was passed away … she make me to have another Mum’ (Salam). Eva said Helen’s carers were ‘brilliant … she really loved them’ (Eva). Mia talked of residential staff who offered her emotional support but was clear these relationships were individualised and staff were not interchangeable. She had quickly identified who was more likely to empathise: ‘some staff understand me, sometimes I am hearing bad news about my country … some understand, and every time talk to me and relax me, but some of staff really don’t understand’ (Mia). Some residential carers had experienced migration themselves and were seen as more able to understand the emotional ties girls could still have to place, although they were no longer physically there.

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Effective communication in these living spaces was a highly complex process, which often took place across language and cultural difference. Interpreters were provided when practitioners visited and for appointments with health professionals, solicitors, or the Home Office, but there were no examples of interpreters being used for discussions between carers and girls. The formal spaces of communication were prioritised by the organisations over the relational communication taking place in girls’ living spaces. Practitioners acknowledged the impact this hierarchy of communication could have on a girl’s ability to communicate: ‘they only have the interpreter and me there every six weeks … so within that six weeks there is nothing … they can’t communicate really with anybody’ (Elaine). Without a shared language, the girls and their carers drew on a range of creative approaches—drawings, photos, translation apps, and gestures. There were tools available in the organisations to gather the views of children in the care system—booklets, cards, visual maps—but they were only available in English as the cost of translation was seen as prohibitive. There were no examples of any approaches being used, or developed with, separated young people in these local authorities. Although there could be frustration and mis-communication, Grace, Salam, and Mia said they welcomed any attempts to communicate, particularly if this involved a calm tone of voice and open body language, seeing this as evidence that their thoughts and feelings were valued. Like most young people in state care, the girls had ideas about the living space they wanted and needed, and knew their social worker was key in providing this. The practitioners themselves, however, expressed their frustration at a ‘lack of power about where they [girls] live’ (Susan). They felt constrained by decision-making processes they had little influence over, organisational contracts with private agencies, and generic policies they found hard to challenge. Local policy, for example, had already decided that semi-independence was appropriate for a separated girl over 16 before she had arrived at the border and before any assessment process had taken place. This usually meant shared housing with other young people, with some staff support. This focus on age and immigration status as the primary measure of which type of care was needed was something the girls found hard to understand. Mia had lived with her family, and being told she had to live semi-independently in the UK at 16 was an unwelcome surprise: ‘when you arrive in this country you bring with you your family background, everything your family used to do for you, so you expect everyone in this country treat you the same’ (Mia). Although Mia had been

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brought into state care on the basis of being a ‘vulnerable child’ she immediately experienced a process of adultification (Hlass, 2020) and was seen as mature enough to live without a consistent adult in a parenting role. This idea was strongly rejected by Mia. Six months after her arrival, she said 17 was still too young to live without consistent adult care: [S]omeone tell you ‘you must live alone with another language and another culture’. I’m 17 years old. I don’t understand the language. I don’t understand cooking, I don’t understand look after myself. I don’t have everything and it’s so hard. (Mia)

There were concerns from the practitioners that this one-size-fits-all approach overlooked the individual needs of separated girls and boys. There were also worries that fragile, contracting arrangements could work against the stability practitioners were trying to achieve for young people: ‘things get scaled up because it’s cheaper and we go for the lowest tender … it’s not manageable and the accommodation providers collapse, which I’ve seen twice, so then you have to get all the kids out’ (Alice). Private agencies are also contracted to care for indigenous children, so this arrangement is not unique to migrant young people. What did concern the practitioners, however, was that notions of adequate care may be influenced by excluding narratives found in some organisational spaces: ‘I think that they develop a picture of them being undeserving, that they’re taking resources away from indigenous kids and they’re not here for genuine reasons’ (Joe). As practitioners who had chosen to work with separated children, they expressed anger and frustration at othering comments from colleagues and managers, but wanted to stress these were minority voices: I got told that they’re smelly, by an admin person talking about when we’ve used the rooms when someone had just come in after two months crawling across Europe and sitting in a camp… some people say that there aren’t foster placements because our [unaccompanied] kids are getting them and you think no, they’re your kids as well, but on the whole that’s a real minority. (Alice)

The practitioners acknowledged the importance of not being passive when they encountered excluding narratives. Joe said he challenged any negative constructions of separated children and had heard these at all levels of the organisation: ‘I hear stuff from managers, not just team managers, senior managers. I will always say something’ (Joe). These excluding

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narratives could also be present in the spaces where girls were living. There were multiple accounts of skilled care, but Grace’s account shows how the boundaries of living spaces can sometimes be contested by carers themselves, and how their duty of care can be overlooked when young women are seen as ‘other’. Initially Grace felt welcomed by her carer and their family, but this quickly changed: [T]hey just being shouting, They told me ‘Muslim people kill people, you kill people’ they say that to me. I say ‘I kill people?’ ‘I don’t know that, I never kill anyone’. They say ‘not you but the Muslim people and you’re Muslim’ so I say ‘OK you say I not kill anyone but you say I’m Muslim people, in the end you hurt me. I didn’t done anything wrong to you, why you say that to me?’ and her girls are just shouting. They say ‘in our school they told us about Muslim people’. I want to start my education and stuff they upset me, they say ‘Oh English school not accept Muslim people, they don’t like them because they think children like you are coming here and they take the place of English people. (Grace)

Here we see the fallacy of framing state care as a protected bubble, hermetically sealed from the outside world. Grace lived with this carer for her first six months in the UK. After a time she told her social worker what was happening, but it was several weeks before she was moved to another carer. Yet here she went from being constructed as a ‘dangerous Muslim’ to being seen as an unworthy ‘drain on resources’: ‘she [carer] say I get all the help from the government and why her son is not have that help like me?’ (Grace). In constructing these micro-spaces as only for indigenous, non-­ Muslim citizens, these carers were working to define who belonged and who did not in each space—not just in the contested micro-space of foster care but in the contested national space of England itself. As Sirriyeh (2013) notes, carers are ‘at the forefront of the nation’s threshold’ (p. 5), and these were amongst the first people Grace had met in the UK. She began to fear everyone in the country would respond to her in the same way: I want to live in peace and I didn’t see anything in this life as these people. I shocked. I mean I can’t eat. I’m being ill. I can’t go out because I’m thinking, maybe people they’re not going to like me anymore. I go outside this door how many person going to think in the same way - a million? - two million? I can’t go to every single person to explain my situation. I spent twenty-four hour in my room.

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I can’t go out, it’s so bad, you feel like you’re in prison and you know the day that I get out of that home I feel like oh my god that is my freedom now. (Grace I-Poem 2)

Grace acted to find solutions, telling her social worker what was taking place and then moving on, but the impact of these experiences was still significant for her. She sees them as delaying her adaptation to the UK and slowing her recovery from the health issues she had on arrival. Grace went on to find more welcoming and sustaining relationships elsewhere. There was no consensus amongst the participants about which narratives dominated. The girls and practitioners described multiple and shifting constructions being attached to different bodies in different spaces. The practitioners said they challenged excluding narratives, but this did not mean arguing for organisations to respond to separated children exactly as they did to citizen/indigenous children. Instead, they wanted the system to see separated young people as having a clear right to be in the UK and to receive services which met their needs as young migrants. They argued, for example, for additional language support, additional resources when young people arrived without any belongings, and access to mental health support that was culturally sensitive. To achieve this, Joe felt they needed to continually position separated children as ‘our own’: They’re our children, they’re here, we need to look after them. They’ve got as much value as any other child. That’s what our role is, that’s our responsibility, to parent as best we can. (Joe)

‘It’s just such a different way of life’ The smaller numbers of girls made practitioners hesitant to generalise, but they thought transitioning to English life could be more difficult for girls than boys: ‘what I found with the girls, different from the asylum-seeking boys, I think it takes a bit longer to adjust. It’s just such a different way of life’ (Laura). They talked of the challenges girls faced as they navigated different gendered expectations without a family to help them. The practitioners thought many girls found this ‘mind-blowingly bizarre’ (Laura), ‘a massive shock’ (Faith), and ‘a really, really scary experience’ (Joe). There was no suggestion that young men’s adjustment was straightforward, but boys were thought to be more equipped to manage periods of transition, more confident, and more able to live independently. Boys were more

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likely to be living with other boys in shared houses and so had more opportunities to form supportive friendships. The practitioners thought the transition was particularly difficult for girls who had previously lived in feminised spaces: ‘it’s a real challenge especially for some of our young women that have come from those cultures where they have been very protected, and living just with the female members of the household’ (Agnes). Girls who had spent their childhoods in private spaces were seen as more passive: ‘in some cultures they play a very sort of passive role, a subservient role’ (Joe). Practitioners talked of helping girls find a voice in a new place, to support girls to move from passivity to agency. They acknowledged they knew little about how girls may have used their agency in previous spaces, but saw these practices as less relevant to life in England. For the practitioners, adaptation meant girls learning new agentic practices in an English cultural context. This expectation to culturally adapt was something Mia, Salam, and Grace were acutely aware of. They understood that they were the ones expected to make the adaption, rather than it being a mutual process of adapting to each other: ‘I try and get myself to fit with this new society, new place, adjusting my behaviour, my expectation’ (Mia). This adaption was individualised and strategic, however, as each girl was continually maintaining and rejecting different cultural practices. While the girls recognised an expectation to absorb ‘Englishness’ and/or ‘Britishness’—although there was no clarity about what these notions actually meant—this was something they resisted: I don’t need to be English because I live here. I like [being] in UK and I respect English people and so they need to respect me back, but you don’t need to compare between me and English people. I’m from different traditional. (Grace)

Semi-independent living in shared houses was partly based on the notion that separated young people benefitted from living together and could support each other through this adjustment period. There was some support for this view. Mia said she liked living with others who shared similar experiences and this reduced her isolation: ‘you have someone around you, they have the same problem, without family, so is big relief’. Mia felt there could be a mutual understanding between young people. They shared useful information about how processes worked in the UK and what could be expected from professionals. Some houses had staff who had themselves migrated and who sometimes shared languages and

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cultures with young people, and they could be valuable sources of support. English carers were valued for their particular cultural knowledge about what was possible in the UK context. Yet applying a generic view of appropriate care, based primarily on a girl’s immigration status, could overlook the significance of her past experiences and intersecting identities. Some separated girls may feel less able to make the changes they want for themselves if they are living with people from their country of origin, or who share the same religion, but this may be overlooked in processes which foreground age and immigration. Mia had come from a country where she shared public spaces with men and boys and said she was comfortable living with young men, whereas Salam said she would not feel safe living with any males from her country of origin: ‘I don’t trust people from my country’. Grace was similarly clear she did not want to live with anyone from South Sudan or neighbouring countries, or with males who shared her religion. Grace wanted to ‘live independent … to start different life’, and said there would be expectations to behave in particular ways as a Muslim young woman in shared housing with young men. When I first met Grace she was watching the BBC reality programme, ‘Muslims Like Us’, and said she was trying to find out what it meant to be a Muslim girl in the UK.  Grace wanted to find ways of achieving her aspirations that would allow her to embody her national and religious identity in ways she chose for herself. She was clear she needed a living space away from Sudanese, Muslim males to be able to achieve this. Of course, separated young men are individuals, and Grace may have found a less restrictive space than she feared, but it raises questions about the extent to which gender-power dynamics are considered in decision-­ making processes where immigration status is the primary consideration.

‘Boys more free … they are important’ A focus on age could also overlook individual need, and local policy meant girls under 16 initially lived with foster carers. Agnes thought girls of any age had a better experience in foster care than in shared houses: ‘going to live with a family [will] certainly be a better experience than going to live in a shared house, where there’d be lots of unknown people and lots of comings and goings with not quite as much support’ (Agnes). Notions of girlhood and place are apparent here. Shared houses were seen as very fluid, framed more as a public space than a private space of a foster home, with young men from boys’ social networks entering and leaving. These fluid

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boundaries meant they were seen as less suitable spaces for girls, who were framed as needing more protective, adult support. Constructions of the dangerous male migrant could also frame boys as potential risks to young women. Anxieties about girls’ vulnerabilities could dominate staff approaches when girls and boys lived together. Mia felt strongly she was treated differently, sometimes inequitably, as the only girl in the house. She said she was both undervalued and more restricted: [B]oys more free, can do, they are important. The social worker, the local authority staff, let the boy do what they want but restricting and stop girl what they want to do. Being in this country for six months she still not free to go. [She] needs to check time and they check her, where she goes and when she returns. Controlling, she feels being controlled all the time, meantime she can see [they] treat boys different. (Mia, interpreted)

Mia also felt that, as a girl, she was expected to carry more of the responsibility for relationships in the house and to adjust her behaviours in response to any tensions. When she was upset about an argument with a boy, for example, Mia felt it was her behaviour that was scrutinised and expected to change: ‘staff just try and make me calm, give advice “be careful, not get involved”. They need to talk to him as well, change his attitude’. Like Mia, Salam felt she was expected to adjust her behaviour around boys, that it was her responsibility to remove herself from spaces where boys might be. Salam said she felt frequently under scrutiny by the boys in her foster carer’s home, the subject of a sexualised male gaze, and she stayed out of communal areas to avoid comments she felt uncomfortable with. It was Mia and Salam’s bodies which were seen as ‘out of place’ within these gendered living spaces, predominantly constructed around the perceived needs of boys. The girls also felt an expectation of domesticity, being expected to be more adept at domestic skills—cooking, cleaning, and tidying—than the boys. The practitioners saw girls as more likely to have domestic skills because of their location in private, family spaces: ‘quite a lot of them know how to cook since they were 10’ (Laura). Any perceived lack of domestic skills in girls was more likely to be seen as problematic, an indicator of a girl emotionally struggling or not ‘coping’ with change. Boys who were not regularly cooking and cleaning were normalised within UK cultural notions of the ‘messy teenage boy’, and the focus was more likely to be on teaching them to develop more domestic skills.

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It is carers who are expected to help young people learn these everyday skills, but this could vary in practice: ‘some sharing house is very good because they have a good staff … some sharing house really so bad and so dirty and you know everyone coming there and not very clean’ (Mia). Rather than seeing these inconsistencies as a problem with individual services or with staff they saw as often supportive and skilled, the practitioners connected this to limited resources. Alice directly connected the austerity agenda in the UK to the types of care available, and to the priorities for social work becoming ‘keeping people safe, fed, educated, housed’ (Alice). Alice expressed some frustration that girls didn’t always express gratitude for what had been provided within these limited resources: [Y]ou have a young person going ‘you do nothing for me’ and I think, you’re saying that from inside accommodation we’re providing, with money in the bank that we’re giving you for your food, with the travel warrants that we’re giving you to get to college, with the education. It provides time for me to be able to go and see what’s going on for her and to try and help her. I think it’s a great thing, social services, I really do. (Alice)

Constructions of the ‘grateful refugee’—and expectations of gratitude—can become more dominant when services are provided on the basis of worthiness and welfare rather than rights (Schwöbel-Patel & Ozkaramanli, 2017). Age and culture may be further factors here. Children learn to express gratitude in culturally specific ways (Tudge et al., 2015), so girls may be framed as ungrateful when they don’t express gratitude in expected ways within new cultural spaces. Mia, Grace, and Salam did acknowledge the importance of the practical support they had been provided—accommodation, education, and health care—but for them the provision of generic and practical resources was not enough. They wanted emotional support, to be valued and cared about as unique individuals, and to have as much choice and control in their lives as possible. For these girls, this meant having someone they trusted that knew their ‘story’.

