Age assessment practices: a literature review & annotated ... - Unicef

In European countries where guidance and practice on the issue of age assessment has
been developed, it appears that many of the individuals carrying out assessment do not
have sufficient training or are not sufficiently independent enough to be carrying out such
assessments. For example in the UK some social workers described working in a context in
which a child‟s account of his or her experiences is disbelieved and credibility increasingly
used as the basis for disputing a child‟s stated age being put under pressure by managers
to assess children as being over rather than under 16 or 18 years of age (Crawley, 2007).
In addition, there appears to be a significant over-reliance on assessments based on
physical appearance alone, made by those who have had little training or guidance,
including social workers, legal representatives, immigration officers, and other practitioners,
for example in Germany, Austria and Greece. In Greece for example, the age of an
unaccompanied minor is mainly assessed through the arbitrary assessment of police officers
who carry out interviews with the individual in question (European Migration Network,
2010:52). These practitioners often reach a conclusion that an individual doesn‟t look like a
child, a conclusion which is based on a socially constructed understanding of what a child
should look like (Crawley, 2007:49). Parsons describes how a similar practice takes place in
Finland, with police officers making a rough estimation of age based on a visual
assessment, and then dealing with the applicant as an adult, despite the applicant claiming
to be a child, or record the child‟s age as the date of the age determination statement, with
the year of birth given in the statement. In this way, police officers have been able to amend
the month of birth making the child several months or even almost a year older than the
child has claimed and/or actually is (2010:55).
There are concerns about the qualifications of some paediatricians to carry out medical
and/or physical age assessments, especially given the strong bias in favour of these
approaches (Crawley, 2007). There are also concerns about the authorities or bodies who
are ultimately responsible for making a final decision on an age disputed case, and it is not
thought to be good practice that the authorities who are contesting the child‟s age have
responsibility for the final assessment, because of the conflict in agendas. Instead,
recommendations are made that final decisions should be made by an independent
professional body or a separate board consisting of a range of professionals with relevant
competencies (see Save the Children Norway, 2006; Crawley, 2007).
As is evident from elsewhere in this review, there are pockets of „good practice‟ where
children have been able to access the assessment of a trained professionalA further
example is Afghanistan, where the opinion of a medical professional is sought if a child‟s
age is disputed within the juvenile justice system.. If the opinion of the forensic doctor or
other doctors contradicts the background of the case and the child‟s physical appearance,
the issue of determining the child‟s age is referred to a medical team of not less than three
doctors(UNICEF, 1995:20).
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