From Persecution to Prison - Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of ...

of thorough documentation. However, a fundamental concept is beingignored in the current INS approach to “age testing”: chronologic age,dental age and skeletal (bone) age are not necessarily the same in a givenindividual. In fact, deviation among these three “ages” is common andwell appreciated in pediatric medical and dental practice. Discrepanciesamong these ages can amount to as much as five years; this is substantialwhen one is considering a span as short as the first two decades of life. A14-year-old female, for example, can be skeletally, dentally, and sexuallymature, but be four years short of legal adulthood.Every recognized authority on physical development has stressed thisfact. This is precisely the fact that one well-known INS practitioner, Dr. R.Trager at Kennedy International Airport, has ignored or failed to comprehendin his INS-sanctioned practice.The volume that Dr. Trager calls his“bible” (as quoted in the New York Times, “Crucial I.N.S. Gatekeeper:The Airport Dentist,” July 22, 2000), the venerable and classical work:Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist byWilliam Walter Greulich and S. Idell Pyle, explicitly recognizes this fact:Because of this variability, the chronological age of a child during theearly part of the second decade of life is often but little more than a measureof the length of time that he or she has lived; it bears no necessarilyclose relationship to the amount of progress which the child has madetoward attaining adulthood. (2ed. p. 2)Another citation:The chronological age at which boys attain puberty is quite as variable asthat of girls at the same period of life due to both genetic and environmentalfactors. This variability is strikingly illustrated by the photographsreproduced in Figure 5. [referring to illustrations in the Atlas] The boysshown were either fourteen years, fourteen years and one month, or fourteenyears and two months of age when the photographs were made.Despite their similarity in chronological age, they ranged from early prepuberalto an only slightly subadult stage of development. (p. 13).This Atlas was not designed to determine chronologic age. Rather, itwas designed to assess the skeletal (bone) age of an individual and compareit to the “average” or “typical”. It is a method of grading only thephysical progress of development. If, for example the average 18-year-oldmale has nearly completed skeletal growth and the bone growth plates ona radiograph are, on average, closed or nearly closed, this is graded as abone age (or “B.A.”) of 18 to 18.5 years. Any child whose hand-wristradiograph looks similar is given a bone age grade of 18-18.5 years. Thisgrade is independent of the chronologic age. It is also important to notethat the Atlas was based on data for white North American children.Applying these standards to children of other colors and from other200 FROM PERSECUTION TO PRISON