‘Telling is hard … really hard’ Laura, Faith, and Susan all said young women were often more open, more able to communicate their feelings and concerns. Most of the female practitioners said that girls were easier to work than boys, but they could struggle to find a rationale for this: ‘it feels easier working with the girls

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than the boys. Not sure why. Just feels easier’ (Elaine). There was a sense that the girls made themselves more ‘knowable’ than many of the boys: [I]t’s a lot easier to work with unaccompanied young women than unaccompanied young men, purely because they are more open and more trusting… it’s almost like you can see their vulnerabilities so you can see how to work with that. (Laura, stressed words underlined)

In contrast, Joe, a male practitioner, felt he had to work harder to position himself as a safe person with girls. He did this by acknowledging their potential fears, actively working to reassure and looking for any embodied communication that might suggest anxiety. Mia, Grace, and Salam’s stories suggest girls do not always feel able to communicate their needs, to practitioners of any gender, and their communicative capacity shifted across time and place. Language was a factor here, but these were also highly affective interactions: ‘If I want something I was scared to ask them. They say Salam do you want something? Why you not ask? I feel something like shame you know’ (Salam). Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) emphasise the relational aspects of shame—how people can internalise how they are seen by others within impersonal relationships of inequality. Salam was uncomfortable with being seen as a charitable subject, but she also spoke of feeling devalued as a girl in the previous spaces of her life. Wetherell (2012) notes how our ‘affective performance bears a complex relation to our past affective practice and relational history’ (p. 129), and Salam said she had been harmed when she attempted to use her voice during her childhood. Her affective patterning impacted what she felt she could and could not say within the spaces of English state care. Such affective patternings—not just of the girl but of others present—play out in relational spaces where girls, carers, and practitioners meet. Meetings between girls and practitioners are particular forms of encounters, shaped through the power dynamics of the social work ‘visit’. When social workers visit a girl in her living space, they enter a temporal and affective space where particular understandings can form. Carers can be influencers in the understandings forming between girls and practitioners, offering perspectives which may be rich and individualised, or excluding or disbelieving: ‘I knew that she’d already started making quite a lot of onerous demands on the accommodation provider’ (Alice). Understanding—and assessing—is sometimes framed as a linear process, of the young woman ‘telling’ and the practitioner then ‘knowing’, but the girls and

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practitioners described a much more fragmented and shifting process which required a high level of emotional work from everyone involved. As they became more aware of the processes within state care, Mia, Grace, and Salam understood practitioners to be powerful decision-makers. They recognised that how practitioners thought and felt about them affected the decisions being made and the resources provided. Having a social worker who understood them and their personal aspirations was therefore seen as essential. Grace, Mia, and Salam were continually working to shape the meaning-making taking place in each encounter: [Y]ou need to understand the young people that you work with. It’s very important. I have a good situation with my social workers because they understand me and that has helped them to help me. (Grace)

Grace recalls her social worker asking her what she wanted for herself, but as a young woman seeking more agency, Grace disliked feeling dependent. She was frustrated by her inability to make her own choices about where she lived, or where she went to school, and found this a disempowering experience: ‘I do not know a lot of places here … I can’t talk to people properly … wait for the social worker to move me’ (Grace). Mia also found this sense of dependence frustrating, linking it to the consequences of being separated from parents or family members who, as adults, could better use their power and agency: [W]e here, doesn’t have family and doesn’t have someone bigger than me, for example mother, father or uncle, cousin.. and if social worker doesn’t help me, really I can’t do nothing. What can I do? Nothing. (Mia)

Alice drew a picture of herself meeting with Hester, a young woman who had recently arrived in the UK. They are sitting around a table, which holds Alice’s pen and notebook, and in her hand is a ‘magic wand’. Alice talked of wanting Hester to speak but also of her anxiety about not meeting the organisational requirements of gathering information: ‘she just wanted to talk. I’m just sitting there writing down. I’m scared not to capture everything’ (Alice). Alice is anxious about the consequences of not producing a narrative for the organisation, and her conflicted feelings parallel Eva’s ambivalence about the organisational Giant (discussed in Chap. 5). It provides the source of her power to act, her ‘magic wand’, but it also constrains, limiting the encounter to the gathering of information and fixing it in this living space. These tensions between the need to ‘know’ and

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the difficulty of ‘telling’ were apparent throughout this project, but the relational positions occupied by girls and practitioners are significant here. Compare Elaine’s feelings about Clara with Salam’s account of telling her story to her social worker, Teresa: I talk to Teresa I feel like just ok. I feel comfortable. Sometimes I said ‘ok I should have to tell them’ but I said no. I just tell her you know, not like one day everything. Sometimes I get off and then cry. (Salam I-Poem 1) I’m not really getting anything back from her. If I go out with one of my children that can speak English, we’ve just go so much more in common. I find it really difficult with these children because you can’t communicate. I just think the more that can be put in to teach them intensive lessons of English, would move them on a lot quicker. (Elaine I-Poem 1)

Salam is describing a process of testing out, of making several attempts to tell Teresa about her past experiences before she felt able to speak. Salam talks of Teresa giving her time to talk, allowing Salam to dictate the speed at which she tells this story. Salam’s telling took place across a number of encounters and involved moving towards, and away from, the complex feelings this evoked. Salam is using her agency here, making choices about what is shared, when, and with whom. In Elaine’s account, her ‘not-knowing’ about Clara was described as a problem with communication created by lack of a shared language or a common cultural experience. It is a concept of ‘knowing’ very grounded in information gathering (Froggett, 2002). Elaine is white and British. As the person from abroad, who doesn’t speak English and is unfamiliar with English youth culture, Clara, a young black girl, has become the embodiment of this communication ‘problem’. Elaine’s solution is to help Clara speak English more quickly—it is Clara who has to do the work to bridge the communication gap. I have no desire to construct Elaine as the ‘bad’ social worker here: Elaine was willing to discuss the tensions and vulnerabilities in her professional role and described Clara as ‘lovely’. In Elaine’s drawing she positions herself in her own bubble, disconnected from Clara and the wider network, including her colleagues. Elaine had only recently started working with separated young people and said there had been no induction period. Laura, her colleague, shared her own frustration at the ‘expectation that you are some sort of cultural expert’, although ‘there isn’t really any

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training’ for her specialist role. Although Elaine described her manager and peers as supportive her drawn ‘bubble’ suggested isolation, and her own communication with the organisation appeared based on the transfer of information. When she began working with Clara, Elaine used the approaches she had developed working with citizen/indigenous English-­ speaking children, approaches she found ineffective with Clara. In response she used a post-colonial lens to see Clara as ‘other’, a perspective that had not been challenged or unpicked by the time this research took place. There were very few examples given of regular, reflexive spaces for practitioner, where different framings could be critically and safely explored. Joe’s account shows how a different form of communication can emerge when the encounter is not framed by the organisational construction of the ‘visit’ and when the practitioner is more experienced and comfortable in the space. He recalled meeting Zema when he was visiting someone she lived with, before meeting with her as her new social worker. Joe identifies as black British and thought his own experience of being framed as the ‘other’ helped him engage with Zema, a black girl of African origin. Rather than being fearful of Zema’s differences, Joe finds a point of connection: ‘she’d painted this picture … I remember talking to her about the art work’. Joe feels this brief meeting formed an initial connection he could build on and Zema, in her response to his overtures, was agentically engaging here too. Joe is working to bridge the communication gap— framing himself as the stranger to Zema who has to work to be seen as safe, caring, and interested. Alice however, could find informal communication unhelpful to completing her professional tasks, seeing this as something to filter out: ‘I’d have to patiently listen to her, discuss things in absurd amount of details to get to the point’ (Alice). There is no shared agreement, then, about what knowledge is of value in these spaces and this was being continually negotiated within each encounter. Knowledge itself is a contested notion, created through process of power—it shapes what is attended to and what is not, what can be borne and what is defended against and avoided.

The Sheltering Tree Although Grace had not always felt welcomed within the spaces of state care, it was she who most clearly framed her social worker, Vanessa, in terms of protection (see Fig. 6.1). Grace drew Vanessa as the ‘sheltering tree’ that protected her while she established a life in the UK.

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Fig. 6.1  Grace’s trees

Here, Vanessa is the caring adult, providing temporary shelter while Grace develops—physically, socially, and emotionally—and grows into independence and adulthood. There are similarities with Salam’s drawing of her progressively growing and mending hearts (Fig. 7.2). In both drawings, the conceptualisation of size is described relationally, rather than as an intrinsic quality each girl ascribed to herself. It is strongly situated in place and time: She is bigger tree because she always look after me. She protect me, so always I know I’m safe with my social worker. She help me to grow in the right way so one day I can be like a big tree. She know Grace, one day she want to be a doctor. She know my plan. (Grace (S)he-Poem 1)

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Grace frames Vanessa’s caring as a combination of factors—practical, communicative, and affective. Grace values Vanessa because she is ‘bigger’—she is older and more experienced with life in the UK context. She also holds power which Grace can access for resources that Grace cannot (yet) provide for herself. Vanessa is seen as protective—when she is physically present, Grace understands herself to be safe. When Grace said she felt unsafe in her living space, Vanessa acted and supported Grace to move. Vanessa is also framed as helpful—she is a source of knowledge about how to be a girl, and an adult woman, in the spaces of the UK, and is seen as educated, professional, and independent. These are things Grace values and has made aspirations for her own life. Finally, Vanessa is framed as knowing—she has some understanding of Grace as an individual and of the stories of her past. Importantly, she knows Grace’s plan for the future and is actively trying to achieve aspects of this with her. Grace’s story highlights the different types of relationships girls may look for within state care, and the need for practitioners to position themselves differently with each girl, adapting as she continually changes. Salam described her carer and social worker as surrogate family members and talked of wanting to have sustaining relationships with them that endured into adulthood. Grace, in contrast, framed her connection with Vanessa as a temporary shelter, one that she would move away from to live independently as an adult woman. Grace’s desire for agency and self-­determination is apparent through this drawing, when she frames herself becoming the strong stable tree, taller even than Vanessa is now. On the trunk is written: ‘I can grow one day like this, in the right way ’cause my social worker help me’.

References Froggett, L. (2002). Love, hate and welfare: Psychosocial approaches to policy and practice. Policy Press. Hlass, L. (2020). The adultification of immigrant children. Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, 34(2), 199–262. Schwöbel-Patel, C., & Ozkaramanli, D. (2017). The construction of the ‘grateful’ refugee in law and design. Queen Mary Human Rights Law Review, 4(1) 1–10. Sirriyeh, A. (2013). Hosting strangers: Hospitality and family practices in fostering unaccompanied refugee young people: Hosting strangers. Child & Family Social Work, 18(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12044 TACT. (2019). Language that cares. Retrieved June 15, 2021, from www.tactcare. org.uk/content/uploads/2019/03/TACT-­L anguage-­t hat-­c ares-­2 019_ online.pdf

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Tudge, J. R. H., Freitas, L. B. L., & O’Brien, L. T. (2015). The virtue of gratitude: A developmental and cultural approach. Human Development, 58(4-5), 281–300. https://doi.org/10.1159/000444308 Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE. Wilkinson, R. G., & Pickett, K. (2010). The spirit level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger. Bloomsbury Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1990). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Karnac.

CHAPTER 7

Trust, (Dis)Belief, and Love

There was a consensus amongst all the participants that trust and belief were essential elements in any relationship, but that these were difficult to develop in the context of social work and migration. Trust was often described as a two-way relational process, of showing trust in each other: ‘because she trusts me we establish good relationship. I am able to actually pass my feelings to her and she can understand me better, and therefore she can help me better’ (Mia). The practitioners talked of wanting to present as someone who could be trusted, and they drew on practice wisdom which stressed the importance of a child feeling believed. There could be a paradox for the practitioners, however, between an ethical wish to believe a child’s story and the extreme difficulty of establishing any forms of ‘truth’ in the context of trafficking or forced migration: ‘we always want to believe the child as much as we can, but with a sort of healthy knowledge that we may never know what the truth is and they may never know the truth themselves’ (Agnes). Belief, trust, and action were therefore closely connected in the accounts, and the girls’ sense of support came from the interplay of all these aspects of practice. Notions of care were tied up in these relational encounters; the embodied and spoken communication of each practitioner could enable or undermine the development of feelings of trust. Consider Mia’s contrasting experiences of two social workers in the (S) he-Poems below: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_7

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Mia about Monifa: she don’t follow your story she come late she’s not organised she not very heartfelt she don’t hearing my problem. (Mia (S)he—Poem 2)

Mia about Rosa: she understand my story she’s punctual and organised she very fast. she every time helped me she believed me. (Mia (S)he—Poem 1)

Rosa’s punctuality and the actions she took to help Mia achieve her aspirational goals were understood by Mia as acts of care. When Monifa becomes her social worker and cancels meetings, arrives late, and seems disengaged, Mia feels uncared for, and uncared about. Mia has come to understand the power that practitioners can hold within state care services, and this lack of connection with Monifa raises her anxieties. She feels less able to influence decisions being made about her life, a sense that these decisions are being made in spaces she cannot access. That does not mean, however, that the girls saw practitioners only as vehicles to achieve their goals. Mia, Salam, and Grace said they wanted to be believed and trusted, but they also wanted their practitioners to be independent, thinking social actors who offered guidance based on their experience. Even when that guidance was unwelcome in the moment, tensions could be managed within relationships grounded in skilled communication. These moments of disagreement could sometimes help to build trust, particularly if they happened within a consistent relationship. The practitioners understood different perspectives in terms of normative parent/child interactions within the UK context and they expected that, as young people, the girls would challenge power dynamics and ‘push boundaries’. The girls could feel frustration when things took time to happen or when their social worker challenged their worldview, but they could also see boundary-setting as a sign the practitioner was concerned with their wellbeing. Grace and Salam both described times when practitioners had helped them by acting from a different viewpoint: ‘I want to stay at home but Teresa she make me outside … for church and then I made friends and then ok’ (Salam).

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The presence of interpreters could also affect the relationship-building that was taking place, and interpreters brought their own affective practices (Wetherell, 2012) to encounters. Interpreters were framed as both essential for, and a barrier to, communication and relationship-building. Gender was significant for the girls, and they talked of their anxiety about male interpreters and the impossibility of saying certain things in front of a man. The benefits of a consistent interpreter were recognised by practitioners, and they spoke of developing effective working relationships with interpreters over time. However, consistency was not always achieved and the interpreter could then become framed as the ‘stranger’ in the room: ‘it’s hard to communicate anyway, without having a perfect stranger there’ (Elaine). Effective communication in interpreted encounters is known to take more time (Morsch, 2019), but while the practitioners allowed additional time, the organisations did not account for this in the allocation of work. This could add to the pressure of time, increasing practitioners’ anxieties about not completing the aims they had set for each encounter. Practitioners also expressed frustration and anxiety at having to continually evidence their work and the sense that their organisation did not fully trust them. Alice described feeling a continual pressure to record what took place in every encounter: ‘to accurately show that you’re doing work’ (Alice). Issues of trust could also affect what was said between girls and practitioners, and the girls disliked feeling they had lost control of their own stories. Anxiety about what might be shared in cultural and community spaces could affect the story being told: [M]y Solicitor interpreter was so nice. If I meet them now I wish they don’t know me because now I am different person. One of interpreter talk about me like with her friend maybe? I don’t want anyone to know about my back home life. (Salam) Ala tells me that there are videos on the internet where people from [country of origin] are giving out information about why someone is claiming asylum, telling everyone if it’s about sexuality. Now Ala is convinced this comes from the interpreters and is now too scared to talk to Solicitor about the claim, so that’s another barrier to making this young person feel safe. (Autoethnographic Diary Entry, Sept 2017)

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When stories had been shared it was particularly important to the girls that they knew who had been told about their past; they wanted control over how this information was shared and when. When practitioners openly discussed this with a girl it could help to build trust. Mia, Grace, and Salam all described their anxiety about being asked to re-tell a painful story when practitioners changed and this, too, had to be navigated relationally. Practitioners could be sensitive to this: ‘she told me sorry Grace I know that between me and you … but I’m going to told my manager because I need help’ (Grace). The practitioners recognised the need to be an emotionally containing presence in the space, if they were to hear girls stories, but they also spoke of the emotional impact of hearing multiple stories of loss and trauma: ‘some social workers had, for the first time, to deal with unaccompanied minors … the support I had to give was over how to deal with the stories that they had to hear … emotionally’ (Eva). There were concerns, though, that girls might become understood only in terms of these trauma narratives. Faith said she preferred a strengths-based approach, which she understood as developing a balanced view of a girl’s life: ‘it’s so easy to focus on the negative things that have happened to people. I think we have to have to know about the positives as well, so we can build on that’ (Faith). For some practitioners, however, the highly contested discourses about migration created a number of difficulties in knowing what to believe.

