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

pay attention to the person‟s behaviour, as the biological age cannot inform on the degree of
autonomy of a person.
A number of officials have suggested that they „struggle‟ to identify what is meant by
„holistic‟ assessments, particularly the psycho-social elements and how to weight this
evidence. Guidance 14 for developing age determination procedures in the USA establishes
a minimum requirement that the government‟s procedures take into account multiple forms
of evidence, including the non-exclusive use of radiographs for age determinations. The
House of Appropriations Committee has also made suggestions that Immigration and
Customs Enforcement employ „holistic age-determination methodologies‟ when assessing
the age of those in its custody, and there is significant criticism from activists and the
medical sector of an over-reliance on medical assessments of age. However, in the report
on age determination by the Office of the Inspector General, the Inspector states that „we
could not identify a single, authoritative definition of what might constitute a holistic
approach to age determination.... (and) several individuals in the medical community noted
that psychological testing of individuals to determine exact age would be difficult‟
(Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General 2009:07).
Other countries have also spoken of problems in identifying psycho-social age assessment
procedures such as Belgium where „the procedure for psycho-affective tests (such as
personality and intelligence tests) is foreseen in legislation but is not in place yet, „owing to
problems of reliability‟. In Finland, psychological assessments are considered to be
insufficiently reliable because of the subjectivity of age (European Migration Network,
2010:51).
As mentioned in Section 4.3, there is little in the way of detailed practical guidance on
psycho-social or developmental assessments of age, despite these approaches being
heavily emphasised in international guidance, and recognition that holistic assessments
should be prioritised. The central recommendation made by reviews of the age assessment
procedures in the UK and the USA is that specially qualified and trained practitioners should
be identified and tasked with carrying out age assessments. In the UK, Crawley (2007)
recommends that age assessments should not by undertaken by individual social services
departments but by social workers based in a small number of properly and independently
resourced regional assessment centres, while in the US the Department for Homeland
Security (2009) recommends that guidance on the selection of „best qualified‟ practitioners
to conduct radiographic exams and report results is released.
Evidence also suggests that the weighting in favour of medical assessments at the expense
of a multi-disciplinary approach has less to do with a lack of guidance on psyco-social forms
of age assessment, and more to do with perceptions of credibility and reliability of methods,
and it appears that immigration officers and adjudicators are sometimes more influenced by
medical facts than by social histories, although social factors may be of the utmost
importance (The Kings Fund, 1999:14), meaning that unreliable medical tests and
14 See the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-457),
December 23, 2008
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