‘What would I want her to be, in order to look like a worthy asylum seeker?’ As practitioners within specialist teams, the social workers stressed the importance of developing their knowledge about youth migration. Susan’s account, however, suggests that ‘knowing’ about aspects of migration does not automatically lead to an unquestioned acceptance of a girl’s story (see Fig. 7.1). Susan drew an image of a boat, before talking about the complex journey Joy had described: ‘I often think about that map … all the things that she said happened to her. There are bits that I don’t understand in what she told me’ (Susan). Susan was struggling to make sense of what she had been told: Is she who she says she is? … is she? I think about those images that I’ve seen on the news with the overcrowded boats I’m going to be absolutely honest, there’s a small part of me that’s kind of put a question mark there

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Fig. 7.1  Susan’s questions Where do I put those questions? Most of the time I just need to put that out of my mind, because it’s just not helpful. (Susan)

Susan doesn’t doubt there have been boats filled with people crossing the Mediterranean from Northern Africa, but she finds it hard to equate these media images to the girl in front of her. Knowing and believing are not interchangeable here. Belief was not presented as a constant position or described by any of the practitioners in binary ways—as believing or not believing. Instead, belief and doubt could be experienced simultaneously. Here, for example, Susan is trying to believe what Joy has told her, but is troubled with feelings of doubt and questions she cannot ‘put’ anywhere. The practitioners’ responses to feelings of doubt and uncertainty differed, and there were shifting ideas about where ‘truth’ lay. Susan’s

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feelings of disbelief emerged when she heard the doubts of others around her, and when she tried to match media images of mainly adult, male migrants, or family groups, to the young woman in front of her. The doubts Joy’s carer raised about her age led Susan to question if Joy was even a child—drawing a number of possible ages before ending with a large 21 and a question mark. Susan concluded that this constant questioning—about Joy’s age, nationality, and migration—was ultimately unhelpful, not just because these questions may be unanswerable but because they distracted her from the purpose of her role: ‘it kind of doesn’t matter, she’s here in this country on her own. I’m here to work with her and support her’ (Susan). As much as she said she wanted to resist excluding narratives, however, Susan acknowledged that the wider social context of migration could affect her practice at the micro-level: [I]t is difficult working with asylum seeking young people, the whole global context, everything that’s going on, how people feel, the views that are expressed. Sometimes it is difficult not to bring those into your working practice. (Susan)

Susan and Alice both identified a disconnection between the constructions of the ‘refugee child’ that surrounded them, and their experiences of the girls they met in state care. Girls’ acts of agency and assertiveness challenged expectations of childhood vulnerability and female passivity: ‘she’s got a very strong personality that quickly comes across. I don’t think I was expecting [that]’ (Alice). Susan talked of struggling with the disparity between her expectations and the girl she met in practice, expectations she had not consciously considered until she met Joy. When Hester brings physical ‘evidence’ of her stress to her first meeting with Alice—hair she says has fallen out—Alice finds this unsettling and questions what she is being told. I just thought how organised is that? I’m thinking is she playing me? I guess I wondered whether she was setting up a scene for my benefit What would I want her to be, in order to look like a worthy asylum seeker? (Alice) I’ve been on a really sort of moral journey with this whole thing as well I was expecting a lot more almost traumatised, shell-shocked young people I wasn’t expecting them to be as assertive Why am I expecting something different because they’re a refugee? (Susan)

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Alice and Susan are looking to wider social constructions to guide how to think about Hester and Joy. When they experience a disconnection, they are troubled by a lack of alternative constructions and both feel doubt about what the girls are saying. Susan reflects on ideas of morality to consider what her response should be, while Alice considers the notion of the ‘worthy’ migrant—and so, implicitly, the ‘unworthy’—although she uses an ironic tone as she talks. Alice frames the asylum process as a difficult system to navigate, and has some information about Hester’s country of origin, but this does not automatically lead to belief. Instead, she uses it to avoid blaming Hester and to resist constructing her as ‘unworthy’: [I]f I take what the Daily Mail would consider the worst case scenario, that this is a rich girl (she’s told me she’s rich), who’s come over here to study and maybe her [parent isn’t missing], nevertheless I’ve got to look after her and [country of origin] is a totally repressive country and it’s probably really hard living there, and if I was in that situation I might well be in her position. (Alice)

Although this ‘Daily Mail’ scenario is resisted, Alice uses it as a potential conceptual map to develop an understanding of Hester’s situation. She is measuring Hester against this construction before rejecting it, and instead developing a response based on an empathetic understanding. Alice’s construction of Hester as a child allows her to put aside considerations of ‘worth’ and focus on her duty of care, and the framing of state care as a protective space for children allows her some distance from polarising constructions she finds troubling. Susan’s response to her own doubts is to try to put certain questions aside and focus on social work tasks. In doing so, she narrows her vision to the present day, to what is known now, and to the micro-space of the local authority. Truth and belief therefore have clear affective dimensions, and there are multiple responses which may emerge as girls become understood as complex, human beings. Alice gave a rich description of Hester, framing her as an intelligent, agentic young woman who had acted to improve her life. She talked of her sadness at not being Hester’s social worker anymore and the affective aspects of their encounters were clearly acknowledged: ‘as a human to human you’re listening to someone and you’re trying to help them’ (Alice). Alice talked of a felt closeness with Hester, but this emotional dimension of practice was not always recognised within the spaces of her organisation.

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‘When I came my heart was broke’/‘Social Workers should be like cogs’ It was the emotional territory of encounters that the participants could find the most challenging to navigate, particularly given the complex power dynamics at the intersection of immigration and state care systems. The practitioners all considered their felt responses, the raw reactions and internal dialogues they experience: ‘I got very angry’ (Susan); ‘I was scared … how is she going to cope?’ (Eva). All of these affective responses can be present within the relational space: ‘sometimes I hear things and I find them very distressing but I’m able, in a professional way, to hold that still for someone, it’s important for them that that’s held’ (Joe). These affective dimensions were made more complex by the familial and emotive ways girls could frame their relationships with practitioners. When girls became separated from parents and other family members, they could seek intimacy and affection within the new relational spaces of their lives: ‘she’s like not just like my social worker, she’s like my sister’ (Salam). Practitioners could be seen as surrogate parents: ‘social worker like my mother or father, so look after me, care for me and support me’ (Mia). This affection was sometimes openly expressed by the girls, but it could be difficult territory for the practitioners to navigate: [S]he uses the language of love so she’ll say ‘the supported lodgings lady she didn’t love me but my social worker she has love for me’, ‘you have love for me’. I would never use that language with my young people that I work with, it’s emotive. (Susan)

It cannot be assumed that ‘love’ describes a universal, sensed experience without a cultural or social context (Wetherell, 2012). Yet it speaks of a relationship that is not experienced as procedural or formal. This need for connection was recognised by the practitioners: ‘everyone’s in need of respect and love, not a word we use in the care plan, but on another level that is what it is, isn’t it?’ (Alice). As Alice notes, though, this ‘language of love’ is not easily available to practitioners within professional discourses and can be in tension with boundaries that safeguard young people from abuse and exploitation. While the practitioners recognised the familial ways girls could describe their relationships, they responded in different ways:

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I am your social worker. I will empathise with you but I will not sympathise with you. I am not your Mum. I am not your Dad. I am not your sister. A lot of the young people I worked with don’t understand that, they see you as their family. (Eva) [W]hen she got married she invited me to the wedding, because obviously her father wasn’t there and I did a speech for her … just saying how brilliant she was and how proud I was of her and how amazing she was. (Joe)

Here the boundary of social work itself is shown as fluid and contested—Eva states she is not a surrogate parent while Joe describes acting as father-of-the-bride at Ada’s wedding. Perhaps the most striking disconnection was found between Alice’s reflection on a model of social work offered to her within her organisation, and Salam’s account of coming to the UK (see Fig.  7.2). Salam’s story of state care is saturated with her emotional responses to her carer and the practitioners she has encountered: [F]irst time when I came my heart was broke … broke heart in half … with my social worker I feel like … they gave me hope in my life trusting is hard to me, so the way how they trust me, the way how they treat me, they make me like to have a big heart, because they give me value. now I have a big heart and I have hope … I have aim for my social workers … this is just for them. (Salam)

The contrast between this and Alice’s comment is stark:

Fig. 7.2  Salam’s hearts

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[M]y manager … she goes ‘Alice social workers should be like cogs in a wheel … you should be able to put one in and pull one out’. I thought no, they are relations, they are human relations and you can’t actually just suddenly slip someone else in. (Alice)

It may be helpful to consider, here, Grace’s construction of social workers as the ‘sheltering tree’, rooted in the ground, stable and secure (Fig. 6.1). Effective engagement with young people takes emotional resources, and practitioners act within relational, affective networks which can support or disrupt their practice. Alice is anxious that her own ‘sheltering tree’—her organisation—will not ‘hold’ her as she carries out this complex and skilled work and, more alarmingly, that it does not see the need to do this. The narrative of practitioners as ‘cogs’ denies the need to support Alice’s emotional, relational, and cognitive capacity to be a ‘sheltering tree’ for young people. It was unclear where the complex thoughts and feelings evoked by this work could be shared in the professional networks. This takes us back to Susan’s comment about where she can ‘put’ her questions. The practitioners struggled to identify consistent spaces where they could reflect and be emotionally held (Ruch, 2012), and where the implications for their work could be safely explored. Overall, there was a disjointed picture of peer support, supervision, and individual reflection. Hearing and holding girls’ stories involved practitioners in emotional work and skilled communication, and the girls valued this sensitive ‘tuning in’. These affective connections were unsupported, however, within organisational processes that constructed social work as a technical, bureaucratic exercise, and framed social workers as ‘cogs in a machine’.

‘I see it as having a rope’ In Joe’s description of the ‘pond’ we see how relational, affective aspects of social work can be understood as central to promoting rights, participation, and change, but how impersonal and excluding notions of care can act as barriers to achieving this. Joe focussed on the felt experience of his work, for himself and for the girls, but placed this within a clear organisational, social, and political context: [T]hey feel like they’re in water and everything’s really confusing. I am on the dry land and I see it as having a rope. I can help someone on dry land,

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even if I’m having to share what pain or experience they have. It is a balance between learning how to be on dry land but not detaching yourself emotionally, so there’s no connection. If I’m in the water with them, I’m no good, we’ll both go down. (Joe)

Joe saw his role as the holder of the ‘rope’, a felt connection which prevented girls from falling further into the ‘pond’ and which they could use to climb out. Young women were in the ‘pond’ for multiple and interacting reasons—separation from family, possible trauma, lack of support networks, age, lack of life experience, and their involvement in immigration processes. Joe identified his skills, knowledge, experience, and relationship-­ building as things that helped keep him on ‘dry land’. To maintain this, however, he looked to other intersecting spaces rather than his own organisation, for support and motivation. Organisational hierarchies—the ‘management’—were included but placed further away. Of more significance for Joe was his own value-base. His view of migration as an enriching social process was something he felt was not always shared within the organisation, highlighting how constructions of care are connected to politicised notions of the social work role. Joe made a direct link between the broader social change he was trying to achieve and the extent to which a girl felt authentically cared for as an individual: [T]o affect change with people, to have someone who actually cares about them, actually genuinely feels that. I think that’s what the job’s about really, for me it is anyway. (Joe)

References Morsch, A. (2019). From ‘translation machine’ to trusted colleague. In L. Wroe, R. Larkin, & R. A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice (pp. 251–262). Jessica Kingsley. Ruch, G. (2012). Where have all the feelings gone? Developing reflective and relationship-based management in child-care social work. British Journal of Social Work, 42(7), 1315–1332. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcr134 Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE.

CHAPTER 8

Interconnecting Spaces

Separated girls do not only live within the spaces of the care system; each girl was also navigating multiple interconnecting spaces which held the potential for different relationships to develop. These could offer sustaining forms of support, but encounters in these spaces could also undermine and disrupt the changes girls were trying to make in their lives. The meanings of each space were shifting, complex, and individualised. Being separated from adult family members, and the adultification they could experience, meant girls were often required to talk to a number of different state actors. Laura felt being in care largely protected girls from formal processes, leaving them free to focus on their everyday lives: ‘the young women are almost shielded from it. You take it on as the social worker’ (Laura). Yet Mia talked of her anxiety at being expected to attend a continuous stream of formal meetings and how this reinforced her sense of disorientation: When I arrive here, and my social worker tell me ‘you must have lawyer’ I scared. Why must have lawyer? Because in normal life I never talk to lawyer or police or staff in Home Office. (Mia)

The girls understood these connections provided routes to resources they wanted to access—specialist legal advice, health care, and education—but they knew these spaces were constructed around their identity © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_8

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as young migrants and as ‘looked after’ children. As they adjusted to living in the UK, the girls looked for spaces where they could foreground other identities and talked of wanting to (re)create a more ‘normal life’. The practitioners recognised the importance of girls living more everyday lives and could be actively working to support girls to find friendships and community connections. However, there could also be some anxiety about the ways girls might be treated as young migrants and as young women. Joe and Eva drew on their own experiences of being ‘othered’ in social spaces to consider how girls may be seen in spaces beyond state care, expressing their frustration at how refugees and asylum-seekers were treated in the UK and their powerlessness to address this. As someone who had migrated herself, Eva said she thought the Brexit referendum had contributed to narrowing constructions of Englishness. Her own right to be in UK spaces had been questioned more frequently since the Brexit debate began: ‘I speak with an accent so they immediately know that I’m not English’ (Eva). Drawing on his experiences as a black British man, Joe also made a direct connection between anti-immigration narratives and racism. He felt young people were aware of excluding narratives about migration and experienced these in multiple spaces: [T]hey often feel that they’re unwelcome here, coming to a place where they’re trying to get refuge and then feel that no-one wants them here and even the government is desperate to get shot of them. (Joe)

Mia, Salam, and Grace described more fluid experiences—of spaces that moved between inclusion and exclusion. They talked of other people frequently occupying the ‘privileged position of vision’ (Froggett, 2002, p. 172), framing them in ways they could not always predict or influence. The girls therefore made agentic choices about which spaces they chose to spend time in, when this was possible, and were always involved in a complex pattern of resisting, absorbing, and avoiding different constructions.

‘I want to add something new to me’ In the UK, going to school is central to notions of everyday girlhood. For Salam and Grace, it was educational spaces that provided structure to their lives and a sense of purpose. All the participants identified education as an essential need for separated girls, not only because of the aspirations girls may have for their futures but because of the pastoral support they received

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there. Grace and Mia hoped to go to university. Salam wanted to learn English and Maths so she could work and be financially independent. Grace and Salam spoke of feeling welcomed in education. These spaces had become a source of emotional scaffolding (Treisman, 2017) that provided routine and continuity of relationships. These connections could form across cultural and religious differences. Grace, a Muslim girl, was attending a Catholic school and described her relationships there in highly affective terms: ‘I wish if I have a room inside the school because I spent all my time there and all of my teacher I love them, they love me’ (Grace). Salam said the only place she felt even slightly safe, in the first few months of being in England, was her foster carer’s home and her college. The practitioners expected separated young people to value education, particularly if they had not attended school before, and narratives of the English education system as internationally respected further reinforced this. Salam and Grace had very little formal education in their countries of origin and placed great value on attending an English school. Girls could be seen in terms of passivity, so when a separated girl did not behave as the ‘good student’, this could surprise their social worker. Alice struggled to understand why Hester may be finding school difficult: ‘she’s educated and bright and she wants to get ahead, out of all my cases she got the most appalling attendance. I was like: “What?”’ (Alice). Mia offered one perspective when she said attending school in England was a frustrating experience. Mia was hoping to study medicine or engineering at University, and said she had regularly attended school in her country of origin. In the UK, Mia hoped to continue her science subjects at the level she had already attained, but found she did not yet have the English language skills to follow the work. When she was given work at a level she had passed years before, Mia felt she was not seen as the intelligent young woman she felt herself to be. The insecurity of her immigration status added to her sense of being rendered invisible, particularly when she discovered she may not be able to afford to attend University even if she was legally allowed to remain in the UK (Refugee Education UK, 2022). Rather than feeling she was moving towards her future hopes, as Salam and Grace did, Mia felt she was falling further behind and started to avoid school. School could be a space where friendships were made, and the practitioners saw these connections as an important part of everyday girlhood. The lower numbers of girls, however, and the time they spent in private rather than public spaces were seen as limiting opportunities for girls to form friendships. There was agreement that girls were often more isolated

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than the boys. Language and cultural difference could also be barriers to girls navigating public spaces, reducing their opportunities to meet other people. Boys were seen as much more confident and adept in public space: [T]he young males that we work with often have more connections with groups in the community. They often have friendship groups or social groups that they’re able to gather support from. They are able to have their own peer group support, which often the girls don’t. (Joe)

In response, practitioners and carers made efforts to support girls’ friendships in ways they did not with the boys. Some carers actively created spaces where separated girls could meet each other: ‘the foster carer is in contact with another foster carer who also had two girls, so she has two ready made friends’ (Elaine). There could be assumptions that girls would only want to be friends with other migrant girls and would prefer activities like shopping. There were no examples of friendships being promoted with indigenous/citizen girls, although no examples of these being discouraged. Having the chance to meet other girls was something Mia, Grace, and Salam welcomed, seeing these as socially appropriate relationships which did not carry anxieties about gendered power dynamics. While Mia said she was happy to make friends of any gender, she wanted more opportunities to meet other girls, and Salam talked of her excitement when a girl moved into the foster home she had only ever shared with boys. The geographical location of the local authorities was also significant because of the networks that could be established there. The everyday interests girls had in previous spaces were not always available to them after migration, and they could find it hard to access them even if they were. Mia described her difficulties in moving from city-based life in her country of origin to a rural location in England: ‘it’s hard for young lady, who came to this country from a big city among many young people and suddenly feel empty, from huge, big and overcrowded place coming to a small town, this was hard’ (Mia). Mia struggled with the lack of noise and cultural activities in a small English town—no galleries, theatres, or shopping centres. These were the everyday places of Mia’s life, spaces she had visited for distraction and social contact before migration, and she found it difficult to replicate these ways of emotionally self-regulating: ‘I don’t like the very, very, very quiet… every time I thinking about bad things. I think about my story’ (Mia).

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When girls did spend time with other young people, this still meant navigating different ways of being seen. Grace joined a youth group with mainly white British young people, a space where she thought she had friends and felt welcomed. When the group discussed a local group for refugees Grace was shocked to hear comments that asylum-seekers were dishonest and undeserving of support. Until then she had not shared any information about her immigration status, choosing instead to foreground her identities as a Muslim teenage girl: [T]hey didn’t think I was asylum-seeker … They say ‘these people are not good’. I say ‘listen I’m asylum-seeker’ and they be shocked and they say ‘no you’re not’. I say ‘I am’. I think that is going to change their mind, because if they think I’m nice, maybe it means a lot of people like me, asylum-seeker, are very nice. (Grace)

Although Grace challenges the group’s construction of asylum-seekers, she is aware of the need to position herself as ‘nice’ in this space, as the unthreatening migrant they do not need to fear. Responding with anger risks reinforcing the construction of the ungrateful asylum-seeker, and Grace is navigating the additional category of the dangerous Muslim. In speaking out, Grace is risking rejection from the group and losing her growing sense of belonging. Using her voice is an agentic and disruptive act which requires emotional energy. This was energy, however, that the girls did not always have available, and this could lead to different strategies being developed. In the first months after arrival, Salam felt unable to enter any public spaces beyond her carer’s home and her college: ‘four months or five months I didn’t go anywhere. I just go college and then from the college just home’ (Salam). It was her social worker, Theresa, who Salam said helped her find ways to enter English public spaces, supporting her to (re)build a sense of control over which aspects of herself she made visible: ‘they just tell me I am like the same as other people … people they don’t see like inside they just see the outside’. Salam said she was now very selective in what she said about herself in different spaces, sometimes claiming a non-refugee identity that avoided the need for explanation: ‘sometimes I say from Brazil’ (Salam). Yet, even when young people fulfilled the ideal of the ‘good citizen’, they could still be framed as ‘dangerous’ on the basis of their religious identity or because of racialised responses based on the colour of their skin. Alice described her anger at how migrant young people, in a mixed-gender house, were framed as a threat by a neighbour:

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[T]he person next door wrote to the head of the council saying another one of yours has escaped and my parents can’t sleep safe in their beds now. I just thought: why? There wasn’t a single incidence of criminality which in itself is hugely rare, even if you just had seven teenagers I’d be expecting some criminality. The fact they’re all looked after children in one area - nothing no hanging around on the street, no noise, no complaints and you want it shut down. (Alice)

Writing this letter is an attempt to fix the boundaries of place, in this case a street in southern England that, from the perspective of this neighbour, is not for migrant young people. Massey (Massey, 1994) argues that place rarely houses a single ‘community’, something we could identify as a coherent social group. Even when this seems to be the case, Massey (ibid.) notes that individuals move through the internal structures of community across different spaces, and each person’s sense of place differs. When one social actor attempts to fix the boundary of place and define who belongs there, there are alternative paths to other types of community. The girls in this project were actively and creatively forming their own communities— at school, in church or the Mosque, in social gatherings with friends. Relational networks were not static, and the girls were continually making and re-making these connections. In doing so, they were maintaining some aspects of their past lives while distancing themselves from others, creating new forms of community for themselves in the UK: [Y]ou’ve come from that community and you want to be different. You’re not going to go back to that community, you are going to build yourself to know a new thing because you move from that, but some people from my country, they live in the communities they come from. I’m never interested to do that, is not add to me anything because I am from that and I don’t want to add any more. I want to add something new to me. (Grace)

Spaces of Intimacy: ‘Young women have the ability to get pregnant’ Young people who migrate encounter new practices around sexuality and intimate relationships, framed within gendered power dynamics and cultural notions of masculinities and femininities. While practitioners could be proactive in supporting friendships between girls, there was no discussion about girls who may be on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and heteronormative assumptions could underpin notions of friendships. Sexuality,

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pregnancy, and motherhood in youth migration are under-researched areas, and the focus on notions of childhood can mean young migrants are infantilised as asexual beings (Crawley, 2011). Salam said there was very little information on sexual health or safe relationships for separated girls, who could be trying to navigate—or avoid—intimate or sexualised encounters with boys: ‘we don’t have information when we come … I would have liked to have more talk about relationships’. While Mia, Salam, and Grace considered the future possibility of family and motherhood, they did not want to relinquish any sense of control over their future trajectories. Salam saw relationships with boys as a risk for separated cis-girls, because of the possibility of pregnancy, and the subsequent disruption to education and future careers. Salam thought girls may be trying to feel more cared about when they began intimate relationships, in search of someone to ‘belong’ to, but she mistrusted this: ‘guys they say we love you , we love you, we love you… then leave them when they have a baby’. Faith also understood girls becoming pregnant in terms of affective practices, as a (re)creation of the family life they were separated from: ‘young women have the ability to get pregnant and that does happen…quite often because they don’t have family. They want to have that family for themselves’ (Faith). Faith reflected on Sofi’s experience as a young mother and believed parenting was made more challenging by her isolation as a separated girl. Faith was frustrated by a lack of community structures to support Sofi to continue her education: [S]he says she feels much happier since she’s had him she feels more complete … she’s got her family here now she says but at the same time she’s very anxious. She worries a lot, she doesn’t have that much of a support network around her … she was training to be an accountant and she wants to finish that. She wants to have a good future for her and her son but she’s not sure how she’ll be able to do that now. (Faith)

Navigating the complexities of (potentially) intimate relationships required more than information on sexual health, although this was considered valuable in itself. Time and space are relevant here. Practitioners approached each encounter with a girl assuming she may have experienced sexual violence, and sensitivity was required to discuss any issues around sexual health. Reflecting on her early months in the UK, Salam acknowledged that Theresa had tried to raise this subject with her but that she was unable to talk at that time: ‘I said I’m not ready … I’m not ready to talk

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about this’. Feelings of shame and embarrassment about sexual practices could also be barriers to girls developing knowledge about their own bodies. Discussions about intimacy, sexuality, and sexual health, if they did take place, happened more often within relationships of trust that developed over time. By the time Salam felt she wanted to know more about relationships, her social worker had changed, and she did not feel the same trust she had with Theresa. When carers or social workers did not create spaces where intimate relationships could be discussed, peers could become a source of information, but their knowledge could be partial and inaccurate. Girls could also look to religious spaces to provide a value-­ base. Salam, however, still saw social workers as having a responsibility to promote young women’s sexual health and safety in relationships, and she wanted this to be more embedded in practice: ‘if they talk about this as well it help the young ladies’ (Salam).

‘You need to talk to me like who I am, not about my religion’ Religious faith has been described as a coping mechanism for asylum-­ seekers (Ni Raghallaigh, 2011, Voe, 02). There were mixed views, however, about the significance and meaning of these connections for the girls in this research. Grace and Salam made links between their faith and their shifting subjectivities. Grace was in search of positive constructions of the young Muslim woman, looking within her relational network but also out to wider social discourses and media representations. Yet she resisted being framed only in terms of her religion: ‘you need to talk to me like who I am, not about my religion’ (Grace, stressed words underlined). Girls’ religious practices were framed as highly significant by some practitioners. Susan agreed with Grace that learning about the meaning of religious practice for each individual girl was more important than generic knowledge: ‘it’s something I’m trying to learn more about, about what that means to her’ (Susan). However, religious practice could also be seen as teenage experimentation rather than an expression of identity: ‘I get a call from Father [name] - she’s no longer coming to church. She’s a teenager, she can’t be the first that’s kind of wafted in and wafted back out’ (Alice). Trying out different religious spaces, however, did not necessarily indicate an ambivalence in religious faith. Girls themselves could attach complex meanings to religion, and their religious practices were also affective

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practices (Wetherell 2012). Mia had left her country because of persecution based on her religious identity, but was conflicted in her feelings about religious practice in the UK. She was testing out different religious spaces as she tried to reconcile her feelings of connection to family with feelings of anger and loss. Helen, in contrast, asked Eva to help her move nearer to a national Orthodox church. For Helen, church meant connection to family and to culture: ‘the church was where she felt her mother, and where she felt that she belonged’ (Eva). Salam similarly wanted to maintain a connection to her father through their shared faith, but was also seeking adult guidance from people who shared the same value-base. When Salam encountered values in the UK that differed from those taught by her father, she looked to the teaching of her church: ‘to tell you the good thing and the bad thing’. This did not mean, however, that Salam connected church attendance to maintaining a national or cultural identity. Her pre-­ flight experiences meant she was actively avoiding forming relationships outside of the church space: I understand the bible like in my language, that’s why I go, because of the church I just want to have contact with these people. After that no, I don’t want contact with them. I don’t trust people from my country, no, I don’t want that in my life no. (Salam, stressed words underlined)

There were gendered aspects to these religious practices and their connection to culture. Migration disrupts notions of what it is to be a person of faith in social spaces, and girls could be wary that religious spaces could replicate the ways their bodies had been monitored and policed in previous spaces. Choosing their own clothing, for example, was linked to girls’ emerging subjectivities in the spaces of the UK: [T]he main religion in our country is Islam … you should wear a hijab all the time, but in here no one can ask me why I wear a hijab or not, so it is my choice and is more freedom. In my country I do not have that freedom. (Grace) [W]ithin a few weeks she was looking like Madonna on tour, the shortest shorts. I think she was relishing the chance to express herself. (Alice)

The practitioners spoke of the impossibility of trying to utilise static understandings of girls’ identities, as they engaged in this process of experimentation, growth, and change. The neo-liberal and humanist

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philosophies which largely underpin twenty-first-century British social work can frame religious practice as a private choice and can decentralise religion in understanding the lives of children in state care. While religious practice may be central to the everyday lives of some girls, practitioners being with them in religious spaces are not part of everyday social work practice. Carers were more likely to enter religious spaces with girls, but, for Eva, it was going with Helen to visit her church she thought provided a richer understanding of this individual girl. At Helen’s request, Eva attended church with her and went to a local café to eat food from her country of origin: ‘it was a whole day of getting to know who she is and part of her culture, a different side to her’ (Eva). It was in these spaces Helen first told Eva she wanted to move to the city and live more independently. Things could be said here that were difficult to verbalise in other spaces; the power dynamics had shifted. Helen is the cultural expert here, comfortable with navigating place. By entering this space with Helen, however, Eva is disrupting the dominant narrative about what social work is within her organisation, pushing at the boundaries of what everyday practice can be. Eva framed this day as outside her normal practice, but still within her construction of the social work role. It is a construction her organisation resisted: ‘it took me a while to convince my manager’ (Eva). The girls, however, felt that developing richer understandings of the meanings religious practice had for them was central to understanding them as unique individuals, and to helping them find strategies to manage the uncertainties of their lives.

Transnational Spaces: ‘We will probably never know where her family are’ The practitioners talked of girls’ family relationships as highly significant, but said most girls had no contact with family members outside the UK. They thought that wanting to remain in the country may lead some children to stay silent about family members abroad, fearful they would be un-categorised as separated and deported. Mia maintained some connections with extended family, but the unpredictable nature of communication in virtual spaces could be emotionally difficult to manage: ‘I have a lot of stress, my friend or my family in [country of origin] call me and tell me bad news … and really I feel depression’ (Mia). As for many children living in state care, the girls could feel disloyal when new attachments were

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formed or life choices were made without parental agreement. Some girls had maintained contact with siblings, but these relationships could be affected by decisions made during migration journeys and it could take time for these to re-establish: ‘initially she [Helen] didn’t want any contact with her older brother, who she felt abandoned her’ (Eva). All the practitioners were aware that, in some political contexts, family contact may not be safe for young migrants and their family members, and saw the girls themselves as the best judges of these risks. There were also concerns that traffickers could pose as family members, so, in the first weeks after arrival, all contacts were mediated by practitioners. Traffickers sometimes tell girls they are being taken to their families as a means of control, and to ensure compliance. Girls can then spend years navigating the sharp contrast between the traffickers’ narrative of family reunion and the reality of continued separation: I’ve got a young girl who believes her parents are here in the UK and that she was being brought to be with them but we don’t know where they are and we can’t find them. Immigration and the police have judged that she was trafficked here and was probably being brought here to work in prostitution. We will probably never know where her family are. Addressing that with her without getting her very, very upset is challenging. (Agnes)

Containing girls’ complex feelings about their separation from family was emotional work which also impacted the practitioners. They, too, had to manage the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened in the past and what this meant for families in the present: ‘was she sold by her parents to the traffickers? Or have we got these parents who will never know what happened to their child?’ (Agnes). All children in state care can be living with partial and contested stories about family. Life-story work is a well-­ established tool, which aims to create a safe space in which a child can begin to explore and resolve their complex feelings about their past (Burnell & Vaughn, 2008). It is premised, however, on the idea that practitioners hold the information and share it with the child, a situation that is often reversed in work with young migrants. Tools do exist to support migrant children to share stories about themselves and their past, such as journey mapping or ‘Tree of Life’ work (Jacobs, 2018), but none were mentioned by the practitioners in this research, and these tools still involve emotional work from young people and professionals.

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It was Elaine who most clearly described her struggle with the lack of information about girls’ pasts. This is unsurprising, given social work assessment is based on the collection and analysis of historical information in order to make sense of the present (Payne, 2020). Elaine spoke of her work with Clara, a girl she had been working with for six months. Elaine was finding it hard to stay in a state of ‘not knowing’: There’s no memories, well there is memories but only that she can tell us. She can’t show us a picture and say well this is when I was young. This is when I was a baby … most children in the UK would have that. It worries me that, you know. In ten years’ time she’s not going to have any reminder or any memories. (Elaine)

Elaine speaks of Clara’s loss—of family, of childhood, and of memories—a situation which Elaine was finding it hard to emotionally ‘hold’ (Ruch, 2012). Elaine struggled to identify spaces where this uncertainty could be ‘held’ for her. When she talks of her plan to start life-story work with Clara, it is unclear who this work is designed to benefit most. Even when forms of family were maintained, there was little evidence that practitioners saw girls as developing their subjectivities across transnational spaces (Nunn et al., 2015). There were some examples of transnational family relationships, but no examples of practitioners making contact with parents to seek their consent or hear their views, even though none of the girls were the subject of Care Orders and the local authorities therefore had no legal parental responsibility for them. Clara was in telephone contact with her mother, but Elaine struggled to place Clara’s family in her drawing of Clara’s network, only considering this when she was asked about them. There were some contradictions in her account—Elaine said Clara could call her mother but that she herself was unable to consult with her about decisions. There appeared to be no organisational model of supported consultation with transnational parents Elaine could draw on: [S]he’s able to contact them every two weeks but she wasn’t doing this. She said this was due to her Mum having some problems with her brother … it’s really difficult when they can’t speak English but not impossible. It would be really good I think, to speak to parents of the young people. (Elaine)

Although the significance of family relationships is embedded in social work practice with children, the girls in this research were largely

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managing transnational relationships alone. This is, in part, because global social work is still grappling with its role in virtual spaces and the boundary between privacy, safeguarding, and facilitation (Picornell-Lucas & Peláez, 2022). Organisational models of family ‘contact’, developed from experiences of arranging face-to-face encounters with family members, are becoming outmoded for many children in the twenty-first century. The findings of this research suggest that, in the context of forced migration and separation, newer models of social work with transnational families may be required.

Girlhood to Womanhood: ‘We absolve ourselves of responsibility too easily’ When Salam left her foster carer at 18 she went to live on a bustling city street, in a building which housed 30 young people living ‘independently’ after being in state care. Salam’s room was brightly painted, decorated with posters that a friend had brought from her country of origin. Salam said her electricity had ‘broken’ one day, so she rang her previous social worker, Theresa, who asked her to look for a letter from the electricity company. Salam found several letters in a pile of unopened post. She said she didn’t understand the formal English and any ‘official looking’ letters made her anxious, so she left them unopened. When she read the word ‘court’ Salam was frightened, but Theresa had ‘sorted it out’ and the electricity came back on. Salam was proud at surviving what had happened in her past and making a new life for herself in England. Yet, as this example shows, she also felt cut adrift from the everyday support that had sustained her in state care: I struggle for a lot of things. Even though I am under social worker … you don’t have someone to look after you, to tell you the good thing and the bad thing. It’s very hard in here. (Salam)

Salam arrived in the UK at 15, and the length of time between arrival and her expected move to ‘independence’ felt too short: ‘I just begged my social worker, “please I just want to stay in here” and I asked my Mum [carer], “please Mum”. No ready. Wasn’t ready’ (Salam). Salam was able to stay with her carer for six months after she turned 18, following advocacy from her social worker, but moving from a carer she had grown to trust was still a mixed experience. There are concerns about the expectations

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placed on all young people in English state care to live more ‘independently’ at 18, and care-experienced adults are at the forefront of campaigns to develop a ‘Staying Close’ approach (ECLCM, 2017). Joe felt English social care was working to an antiquated model: [W]e haven’t moved on with how society’s moved on in terms of parenting, I think that we absolve ourselves of responsibility too easily … I think we leave people in inadequate accommodation … as corporate parents I think we do a really bad job. (Joe)

Without secure legal status in the UK, separated young people are at risk of being deported or living precariously without the right to work, to claim welfare benefits, or to access a range of health and social services. Accommodation and subsistence monies can be provided by ‘Care Leaving’ teams, but this first requires a Human Rights Assessment to establish whether a person can safely return to their country of origin to avoid destitution. Although this means young migrants may (initially) be housed, the variation in the physical quality of accommodation was a concern in this research: ‘most of the accommodation is quite grotty, even the stuff provided by the government’ (Susan). Some of the practitioners had worked with young men who had been deported after 18—‘it was one of the worst things that I’ve ever dealt with as a social worker, really, really upsetting’ (Agnes)—but they had not experienced this amongst the smaller number of girls. The tensions between the social work role with children and the state response to adult asylum-seekers and forced migrants collide within ‘triple pathway planning’. Triple planning involves exploring with a young person how their needs could be met following the three possible immigration outcomes—returning to their country of origin (voluntarily or not), having legal status in the UK or remaining in the UK without secure status and with ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF). Here the contested role of social work at the borders of immigration comes into sharp focus. Triple planning created a paradox for the practitioners. They understood it was their role to make sure young migrants were informed about all possible futures and that they grasped the implications as much as possible. However, they also felt triple planning was a frightening and bureaucratic process young people resisted, and that it was equally their role to provide stability and minimise distress. Some practitioners disagreed politically

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with the immigration system and struggled with their role in the process. It was an element of their work all the practitioners particularly disliked: [H]aving those conversations with young people about what it would be like to have to return to the country they have fled from and they are terrified of going back to. Having to force them to think about how would you stay safe? It’s the only part of my job that I hate. I do hate doing that. It’s awful. (Faith)

Organisational structures could allow practitioners to avoid fully considering the impact of what might happen at 18, something made more possible when young people themselves avoided addressing this. Constructing the role of children’s social work around notions of childhood ending at 18 meant professional responsibility often stopped when a girl was ‘handed over’ to Care Leaving teams as an adult. In some authorities specialist teams continue to work with young migrants after 18, in recognition of their particular legal and social position. This had been the case with the team in this project, but the organisation had stopped this on the grounds that it was inequitable. Alice thought the ending of responsibility at 18 could be used as form of strategic avoidance: ‘I think if you only work with them up to 18 you dodge it, it’s an emotional load’ (Alice). When a girl’s precarious future was emotionally unbearable for professionals, a narrative of hope could be foregrounded in a defended response against the anxiety of the unknown. There are dangers, however, that when professionals also narrow their gaze to the present it may lead to a form of mutual denial. This may leave girls unprepared and uninformed about what may happen if they do not have secure legal status in the UK when they reach 18: At 17 she doesn't yet have legal status in UK and the worker was attempting to talk about triple planning. This was silenced by others in the meeting they didn’t want to hear it, just said ‘oh she’ll get there, she’s so bright, she’s so able’. So they all sat around and talked about the university plan as if it was a given, as if it was cruel not to allow her to have this. (Autoethnographic Diary 2017)

The girls themselves could sometimes focus on the ‘here and now’ in strategic and self-protective acts when the future was unknown and likely to be precarious, but this did not mean abandoning their aspirations. In

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many ways Salam, Mia, and Grace’s stories are stories of success. When the research project ended Salam was living in a city close to her church and she had friends, accommodation, a job, and a college course. Grace was living with a ‘landlady’ she liked and was attending college where she had friends. Salam and Grace both saw their refugee status as essential in their ability to forge new lives in the UK. Salam was looking ahead to applying for British citizenship. Mia was less certain of her future, but had sought out relationships with professionals and friends that rebuilt her confidence and they were supporting her adjustment to life in England. The practitioners said legal security was fundamental to what, they saw, as the largely successful lives of Helen, Sofi, Sophia, Ada, Hester, Joy, and Onika. When this project ended, Mia and Tao were still waiting for a decision. Refugee status was not a panacea, however, and Salam and Grace both spoke of how precarious and fragile their lives could still feel in the UK.  The practitioners thought girls were more likely to get favourable asylum decisions than boys but acknowledged they had little evidence to support this idea. Salam had a decision within weeks of her application to the Home Office and described her relief: ‘I cried oh my God, is that right? Is it me? They give me papers? Actually they give it me in 21 days, in short time. To get the paper is like thank you to God’ (Salam).

References Burnell, A., & Vaughn, J. (2008). Remembering never to forget and forgetting never to remember: Rethinking life-story work. In B. Luckock & M. Lefevre (Eds.), Direct work with children. BAAF. Crawley, H. (2011). Asexual, apolitical beings: The interpretation of children’s identities and experiences in the UK asylum system. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37(8), 1171–1184. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X. 2011.590645 Every Child Leaving Care Matters (ECLCM). (2017, February). The key elements required to comply with the ECLCM vision of an acceptable STAYING CLOSE placement. https://eclcm.org/wp-­content/uploads/2017/02/170222-­ ECLCM-­Staying-­close-­CARING-­TEAMS-­February-­2017.pdf Froggett, L. (2002). Love, hate and welfare: Psychosocial approaches to policy and practice. Policy Press. Jacobs, S.  F. (2018). Collective narrative practice with unaccompanied refugee minors: “The Tree of Life” as a response to hardship. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 23(2), 279–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359104 517744246

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Massey, D. B. (1994). Space, place and gender. Polity Press. Ni Raghallaigh, M. N. (2011). Religion in the lives of unaccompanied minors: An available and compelling coping resource. British Journal of Social Work, 41(3), 539–556. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcq136 Nunn, C., McMichael, C., Gifford, S. M., & Correa-Velez, I. (2015). Mobility and security: The perceived benefits of citizenship for resettled young people from refugee backgrounds. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–18. Payne, M. (2020). How to use social work: Theory in practice: An essential guide. Policy Press. Picornell-Lucas, A., & Peláez, A. L. (2022). The digital citizenship of children and adolescents: Challenges for social work education. Research in Education and Learning Innovation Archives, 28, 32–37. https://doi.org/10.7203/ realia.28.23001 Refugee Education UK. (2022). I am an asylum seeker: What are my options for higher education? Retrieved January 16, 2022, from https://www.reuk.org/ hefaq-­asylumseeker Ruch, G. (2012). Where have all the feelings gone? Developing reflective and relationship-based management in child-care social work. British Journal of Social Work, 42(7), 1315–1332. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcr134 Treisman, K. (2017). Working with relational and developmental trauma in children and adolescents. Routledge. Voe, P. A. D. (2002). Symbolic action: Religion’s role in the changing environment of young Somali women. Journal of Refugee Studies, 15(2), 234–246. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/15.2.234 Wetherell, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: A new social science understanding. SAGE.

PART III

Implications and New Directions

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Disrupting the Giant

The stories Salam, Grace, and Mia shared in this research suggest that migration as a separated girl is an embodied social, cultural, and political experience. It is impacted by the gendered and racialised meanings that are attached to their bodies by themselves and others as they move through particular spaces over time. Ideas of gender, of femininity and masculinity, are not universal, but embedded within place. Place can be thought of as ‘a contentious reality that shapes girls’ lives’, where girls ‘struggle to assert their rights to territory and autonomous spaces, to represent their experiences of belonging’ (Rentschler & Mitchell, 2016, p. 2). The girls considered in this project were navigating the borders of girlhood as much as they were navigating the borders of citizenship and childhood.

Relational (Un)becoming As they move through the interconnected micro-spaces of their lives, we can think of girls moving along unique trajectories (Massey, 2005). When girls’ trajectories intersect with those of individual carers and practitioners, this creates a unique encounter. Rather than encounters being the site where policy and procedure are simply acted out, however, the findings suggest they are interpretations within unique events: ‘a locus of the generation of new trajectories and new configurations’ ( Massey, 2005, p. 141), not just for the girls but for practitioners as well. All the participants spoke © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5_9

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of the micro-adjustments they were making within each encounter, and all were engaged in a continual, relational production of self (Weigert, 2010). Through the development of these new configurations, the practice space becomes the site of possibility: [T]he spatial in its role of bringing distinct temporalities into new configurations sets off new social processes … this emphasises the nature of narratives, of time itself, not being about the unfolding of some internalised story (some already established identities) - but about interaction and the process of the constitution of identities. (Massey, 2005, p. 71)

The findings highlight that separated girls are not passive recipients of services, troubling the idea that practitioners are the sole ‘agents of change’ (Jeffery, 2011) in the spaces of state care. Instead, the girls were actively working to engage their carers and social workers in the changes they were trying to make for themselves. The participants spoke of the women the girls were aspiring to become, most frequently described as independent, educated, and employed. Not all the girls had arrived with such aspirations and UK gender relations were reshaping what they now felt was possible for them. The girls saw their social workers as sources of power they wished to access, but the process of change they were engaged in was being constantly negotiated. They wanted adults to offer both practical and affective forms of care, to understand their fears and aspirations, and to provide clear guidance about what was possible in this new country. There could be tensions between a girl’s wish for adult care and her wish for more independence, a common relational positioning between young migrants and parental figures, linked to the youth projects they are engaged in (Bloch et al., 2011). For the practitioners, these complexities made providing care in the present, and supporting future aspirations, a delicate process, fraught with ethical dilemmas. This was particularly the case when a lack of legal security made girls’ futures precarious and when resources were limited or unavailable. Massey (1994) argues we need to acknowledge the role of place in how identities are formed. She draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) notion of molecular becoming to consider identity formation, although she argues that time and space are more intertwined than they allow. Nayak and Kehily (2008) suggest all young people are engaged in a gendered process of coming-into-being, but Massey and Deleuze share a more fluid notion of becoming (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013), one which rejects the idea of

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ever reaching an eventual state of being: ‘a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin or destination … a line of becoming has only a middle’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 293). The situated nature of molecular becoming (ibid.) was apparent in the accounts of girls responding to the unpredictable ways their bodies were constructed, and the shifting ways they were present in place. As girls who were moving without adult family members, their bodies were often seen as ‘out of place’, and their presence could disrupt spatial notions of childhood, girlhood, and belonging. The girls were active in these spaces—while some spatial constructions were welcomed, others were rejected. Becoming therefore also entailed a parallel process of unbecoming, of moving away from particular identities and making yourself (in)visible in particular ways—as Salam did when she told people she was from Brazil to avoid being seen as a refugee. The practitioners’ own stories could also be understood as forms of molecular becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) as they rejected and adopted their shifting identities as social workers, as adults, as citizens, and/or as migrants themselves. Change can therefore be understood as a relational process—while some changes were welcomed, others were resisted or disrupted. The girls and the practitioners were forming their identities in new relational spaces, and change was an internal process as much as a social one. Mia, Salam, and Grace were continually re-writing their stories-so-far (Massey, 2005), as their understandings of what was possible changed over time. Gender was embodied as a series of everyday practices (Nayak & Kehily, 2008), and girlhood was consistently linked to place. Moving away from feeling unsafe and devalued as a girl was central to the ways Grace and Salam understood their migration, and they wanted to access public spaces previously unavailable to them. It is important to avoid a post-colonial view of the UK as a moral superior here (Danewid, 2017), and recognise that women have also left the UK to forge identities elsewhere (Featherstone & Painter, 2013). Spatial constructions of gender were fluid, creating tensions and opportunities the girls could articulate, but which took emotional energy to navigate. Think of Grace watching British TV in her living space as she explored what it might mean to be a Muslim girl in the UK and then naming herself as an ‘asylum-seeker’ in her youth group. When unwanted constructions were bestowed (Weigert, 2010), the girls often challenged these or moved out of these micro-spaces if they were able. Moving away from unwanted constructions was more difficult when these were linked to dominant cultural discourses. Grace and Salam

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said they had to leave their countries of origin to find new constructions of girlhood and womanhood. In the UK the girls actively avoided spaces where young men from their country of origin were present, staying away from power relations they believed would fix them within notions of girlhood they had rejected for themselves. The girls also had more control over which identities were foregrounded when these were less visible on their bodies. As a Muslim girl who chose to wear a hijab, Grace was continually navigating binary constructions of passivity and dangerousness, but she chose who to tell about her immigration status. Salam chose who to tell about her Christian faith and her immigration status but, as a black girl, had to continually navigate the sexualisation and racialisation of her body. While all the practitioners recognised that gender relations altered across cultural spaces, they took different positions on the importance of gender in their own professional relationships. Unpicking gender from other intersecting identities is highly problematic in small data sets, and practitioners could be reluctant to generalise from their experience of working with only one or two girls. One participant said she did not feel gender made any difference in her work. Yet the same practitioner linked being young and female to increased risk of physical and sexual harm, and all the accounts included some highly gendered language. Most practitioners said working with girls was a different experience to working with boys but struggled to verbalise this difference. It was as much a sensed experience as an analytical conclusion. All the practitioners connected being female with increased risks from adult males, but differentiated this from personal fragility, describing girls they worked with as resilient and emotionally strong. There was no overall consensus on the significance of gender, although given the highly contested nature of identity debates this is unsurprising. Bhatti-Sinclair (2011) says that a person’s foundational identity comes from their ethnicity, but this research found that while ethnicity was important, it was not foregrounded over gender, religion, or age. Instead, these identities worked together, shifting in focus as different constructions emerged and different spaces were discussed. Weigert (2010) argues that all relational identities involve inequality, because the identification of self necessitates an identification of the ‘other’, and this involves a process of societal ‘ranking’. In other words, we look to others to identify ourselves and to position each other in power: ‘the dynamics that generate inequality operate at both the individual and collective moments of identity formation and bestowal’ (ibid., p. 256). When

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Alice describes how some young migrants overlook the resources they have been given to claim she has done nothing for them, she is bestowing identities of the ungrateful teenager and the ungrateful migrant. Here Alice is occupying: ‘an affective subject position as a warm, hospitable and powerful host, whose generosity and largesse is extended to others who turn out to be ungrateful wretches’ (Wetherell, 2012, p. 8). In other moments Alice constructed Hester as resilient and strong, positioning herself as a facilitator or guide. Some ‘bestowed’ identities (Weigert, 2010), formed within gendered power relations, could render girls socially invisible. Grace rejected the notions of girlhood dominant in her country of origin, saying this limited her access to public spaces and dictated the clothes she wore. Migration led her to develop new gender practices in new spaces, but although Grace was now socially included as a girl, she found herself excluded because of her religion and refugee status. Massey (2005) would understand these identity bestowings as acts of spatial power, attempts to fix the boundaries of place and make a claim about who legitimately occupies it—in the narratives of Grace’s first and second carers the UK is for Christian, white citizens. This exclusionary practice places migrants low in spatialised hierarchies of belonging (Back et al., 2012), in Grace’s case framing her as ‘other’ in state care and in the UK. These narratives of inclusion and exclusion could also be understood as attempts to place children within hierarchies of care—think of the reported comments that migrant children were taking placements from ‘our’ children. Bestowed identities are not defining, however, and can be rejected. Grace acted and asked her social worker to move her to a new living space; Joe challenged narratives of exclusion in his organisation.

Meaning-Making in the Micro-space Wetherell (2012) argues it is relational practices that build the micro-­ space—our ‘small worlds’ (p. 81)—and that we understand each other in encounters through forms of joint affective-discursive practices. The ways we speak, the words we use, and our embodied acts are all implicated in how we make sense of each other: ‘we … need to locate affects, in actual bodies and social actors, negotiating, making decisions, evaluating, communicating, inferring and relating’ (ibid., p. 159). While girls and adults may occupy the same space, they are positioned differently in the power relations that shape each encounter. Each encounter is a unique relational experience, but this research suggests that place also shapes the

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meaning-making that occurs, and that different spatial relations can create different understandings. Place is a ‘particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings’ (Massey, 1994, p.  5), an event in space/time when power-gender relations are working to fix meanings but where such containment is impossible: ‘the identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple’ (ibid., p. 5). Understandings between separated girls and practitioners emerge through relational ways of thinking and feeling, funnelled through the gender-power dynamics that shape these practice spaces (see Fig.  9.1). The social work encounter is a purposeful encounter, formed through legal, organisational, and political contexts that shape the social work role. It is always situated in time and space. Relational understandings are filtered through lenses which girls and practitioners use in this space to see each other, and impacted by who the young women and practitioners are trying to be seen as. While understanding is situated, it is also influenced by past experiences. The affective patterning (Wetherell, 2012) that girls and practitioners bring into the encounter space are also working to shape

Fig. 9.1  Spatial, relational understandings

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the lenses they apply, and may affect which ways of thinking and ways of feeling are rejected or re-adjusted. It may be unhelpful, then, to think of a girl presenting herself, almost as a ‘fait accompli’, to a practitioner or carer who then begins to understand her. The participants in this research described a series of more situated and relational encounters where meanings altered over time. Understanding was sometimes framed as information gathering—collecting a biographical account which could be written down and passed on to others, a model favoured in neo-liberal models of knowledge (Froggett, 2002). For the girls, making yourself ‘knowable’ meant providing a narrative to a social worker, a difficult process of judging what to say and when. Girls are active participants in this mutual process of meaning-making and can recognise the significance of the ways state actors see them (Larkin & Lefevre, 2019). Mia, Salam, and Grace all described a sense that professionals wanted the ‘right answer’ from them, particularly on arrival, but were uncertain about what that ‘right’ answer may be. However, the girls also described moments of connection—embodied acts of care or a sense of being believed. When these sensed understandings were absent, encounters were more likely to be described in terms of miscommunication or exclusion. Meaning-making was therefore an affective process as much as it was an analytical one; it could involve multiple ways of thinking and feeling. Notably, all the participants described face-to-face encounters as the key space where the richest understandings emerged, and the girls made a particular link between consistent physical presence over time, engagement, feeling cared for, and feeling cared about. Care had multiple meanings, which could shift from moment to moment. The girls were troubled by disengaged or absent practitioners, wanting their social workers and carers to offer practical and emotional forms of care they could rely on. They described a sense of not being cared about as an individual if their social worker was physically or emotionally absent. Yet, although policy says support for unaccompanied children is most effectively provided within a stable, continuous relationship (DfE, 2017), the neo-liberal agenda continues to direct social work to the completion of measurable tasks (Harris, 2019). Although practical support was appreciated, the role of ‘humanitarian provider’ (Kohli, 2007) was not sufficient for the girls in this research; they wanted practitioners to engage with their emotional worlds. The practitioners themselves felt encounters were too rigidly framed by notions of the ‘social work visit’, which foregrounded particular types of knowledge and communication. Meeting

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girls in other spaces—at her suggestion or through negotiation—was felt to allow richer understandings to develop. This was not always enabled by the organisation, however, and practitioners had to disrupt dominant notions of social work practice to achieve this. The findings show social work at borders is complex and suggest decision-­making in threshold spaces is impacted by the affective practices of all state actors, including immigration officers. The girls wanted control over the stories they told and the pace at which they told them, but it was these stories that unlocked access to care and they were demanded in claims for asylum. This was a troubling paradox for the girls and the practitioners, made more challenging when border spaces were constructed through practices of exclusion, and informed by moral panics about migration and trafficking (Armillei, 2017; Cree et al., 2014). Girls were active and agentic within border spaces, but their ability to navigate place was compromised by their position in power relations, and by the physical and emotional impacts of their migration experiences. While the practitioners recognised their professional authority, they felt they were also placed low in hierarchies of power and that immigration processes dominated encounters. It was here that practitioners foregrounded notions of care as they worked to distinguish social work from immigration processes. This could be a defended response (Megele, 2015) to the powerlessness practitioners could feel in the face of immigration systems, but it could also be a way of disrupting these narratives, of re-humanising young migrants in the context of narratives that dehumanised. When a rich story-so-far was absent, as is usually the case with unaccompanied young people on arrival (Kohli, 2007), this could provoke anxiety in practitioners. ‘Holding’ the anxiety of uncertainty is central to the social work role (Ruch & Murray, 2011), but fluid and intersectional understandings could stall when the emotional aspects of the work were unsupported. More categorical ways of thinking could then dominate. Hierarchies were sometimes present in practitioners’ stories and could be linked to their own continual production of self (Weigert, 2010). When Elaine looked to Clara, for example, to identify herself as the skilled communicator and then experienced Clara’s silence, she categorised Clara as the foreign ‘other’ who needed help to learn English faster. Davies (2014) warns that this ‘listening-as-usual’ as a means of identifying ourselves involves a flawed process of drawing on pre-existing categories:

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[L]istening to the other, for the self-as-identity, is to judge against an imagined ideal and to find it wanting… lacking distance from its own listening it is also swept along by dominant ways of thinking and speaking, becoming what those modes of enunciation anticipate of it. Its own capacities for ethical thought and practice are limited by its primary attachment to the self-­ other binary, and to self’s survival. (ibid., p. 35)

There was evidence the practitioners found these ‘imagined ideals’ unhelpful in face-to-face practice, where conceptual maps could jar against the embodied experience of being with a separated girl. When practitioners were able to interrogate the constructions available they could resist essentialising girls and shift their ways of thinking. When Eva encounters Helen and initially struggles to find effective ways of communicating in the threshold space, she avoids positioning Helen as the ‘problem’ by framing herself as the ‘stranger’—she is the one who has to work to bridge the communicative gap. These were the practitioners who described a process closer to what Davies (2014) calls ‘emergent listening’: [L]istening as a subject-as-intra-active-becoming opens up the possibility of valuing difference, not as categorical difference, but as an emergent, differentiating or becoming. Such listening involves stretching the ears, and all the senses. It requires a focused attention, an intensification of attention to the other, and to the happening in-between. This attention works through the most minute of details. (ibid., p. 42)

Here Davies (2014) is describing an embodied, relational listening, different to ‘listening-as-usual’, although she acknowledges these are entangled in our interactions. Even when participants were rejecting some categories, Alice’s ‘Daily Mail’ view of Hester, for example, these were still present in their thinking and could only be resisted when they were acknowledged. Social work does not operate in a social vacuum that excluding discourses cannot penetrate (Masocha & Simpson, 2011). The richest descriptions of girls came from practitioners who were open to the potential for change in themselves and who approached encounters as a process of micro-adjustment with the young women, a joint enterprise of molecular becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). These micro-­adjustments were still forms of affective practice (Wetherell, 2012), however, and emotional labour was needed to sustain them.

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Connections to Previous Spaces These processes of situated becoming, however, do not mean that past experiences are left behind as people move from space to space or that girls and practitioners come into encounters as blank slates. There were multiple examples of past experiences affecting meaning-making. Wetherell (2012) explains these persistent emotional responses in terms of affective patterning, describing how some practices ‘stabilise, solidify and become habit’ (p. 14) within particular relations and spaces. While assessment processes require practitioners to gather information about a child’s past relationships, the girls said they did not expect practitioners to have an understanding of their lived experiences in previous spaces. They wanted practitioners to understand their individual stories over time, and to provide knowledge as their own cultural experts (Boddy, 2014). A lack of knowledge could even be experienced as safety, differentiating UK practitioners from adults they had experienced as unsafe and untrustworthy in other spaces. Yet there was a key tension between the girls’ wish for practitioners to understand their unique history and the difficulty they experienced in telling the stories of their past. Gender practices (Nayak & Kehily, 2008) could also stabilise into affective patterns. Having spent their early lives in spaces where being female was constructed in particular ways, the girls were now occupying spaces where constructions could be very different. Concepts of childhood and adolescence also vary across cultures (Hopkins, 2010), so gender practices were also linked to adolescent identity formation as girls adjusted to life in the UK (Treisman, 2017). In these contexts we could think of molecular becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) as re-becoming, as reshaping in a new social space and unpicking the affective patterns associated with the past. This could involve negotiating an emotional connection to past relationships, which influenced whether girls moved towards or away from constructions in UK spaces. Treisman (Treisman, 2017) describes the relational ‘me, you and we’ maps that children form in early relationships, and which provide the interpretative, relational lenses through which they understand themselves and others. For Salam and Helen, for example, Christianity was a connection to a missing parent they wanted to maintain. This meant trying to embody the constructions of modest girlhood promoted in their Christian churches, but then having to negotiate the tension between these constructions and gender practices in other spaces.

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Some practitioners worked to make sense of each girl’s relational connections to family—and to friends, relatives, and neighbours—and the meanings these had for her in the new spaces of her life. Other practitioners understood connection to family in terms of a painful absence, sometimes making a referral for family tracing and then focussing on supporting girls’ relationships in the present. Contacting family members in the context of forced migration has risks, but even when girls maintained some contact with parents or family members, there was little evidence of organisations supporting transnational families. Expectations that practitioners would consult with the parents did not seem to extend to parents who were beyond the borders of the UK. For young women fleeing violence, some affective patternings could be understood as relational trauma, where belief systems can become rigid: ‘like powerful songs replaying over and over again, or a camera being stuck on a zoomed-in shot’ (Treisman, 2017, p. 15). There were concerns from the practitioners that trauma narratives could dominate and that girls’ strengths could be overlooked when they were constructed only as the fragile and vulnerable refugee girl. Navigating these affective patternings required robust relational work from girls and practitioners, and there could be gendered elements to these interactions. Joe’s awareness of Sophia’s relational trauma, for example, led him to actively work to position himself as a ‘safe male’ in his emerging relationship with her. One aspect of this was naming the potential fear implicated in that encounter, a form of emotional scaffolding which supports young people to manage their felt responses in a process of co-regulation (Treisman, 2017). Salam describes a similar process in her encounters with Theresa, where she began to disentangle her affective patterning (Wetherell, 2012) and re-­ write variations of her story-so-far (Massey, 2005). The absence of a shared language could make communication slower, and both practitioners and girls found this frustrating. It is important to acknowledge interpreters also influence spatial dynamics and are more than ‘translation machines’ (Morsch, 2019). The findings suggest this affected what could be said and heard, and that more needs to be known about interpreted encounters with migrant children and interpreters’ experiences of these relational spaces. Yet, girls’ encounters with practitioners and carers could offer: ‘a moment of hesitation in emotion, when it is possible to launch body and mind on new alternative trajectories and choose other forms of becoming’ (Wetherell, 2012, p. 9). Wetherell’s (ibid.) idea of ‘choosing’ new becomings in these

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relational encounters, however, suggests a more straightforward process than the data described. It was not a matter of choosing a new form of becoming and inhabiting it, but a series of moments in which girls and practitioners were continually working to shift their relational responses and adjust their internal maps. Telling the stories of their past could be part of a process of moving forward for girls, a staging post in the process of change, but it was often emotionally painful and they feared not being believed. Stories could be spoken in one swift account or in disjointed pieces over a series of encounters. Once told, the practitioners could become the keepers of the stories, the shared holders of past events, but feelings of shame and fear were sometimes involved and the girls wanted control over what information was shared. Although they may have developed trust in individual practitioners, this had not extended to the organisations they represented. The practitioners recognised the significance of acting as a holder of stories, and these supported their understanding of each girl as a unique individual. Stories of the past were also used to make sense of the present—of a girl’s behaviour and responses—and could be greeted with a sense of relief at no longer working ‘in the dark’. Organisational and immigration processes, however, were felt to limit the mutual ‘moments of hesitation’ when these stories might emerge. Significantly, practitioners were not interchangeable for the girls, because when their social worker changed the relational experience changed. Having continuity of relationship with carers and practitioners was seen as vitally important, because ruptures in these relationships could disrupt girls’ processes of change and the extent to which girls felt cared about as individuals. This troubles the organisational discourse of practitioners as interchangeable ‘cogs’ in a machine.

Trusting and (Dis)believing Affective-discursive practices (Wetherell, 2012) can also work to connect understanding with feelings of belief or disbelief—as in the tension between Susan knowing about migrants crossing the Mediterranean and her simultaneous struggle to feel a sense of belief in Joy’s story. We could understand this as a way of avoiding the emotional discomfort of imagining this journey, as a defended response (Megele, 2015). It is also an attempt to fix the boundaries of space (Massey, 2005)—Susan’s locality is not a place where these things have happened to people. Salam described

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a similar disconnection between wanting to trust Theresa and her embodied resistance to this. Framing trust and belief as static positions therefore seems unhelpful. As Wetherell (Wetherell, 2012) says, and the data suggests: [A]ffective practice unfolds relatively automatically with little conscious monitoring… it often emerges ‘unbidden’, very quickly, too fast for the kind of thoughtful strategic planning novelists often attribute to their characters.. we move in and out of ‘knowing’ what we are about during this flow. (ibid., p. 129)

Wetherell (2012) notes that locating affect within bodies means acknowledging that our emotional responses can be felt before they are consciously known. Multiple sensations and thoughts can emerge unbidden in social work encounters. This raises questions, then, about whether the notion of a static, cognitive ‘culture of disbelief’ is helpful when considering micro-level encounters, and whether it helps us find ways of minimising feelings of mistrust. Cooper and Lousada (2011) remind us that all users of welfare services are initially ‘strangers’ to practitioners. Social work with young migrants is the offer of care to ‘the absolute, unknown, anonymous other’ (Derrida 2000b, p.  25 quoted in Sirriyeh, 2013). Of course, practitioners are also strangers to the young migrants too. This may be a difficult moment to argue that complex feelings about ‘others’ need be acknowledged, when the rhetoric of the foreign ‘other’ is drawn on by white nationalists (Danewid, 2017), and when the immigrant is portrayed as a type of ‘folk devil’ (Bowling & Westenra, 2018). Counter-­ narratives can frame the refugee as perpetually guileless, leaving us with a binary that may be politically expedient, but one which this research suggests can be difficult to utilise in face-to-face encounters. Massey (2004) argues that variety is an intrinsic part of place, but that this constant change has an uneven impact which invokes a range of feelings. Cooper and Lousada (2011) suggest strangers more easily provoke feelings of hostility than compassion, and that there is a continual ‘oscillation’ between these positions which welfare services need to contain: ‘how precariously balanced is the sense of equilibrium towards the stranger and how pernicious are the consequences when the balance is lost’ (ibid., p. 89). Practitioners may negotiate this tension by reframing the ‘stranger’ as the innocent refugee child, and girls may reframe practitioners as parents or siblings. Yet, while girls may well be in need of adult protection in border spaces, this research

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shows how the notion of the agentless refugee child can quickly become unworkable in practice. Recall Susan’s struggle to apply this construction to the assertive young migrants she encountered and the disconnect with the ‘shell-shocked, traumatised’ children she had been expecting. The affective dimensions of practice emerged strongly in this research. Practitioners described holding the hope for young women, when they could not envisage a positive future for themselves—think of Theresa maintaining her view of Salam as a resilient young woman when Salam felt unable to leave the house. The data suggests a projected future-self can support girls to act agentically, and engaged practitioners can support girls’ chosen trajectories. The precarity of youth migration, however, means not all projected futures are possible, and a focus on hope can then become an anxious and defended response (Megele, 2015), one that avoids thinking about a girl’s removal or destitution. These are difficult futures to consider, and it requires skilled communication to explore them, but it is difficult to imagine how girls can exercise their rights or participate in decision-making if practitioners manage their own distress through avoidance. For Cooper and Lousada (2011), maintaining the equilibrium between compassion and hostility requires organisations and practitioners to jointly contain the emotions provoked in practice. Yet the framing of practitioners as ‘cogs’ suggests the affective domain of practice was minimally acknowledged and supported in the organisations. Cogs are functional, unfeeling objects, but the practitioners’ accounts are full of the complex feelings evoked in their work—anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, and love. The girls’ accounts were similarly laden with emotion. It is not possible to judge how dominant or momentary the ‘cog’ discourse may be, but the practitioners did describe unreliable opportunities for critical reflection (Ruch, 2009), and few spaces where their own ‘moments of hesitation’ (Wetherell, 2012) could emerge. This may increase the possibility that practitioners find themselves caught in affective ruts (ibid.) and embedded in categorical thinking. Rather than thinking of a girl arriving with a single story of migration, then, the findings suggest narratives develop out of the process of continual ‘embodied meaning-making’ (Wetherell, 2012), which shapes the relational space in which practitioners and separated girls meet. Asking critical questions about spatial dynamics, and considering how power relations may be working to fix meanings, may be a valuable first step in

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identifying fixed constructions and developing more intersectional understandings. It may support practice which allows multiple stories to emerge.

Looking Beyond the Micro-space There is, of course, a wider political and legal context here. Social work encounters are formed within a complex web of national law, policy, and organisational practices which are formed within a global context. In the UK there is scant evidence of the state providing a model of containment and compassion towards people who arrive seeking asylum or opportunities for a better life. As Massey (1994) notes, [T]he particular mix of social relations which are thus part of what defines the uniqueness of any place is by no means all included within that place itself. Importantly it includes relations which stretch beyond - the global as part of what constitutes the local, the outside as part of the inside. (p. 5)

While Wetherell (2012) argues for the positive potential in moments of hesitation, Weinberg (2010) reminds us that social workers can also be engaged in ‘moments of ethical trespass’ (p. 41), and that decision-making can have negative repercussions for people, however unintended. Weinberg (ibid.) suggests that to strengthen ethical practice social workers need to look beyond the one-to-one relationship with service users, to consider ‘the broader structures and paradoxes that shape and limit practice’ (p. 40), and continually question the discourses which frame the structures in which social work operates. This returns us to the perennial debates about whether social work is primarily about the control and problematisation of the individual (Rose, 1993), supporting individual transformation (Adams et  al., 2005), or promoting social justice (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2013; Lavalette, 2019). Although there have been many critiques of the statutory response to separated children, these generally conclude with calls for support to be provided in different ways, rather than not at all. The girls in this research wanted their social workers to do more, not less. Social work organisations are interconnected sets of social relations which have multiple connections to other spaces, and these social relations are the ‘bearers of power’ (Massey 1994, p. 22). The girls described a keen awareness of the power differentials within each encounter at the micro-­ level, and their shifting feelings of dependence on and gratitude towards practitioners. The practitioners were themselves acutely aware of the

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power dynamics present in encounters and in the spaces beyond. Spatial power relations provided them with resources and authority to act, but they could also constrain—think of Eva moving herself back and forward from the multi-faceted institutional/national/bureaucratic Giant (Fig. 5.1 Eva’s Giant). The girls could similarly be moving towards, and away from, the forms of power embodied in practitioners. They could act to utilise this power, but they could also distance themselves from the Giant. This could be an emotional disengagement within encounters, or it could be physical—avoiding meetings or even going ‘missing’ from care. Massey (2004) notes that ‘mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power’ (p. 150). Practitioners could leave the border space or enter girls’ living spaces, but girls’ movement was more restricted, limited by their position as a ‘looked after’ child, by their age, by their gender, and by their limited knowledge of the UK. The precarity of life as a young migrant can create inequality of mobility, even as girls age into adulthood. Unsurprisingly, the girls in this research wanted more agency—more choices about their movement within and beyond the spaces of state care. The girls also wanted to leave state care when they were individually equipped to do so, rather than on the basis of their age. The binary split between constructions of ‘dependent’ childhood and ‘independent’ adulthood, however, means states can be reluctant to provide care after 18, and care-experienced campaigners are calling for a ‘staying close’ approach for all young people (ECLCM, 2017). For young migrants without a right to remain, at risk of deportation and destitution, the need for durable solutions—for permanency—is acute (Chase & Allsopp, 2021). Girls can be living without the ‘ontological security’ that a durable future may provide (Chase, 2013). This research suggests that feelings of precarity can reduce with refugee status but can still be present—Grace may have drawn her tree with more secure roots, but she was still actively seeking feelings of belonging in the UK. ‘Leaving Care’ teams can offer valuable support, sometimes standing between young people and destitution, but this is also time-limited. Salam was planning to apply for citizenship but was still unsettled by her precarious housing, opaque UK systems, and limited finances. Looking ahead she could not identify any adult who could offer the practical and emotional support she received from her ‘Personal Advisor’, support she knew would end when she was 21.

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Disrupting the Giant Social work has always been a contested profession, but it has never been a static one. Roles and structures changed multiple times in the last century (Freedberg, 2007), so current practice and policies do not define the profession and are never beyond challenge. Bourdieu argues social workers are ‘shot through with the contradictions of the state’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 184), caught between the bureaucracy of their organisations and their wish to promote the welfare of service users. Eva’s Giant can be seen to represent such a tension—a struggle between the practitioner she wishes to be and the agencies, laws, and processes that empower and restrict her. All the participants expressed frustration with gaps in state care responses, but each practitioner was navigating their own line between forms of practice they accommodated and forms they resisted. Masocha (2013) notes that practitioners can use a ‘doing the best we can’ discourse to account for the gaps between ‘ideal’ practice with asylum-seekers and what actually takes place. This may offer some emotional defence against a corroding sense of inadequacy in the face of poverty, inequality, and finite resources. Yet this research suggests that ‘doing the best we can’ is not a good enough response to separated girls experiencing forms of exclusion and insecurity. Over 20 years ago Jones (2001) asked some difficult questions that are as relevant to social work in 2021 as they were then, and which could now be applied across global contexts in the twenty-­ first century: [H]ow have we arrived at a situation in British society where, the experience for child asylum seekers might include state-sanctioned poverty, inequitable local authority provision and arbitrary detention? Furthermore, why has the social work profession singularly failed to provide critical scrutiny on the status and relationship of immigration and child care law and the erosion of children’s rights? (ibid., p. 265)

In the years since this was written border fences have continued to be built, national restrictionism has increased, and some European states have criminalised offering help—and care—to refugees (Fekete, 2018). In 2022, far right political parties have been voted in to power in Italy and Sweden, following campaigns that focussed on notions of national identity and monoculturalism. The impact of the ‘hostile environment’ in the UK has been powerfully documented (Bowling & Westenra, 2018;

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Farmer, 2017; Griffiths & Yeo, 2021), and its effects were apparent in this project. It is a continuing narrative that dehumanises, and one that social work has been called on to more actively resist. There are different ideas, however, about the form this resistance could take. In 2004, Humphries called for a restructuring of social work that would disengage practice from forms of internal immigration control and see the profession ‘beating a different drum’ (Humphries, 2004, p. 40). Writing from a radical social work perspective, she argues that the core values of social work are incompatible with being an arm of the ‘surveillance society’ (p. 36). Over 18 years later the profession is still struggling with its role in relation to immigration policy, questioning to what extent it is a counter-­ balance and to what extent a collusive partner. Yet this research suggests framing social workers as ‘agents of immigration control’ (Cohen, 2004) may be ultimately unhelpful. It ignores how practitioners can act agentically and overlooks the different ways they use their authority (Robinson & Masocha, 2017). This research highlights the difficulty of trying to utilise rigid categories to form rich understandings of human beings, and this applies as much to understanding social workers as it does to understanding separated girls. Practice can vary considerably within organisations and girls’ experiences of social workers can be diverse, as shown in data discussed here. Framing practitioners as unagentic enactors of law and policy also disregards their power to influence practice, as well as removing any of their responsibility to do so. It lets us off the hook too easily. It is difficult to imagine, though, how power relations and excluding practices can be disrupted if they are not acknowledged and critically analysed. The gulf between theory, research, and practice, and the ‘talking past each other’ that can occur, is a familiar debate in social work (Al-Ma’seb et  al., 2015). Feminist theories, critical race theory, queer theory, and intersectionality have a fragile hold in many UK social work spaces in the twenty-first century, although this is not the case in every country (Eyal-­ Lubling & Krumer-Nevo, 2016). A lack of frameworks, and concerns about essentialising children, can leave gender and its intersections largely unexamined. The significance of place and space is also under-theorised. Organisations may say they want practitioners to draw on research, but unreflective working cultures that frame time for reflection as a luxury can be significant barriers to critical thinking. Thinking theoretically remains important because it brings different, analytical lenses to social workers engaged in complex work. Bernard (Bernard, 2022) notes that intersectionality offers a framework that allows for ‘difficult conversations to take place about different forms of oppression’ (p. 135). In the context of youth

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migration, intersectional thinking may challenge practices that foreground immigration status and rethink narrow constructions, creating possibilities for richer understandings to emerge. Research has also shown that social work organisations which respond to the affective domains of practice are more able to tolerate risk, contain uncertainty, and support creative approaches (Cooper & Lousada, 2011; Ferguson, 2018; Froggett, 2002; Ruch & Murray, 2011). Yet, there were very few examples in this research of spaces where carers or practitioners could critically reflect and move away from binary or rigid thinking. This is not unexpected. UK policy has long struggled to recognise the complexities of relational encounters, presenting social work as a series of techno-rational tasks and ignoring more affective dimensions (Froggett et al., 2015). Perhaps this reflects the gendered ways in which the rational is still more socially valued than the emotional (Hustvedt, 2017)—social work is a highly feminised profession which has struggled to gain status in the UK. This research highlights that creating spaces where these difficult conversations can take place, and where affective-discursive practices (Wetherell, 2012) can be explored, is not an added luxury. It is an essential part of relationship-based, anti-oppressive, and critical social work (Fook, 2016; Ruch, 2009). Fook (2016) argues that a critical approach to social work involves creating ‘enabling micro-climates within more hostile macroclimates’ (p. 205). Similarly to Massey’s notion of the micro-space as a site of possibility (Massey, 2005), Fook notes that every individual has a sphere of influence in which they can act, and that these actions can create change within other spheres. Since 2010, services in the UK have been under sustained pressure from an austerity agenda that has systematically reduced public service funding (Lavalette, 2019), and limited social workers’ agentic and politicised action (Robinson & Masocha, 2017). Globally, practitioners and young migrants are navigating highly politicised spaces framed around restriction and border control. Yet, the findings show that practitioners can and do resist this. In the UK, neo-liberalism has framed social work as a procedural task, but the bureaucratic does not have to be carried into every encounter. The skilled communicators in this research were actively working to create an ‘enabling micro-climate’ (Fook, 2016) for separated girls, and focussing on both ‘doing’ and ‘being’ (Lefevre, 2018) in each space. Rather than passively waiting for adults to create these spaces, the girls were actively seeking relational connections they experienced as enabling. In places

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where their movement was restricted, the girls sought signs they were being valued, heard, and believed. Effective communication in these contexts was more than the transfer of information—it meant practitioners adapting their communication to place, engaging with girls’ physical and emotional states, and responding with embodied acts of care. The girls drew on these acts of care as resources that enabled them to navigate place—think of Grace’s description of a social worker holding her hand and bringing her chocolate at the border. Skilled, embodied communication and enabling critical practice (Fook, 2016) are shown to be inextricably linked. This is not, however, an argument for social work to focus on individualised care at the expense of collective action or organisational change. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) may argue the molecular (micro) level disrupts power at the molar (macro) level, but the ways in which this might happen are more opaque. There is an element of hope in Fook’s (2016) comment that the interconnected nature of contexts means that ‘we can assume that some kind of change will occur’ (p.  205). Yet, the variety of practice found in this research—and that I have witnessed in almost 30  years of social work—suggests that creating new spaces of practice would create more potential for change. The role of social work volunteers in the camps at Calais, France, shows that social work can find a productive role in forms of collective action, and that different forms of practice can emerge in different spaces. Responding to a perceived crisis of care in the Calais ‘Jungle’, a group of British social workers formed their own organisation, Social Workers Without Borders (SWWB). Drawing on Williams and Briskman (2015), who argue social justice work requires an ‘emotional connection with the nature of injustice’ (p.  3), they looked for ways to practise social work beyond the managerialist approaches commonly found in statutory organisations. To build relationships with young migrants and other volunteers, the practitioners adapted their practice within place. They let go of professional language that was meaningless in camp spaces, and foregrounded embodied acts of care and connection—making food and helping with activities for children. The knowledge created through these practices informed the development of ‘best interests’ assessments, primarily used for children and families’ appeals against immigration decisions (Wroe, 2019). The work of SWWB and other volunteer groups show how acts of care can be both disruptive and productive. Practitioners took the knowledge

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they gained in Calais back into statutory services, promoting debate about social work practice with people who migrate. Statutory social workers draw their authority to act from legal powers provided by the state (Ang, 2019), and SWWB itself navigates a precarious line between legality and resistance, between developing accountable processes and replicating rigid structures. Yet, the organisation continues to challenge the dominant construction of social work as only a statutory function and, in doing so, demonstrates that alternative forms of practice are possible. Following the dismantling of the camp by the French authorities, SWWB has provided assessments for legal challenges to immigration decisions which may separate children from a parent, not usually available from statutory social work agencies (Wroe, 2019). This group of children, at the cusp of separation, had been rendered invisible when social work constructed itself around statutory roles defined by the state—and therefore who the state wishes to draw attention to—rather than foregrounding a broader professional identity grounded in rights-based and value-based practice. Social workers have been criticised for oppressive practice which allows the denial of young migrants’ rights to go unchallenged (Cemlyn & Briskman, 2003), and rights-based approaches are not firmly embedded across the profession. Robust discussions about children’s rights were noticeably absent in the findings in this research, even though separated girls have a number of rights in law (Ang, 2019). Children in countries that are signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) have rights which include continuous, alternative care (UNICEF, 1989) and family reunification. The UK is a signatory, yet there was no robust challenge from social work when the British government withdrew children’s right to apply for family reunification in the UK.  It is NGOs and young migrants who are at the forefront of campaigns to re-establish routes to family reunion (Hummingbird Project, 2020). Notions of values and rights are still developed within structures of power, and the meanings attached to them still need to be examined in reflective spaces. Westernised ideas of human rights can be implicated in notions of neo-colonial ‘rescuing’ which fix black bodies as ‘charitable subjects’ (Danewid, 2017). Yet, providing care on the basis of rights— rather than ever-shifting notions of worthiness—can offer an alternative to flawed categorisation processes. Supporting girls to enact and defend their rights may also offer alternative routes to protection. Research with children experiencing exploitation in the UK suggested practice which

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downplays children’s rights and agency can work against developing the trusting relationships that reduce risk (Lefevre et al., 2017). This requires rights-based narratives to be embedded in social work education and in organisations, to become part of the everyday language of practice. It must be acknowledged that the emotional and physical energy social work demands can leave practitioners with few resources to channel into activism or to form connections beyond their organisations. One of the strongest messages from this research was the significance of positive, sustaining relational connections, not only for the girls but for the practitioners. Joe said his practice was supported by his activism with people who shared his value base. Other practitioners valued feeling part of a sustaining, collective voice within specialist teams for separated children. While practitioners are individually accountable for their work, the best route to challenge and change is often a collective one (Ferguson & Lavalette, 2013; Wroe et  al., 2019). Migration, austerity, and neo-liberalism are global issues, so engaging with international debates can offer ways of reconnecting to value-based social work (Jönsson & Kojan, 2017). This is not to suggest that local contexts are unimportant, and ideas about internationalised social work can too easily blur into post-colonial and hegemonic practices (Dominelli, 2014). However, social work can look very different when viewed from different spaces and through different lenses, and meanings can shift. The dominance of immigration narratives do not have to render social work impotent. Given the challenges of practice with young migrants in climates of exclusion, spaces where dilemmas, resources, and ideas can be shared may act as significant ‘enabling micro-climates’ (Fook, 2016), for social work practitioners and for inter-agency professionals. Perhaps the most sustaining, creative, and disruptive connections, however, may be with—and between—separated girls themselves. Beresford (2019) argues that participation is a key principle for a future social work that is truly universal and user-led. Further connections with migrant boys and LGBTQIA+ young people, with other groups of children in state care, and with care-experienced adults, could create further possibilities for change. Children’s participation can be restricted by power dynamics and adult notions of the child’s best interests (Boyden, 2001), and fixed within bureaucratic notions of ‘feedback’. Yet, when young migrants are supported to develop their knowledge and communication skills, they can bring new perspectives into virtual, political, and organisational spaces (Hummingbird Project, 2020; Leurs et al., 2018).

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The use of an art-based method in this research highlighted how creative practices can create different knowledges, raising questions about what may be lost in reducing participation to spoken or written consultation. Consultation forms were only available in English in the authorities in this research, and young migrants do not always have the literacy skills to complete them even if they are translated. Mia, Salam, and Grace said they were regularly asked for their views about their care, but there was no evidence they were involved in other forms of practice development. Whyte (2017) found that spatial ‘contact zones’ where young migrants took part in art projects transformed the social relations in connected spaces. Yet, social work often focusses on children as singularities, and groupwork has slipped away from UK practice in the twenty-first century. The potential within spaces of contact, connection, and creativity is currently remaining untapped. Participation is also linked to place. The extent to which unaccompanied children feel a sense of belonging in their living space, for example, can impact the ways they participate within care services (Kaukko & Wernesjö, 2016). Jones (2019) links ideas of participation and social justice to place when he considers the relational dynamics between refugees and the different groups who offered support on the Greek island of Samos. It was the kitchen spaces Jones believes were most valued by the refugees, created through a sense of shared responsibility, and where skills were foregrounded over notions of inadequacy and dependence. These were sensory spaces where food could be shared, but, more than this, they were explicitly political and affective spaces where pain and rage was expressed and where volunteers stood ‘shoulder to shoulder with refugees as human beings’ (Jones, 2019, p. 157). The girls and practitioners in this research showed that human-to-human connections can and do occur within state care, and that skilled, engaged practice is taking place. Some connections endured and evolved—Joe stood shoulder to shoulder with Ada at her wedding as a surrogate father-of-the-bride. Such connections were undermined, however, by girls’ anxiety about precarious futures, cultures that minimised the affective nature of social work, and narratives that questioned the right of a separated, migrant girl to be present in state care spaces. Beresford (2019) connects participation to a re-centring of the commitment to diversity and equality in all social work settings. This would require a consideration of who is present in place and who is not, whose voice is heard and who is rendered silent in these contested spaces.

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Narratives which frame separated children as an unwelcome burden on resources, and bordering practices which maintain children at the margins of state care, can only work against the development of more spatial diversity. This research shows that social work can have a significant role in the lives of separated girls in the UK, and there were multiple examples of sustaining practice the girls valued. Yet, as social work professionals who make claims about social justice and anti-oppressive practice, we cannot continue to ignore—or to promote—exclusionary and racist narratives present in our own organisations. Eva’s Giant may hold the power social work needs to act, and it can sometimes constrain, but it is formed through spatial, social relations which can be disrupted.

A Final Thought … As a social worker myself, I am aware of the courage it takes to expose your practice to a researcher, and was impressed and encouraged by the practitioners who took part in this project. None of the critiques I have offered here are directed at individuals, all of whom are carrying out highly complex work within organisations in challenging economic and political climates. My intention has been to present the human face of social work, carried out by thinking and feeling human beings, and to argue this is both our greatest challenge and our best resource. Mia, Salam, and Grace honoured me with their humour, strength, and hospitality, in the context of highly disrupted and precarious lives. I hope I have honoured them in this book, and the faith they placed in me when they shared their stories.

References Adams, R., Dominelli, L., Payne, M., & Campling, J. (Eds.). (2005). Social work futures: Crossing boundaries, transforming practice. Palgrave Macmillan. Al-Ma’seb, H., Alkhurinej, A., & Alduwaihi, M. (2015). The gap between theory and practice in social work. International Social Work, 58(6), 819–830. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020872813503860 Ang, J. (2019). Working with separated children and young people seeking international protection. In L.  Wroe, R.  Larkin, & R.  A. Maglajlic (Eds.), Social work with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants: Theory and skills for practice (pp. 117–142). Jessica Kingsley.

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Index

A Accommodation contracting arrangements, 130, 131 developed around needs of boys, 79, 136 gendered roles in shared housing, 136 girls’ views on mixed-gender housing, 134–136 semi-independent living, 79, 130, 134 shared housing, 118, 128, 130, 134, 135 Activism, 6, 28, 38, 57, 117, 198, 199 Adulthood agency seen as marker of adulthood, 38, 58 destitution, 39, 86, 87, 170, 190, 192 Adultification, see Age, adultification Affect, 31, 32, 36, 37, 78, 80, 101, 105, 107, 112, 114, 115, 124, 138, 147, 151, 152, 154, 164, 178, 181–188, 190, 195

Afghanistan, 52, 84, 87 Age adultification, 58, 131, 157 age assessment, 38, 39, 74, 76, 119 the child/adult dichotomy, 38, 74, 86, 192 gender and age assessment, 38 westernised constructions of childhood, 29, 33 Agency, 11, 12, 24, 29, 34–36, 38, 39, 58, 198 agency linked to place, 36, 120 boy’s agency expected, 79 girls’ agency, 36, 51, 58, 59, 61, 78, 79, 102, 120, 122, 128, 134, 139, 140, 150, 158, 162, 165 girls seeking more agency, 102, 128, 135, 137, 139, 143, 165, 192 Ahmed, Sara, 8, 28, 30, 121 Alan Kurdi, 33, 34 Allsopp, Jennifer, 30, 32, 35, 38, 70, 71, 73, 83, 86, 88, 192

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Larkin, Separated Migrant Young Women in State Care, Studies in Childhood and Youth, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15183-5

207

208 

INDEX

Anti-oppressive practice, 79, 82, 200 diversity, 199, 200 inequality, 4, 5, 7, 13, 35, 51, 56, 60, 72, 120, 138, 180, 192, 193, 199 social justice, 13, 14, 75, 118, 196, 200 value-based practice, 14, 72, 88, 105, 106, 118, 194, 197, 198 Anxiety impact of professional anxiety, 26, 114, 139, 184, 190 Asylum gender and age differences in UK asylum claims, 57 legal outcomes of claims, 86, 87 Austerity, 137, 195, 198 Australia, 50, 69, 83 B Belgium, 31, 48, 83 Beresford, Peter, 198, 199 Bernard, Claudia, 122, 194 Bodies transgressive bodies, 5 Borders bordering practices, 5, 6, 76, 82, 200 family separation at borders, 80 offshore asylum ‘processing, 83 push-back policies, 4, 26 Boyhood, 49, 78, 79 Burkino Faso, 53 C Canada, 49, 59, 60, 83 Care criminalisation of care, 6, 7 ideas of safe female carers, 57, 115, 116 Carers, 5, 30, 69, 70, 78, 128–130, 132, 135, 138, 150, 153, 160,

164, 166, 181, 183, 187, 188, 195 excluding narratives about migration, 132, 181 foster carers, 135, 159 kinship care, 72, 85 residential staff, 69, 129, 137 Care systems constructions of children in care, 70 enquiries into historical abuse, 70 shame and stigma, 70 young people’s views on care, 71 Categorisation processes, 23, 25, 26, 29, 35, 54, 77, 83, 114, 115, 166, 197 problems with categorical thinking, 26, 35, 57, 115, 184, 185, 190, 194, 197 Chase, Elaine, 30, 32, 35, 53, 54, 56, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 82, 83, 86–88, 113, 192 Children Act 1989, 86 Citizenship, 5, 25, 59, 101, 172, 192 Communication barriers to communication, 78, 109, 121, 129 disengaged approaches, 146, 183, 192 embodied communication, 24, 107, 108, 110, 116, 118, 138, 145, 196 engagement, 77, 78, 109, 111, 117, 118, 123, 130, 154, 183 interpreters, 78, 82, 108, 113, 118, 123, 129, 130, 147, 187 Cooper, Andrew, 189, 190, 195 COVID Pandemic, 4, 5, 31, 55, 70, 72, 73 D Davies, Bronwyn, 184, 185 Deleuze, Gilles, 178, 179, 185, 186, 196

 INDEX 

Detention detention of children, 73–75, 88, 107 immigration detention, 5, 25, 39, 50, 83, 190, 193 lack of legal oversight of child detention, 73 ‘soft’ or ‘protective’ detention, 29, 73 value-base of state actors, 31, 106 Disbelief, 79, 81, 102, 113–115, 145, 149–151, 188, 189 Durable Solutions, see Permanency E Early marriage, 53, 60, 61 Education ‘girls’ access to education, 52, 56, 60, 102, 137, 157, 158 Emotions emotional contexts of encounters between girls and social workers, 24, 110, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 168, 171, 184, 187–190, 192 emotional labour, 30, 35, 51, 85, 114, 115, 123, 139, 148, 154, 161, 167, 185, 193, 198 ‘girls’ emotional well-being, 36, 58, 77, 78, 87, 110–113, 118, 129, 137, 142, 153, 160, 166, 167, 179, 180, 183, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 196 English Directors of Children’s Services, 76 F Family family-like ties, 84, 85 family reunion, 84, 85, 197 family tracing, 187

209

feeling disloyal to family, 166 gendered, westernised notions of family life, 31, 85 girls' contact with family, 84, 166–168, 187 reification of family life, 85 reunification policies, 83, 84, 197 role in children’s understandings of gender, 51 social work consultation with transnational families, 168 social workers as surrogate family, 152 traffickers promising family reunion, 104, 112, 123, 167 transnational families, 54, 84, 86, 166–169, 187 uncertainty about family members, 84, 167, 186 Fatherhood in young migrants, 56 Feminism, 7, 8, 10, 57, 58, 194 Ferguson, Harry, 26, 77, 191, 195, 198 Finland, 48, 79, 83 Fook, Jan, 14, 24, 26, 195, 196, 198 Friendships, 30, 51, 56, 71, 104, 146, 158–160, 162, 169, 172 girls more isolated, 134, 158–161 G Girlhood, 7, 8, 15, 51, 78, 159, 186 black girlhood, 49, 58, 59, 140, 141, 180 cultural constructions of girlhood, 77, 102–104, 134, 186 girl studies, 49 ideas of girl’s innocence, 50, 59, 79 the role of place in girlhood, 49, 50, 53, 77, 116 Girls experiences at borders, 107–109 fears of men in authority, 115, 116, 135

210 

INDEX

Girls (cont.) feeling less valued than boys, 136, 138, 179 girls’ aspirations, 101, 103, 112, 139, 143, 146, 158, 159, 163, 171, 178 minority in care systems, 8, 57, 79, 105, 133, 170 precarious lives, 30, 36, 39, 52, 54, 56, 87, 170–172, 178, 192, 199 reasons for migration, 53–56, 102–104 Global Compact on Refugees, 48 Greece, 6, 27, 32, 56, 82 H HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, 75, 76 Hostile environment policy UK, 6, 25, 26, 193 I Identity becoming, 77, 178, 179, 185, 186, 188 girls foregrounding different identities, 29, 61, 135, 158, 161, 165, 179–181, 186, 188 intersectionality, 8, 27, 39, 49, 51, 58, 59, 61, 79, 135, 180, 184, 191, 194 LGBT+ young migrants, 8, 84, 162, 198 threatened identities, 5, 25 Immigration systems, 14, 87, 88, 171, 184 Independent Care Review-­ England, 70, 75 Insider-research, 12 International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) definition of social work, 13 Islamophobia, 34, 59, 132, 161, 180

K Kent Intake Unit, 75–77 Kenya, 69 L Language, 11, 78, 85, 108, 109, 117, 118, 127–130, 133, 140, 152, 159, 160, 165, 180, 187, 196 Leaving care, 86, 87, 192 Lefevre, Michelle, 24, 110, 118, 195 Legal advice, 85, 88, 157 Life-story work, 167, 168 Little Amal, 47, 48 Lousada, Julian, 189, 190, 195 M Mali, 53 Masculinities, 8, 52, 57, 116, 177 Massey, Doreen, 9, 32, 49, 53, 57, 101, 110, 121, 123, 162, 177–179, 181, 182, 187–189, 191, 192, 195 Motherhood, 48, 56, 163 impact on girls’ aspirations, 163 risks from childbirth, 56, 60 trigger for migration, 56 N Nationalism, 5, 6, 189 Netherlands, 84, 85, 87 New Zealand, 70 Ni Raghallaigh, Muireann, 78, 164 No Recourse to Public Funds, see Adulthood, destitution O Othering, 23, 34, 38, 59, 131, 141, 158

 INDEX 

P Participation, 14, 52, 154, 198, 199 consultation forms, 130, 199 creative methods, 199 groupwork, 199 linked to place, 199 right to participate, 72 Permanency, 56, 86, 87, 192 Post-colonialism, 7, 34, 48, 54, 58–61, 83, 103, 121, 141, 179, 197, 198 Pregnancy, see Motherhood; Sexual health R Racism, 34, 60, 158, 161, 194, 200 black male bodies framed as dangerous, 31, 116, 117, 136 racialised ideas of innocence, 58 Refugee child, see Separated children Religion Christianity, 103, 180, 181, 186 gender and religious practice, 135, 165, 186 meanings of religion, 103, 135, 164–166 religious persecution, 103, 165 separated Muslim girls, 59, 87, 102, 103, 135, 159, 164, 179, 180 social workers attending church with young people, 166 social work views on religious practice, 164, 166 Research methods and methodologies analysis of data, 11 art based methods, 10 autoethnography, 10, 11 data collection, 10 ethics, 12 limitations, 14 methodology, 10 participants, 10

211

Rights, 31 children’s rights, 6, 7, 23, 26, 35, 37, 51, 59, 69, 71–73, 80, 83, 106–108, 177, 197 Human Rights Assessment, 87, 170 rights-based social work, 13, 35, 75–77, 80, 137, 154, 190, 193, 197 right to family life, 84, 85, 197 Risk, 29, 195, 198 ‘helpless’ woman narrative increasing risk, 58 processes at border increasing risk, 119 risk of girl going missing, 87, 122, 192 vulnerabilities linked to girls, 55, 136, 180 young migrants weighing up risk, 29 RNLI, see Royal National Lifeboat Institution Royal National Lifeboat Institution, 3, 4, 50 Ruch, Gillian, 154, 168, 190, 195 S Senegal, 53 Sensory experiences, 129, 199 Separated children children seen as a risk, 30–32, 161, 162 definition of separated, 15 ideas of innocence, 29, 32–34, 38, 50, 58, 189 images of refugee child, 23, 24 reasons for migration, 27–29 Sexual health feelings of shame, 55, 60, 164 pregnancy, 55, 56, 163 religion as value-base, 164 sexual health advice, 55, 163, 164 Sexualisation of girls’ bodies, 55, 58, 136, 163, 180 Sexuality, 147, 162, 164

212 

INDEX

Sexual violence contraception to prevent pregnancy, 55 state actors’ assumptions of girls’ abuse, 116, 163 towards boys, 58, 117 towards girls and women, 55 Social work organisations, 13, 82, 86, 87, 106, 119, 130, 131, 139, 141, 147, 151 bureaucratic models of social work, 151–155, 166, 190, 195, 197 narratives of exclusion, 133, 181 reflective spaces, 154, 195 Social Workers Without Borders, 196, 197 Social work practice assessment, 24, 77, 81, 109, 112, 130, 168, 186, 196, 197 critical reflection, 26, 79, 115, 120, 141, 190, 194, 195, 198 defining social work as care, 114 practice girls valued, 70, 71, 130, 137, 179, 196 role in welfare Interviews, 107, 108, 110–112 theory-informed practice, 35, 86, 194 trauma-informed approaches, 35–37, 187 South Africa, 5, 25 South Sudan, 56, 101–103, 115, 135 Sweden, 25, 48, 70, 79, 82 T Terrio, Susan, 31, 86, 88 Trafficking definition, 15 different ‘truths’ about journeys, 114, 122, 145

gendered patterns, 58, 61 sexual exploitation, 58, 117 targeting of girls, 54–56, 58 under-reported sexual abuse of boys, 58 Trauma, 34–37, 88, 112, 148, 155, 187, 190 Treisman, Karen, 35, 36, 78, 159, 186, 187 Triple planning, see leaving care Trust, 6, 34, 71, 78, 81, 109, 111–113, 121, 122, 135, 137, 138, 145–148, 153, 164, 165, 169, 171, 186, 188, 189, 198 ‘girls’ mistrust of males, 163 social workers trust of girls, 78, 145, 189 U UK Nationality and Borders Act 2022, 59 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 71, 197 US/Mexico border, 5, 31, 55, 73, 79, 80 V Vietnam, 53 Vulnerability, see Risk W Weigert, Andrew, 178, 184 Wetherell, Margaret, 9, 11, 24, 36, 37, 101, 105, 107, 112, 138, 152, 165, 181, 182, 186–191, 195 Windrush, 6, 34 Worthiness, 6, 25, 81, 132, 137, 150, 151, 197