A man carrying a child in his arms, is followed by a migrant pregnant woman (2nd R), as they walk on the beach at Dungeness on the southeast coast of England, on August 16, 2023, after disembarking from a Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) lifeboat, that picked them up at sea while crossing the English Channel from France with other migrants. More than 100,000 migrants have crossed the Channel on small boats from France to southeast England since Britain began publicly recording the arrivals in 2018, official figures revealed on August 11, 2023.
It was revealed a growing number of cases of vulnerable children arriving in the UK by small boats were being placed in an adult prison in Kent, which also houses convicted sex offenders.
According to Humans For Rights Network, a recent inspection of HMP Elmley revealed the block where foreign nationals were held also housed sex offenders. A list of 14 unaccompanied children was identified by its staff as being sent to an adult prison, with one of them as young as 14 when the child spent seven months in Elmley, The Guardian reported.
Most of the unaccompanied children were of Sudanese or South Sudanese origin and have traveled to the UK via Libya, most of whom appear to have been trafficked or have experienced some form of exploitation.
Human Rights Groups Urge UK Home Office to Investigate
Human rights watchdogs like Humans have urged the British Home Office For Rights Network to launch an immediate investigation on the matter and speedily release anyone believed to be a child inside an adult jail.
Human Rights Network director Maddie Harris said her group has worked with over 1,000 age-disputed children, with those sent to adult prisons among the most profoundly harmed as they were not being provided the safety they were looking for.
Meanwhile, Coram's migrant children's project head Anita Hurrell added the detention of children alongside adult men's prisons, especially in a facility housing sex offenders.
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UK's Controversial Immigration Act
The Home Office has since contested the children's ages and has been charged with immigration offenses introduced under the Nationality and Borders Act, which became law last year and has introduced tougher criminal offenses for immigrants, including minors, to deter illegal entry to the UK.
British lawyers have warned the practice of sending unaccompanied children to adult prisons was increasing after a Folkestone magistrates court identified an age-disputed child bound for prison Thursday (August 24), as well as a report of another minor in police custody in Margate with the possibility of being sent to Elmley.
Such cases of imprisoning minors were, according to critics, the latest in a string of stories relating to the British government's flawed asylum system, with the asylum backlog rising to over 175,000 this year, a 44% increase in 2022. This also reflected the British government's challenges as more and more of the country's spending is allocated to asylum seeker processing.
Critics of the policy add the children sent to Elmley were declared adults by the Home Office following what experts call a "cursory and arbitrary" age assessment by the authorities, which would last a few hours after they reached the UK by small boat.
Mistaken Ages a Common Problem
Despite this, a number of Home Office decisions where children would be sent to adult prisons have been overturned after detailed assessments by independent or local authority specialists.
The Guardian has also obtained new data confirming that hundreds of asylum-seeker children were being wrongly treated as adults by the Home Office, with more than half of the unaccompanied children undergoing the agency's age assessments later confirmed to be children. The data collected from 55 councils across the UK under freedom of information laws were age assessments carried out over the five years to April 2023.
For this reason, Equal Justice For Migrant Children co-director Syd Bolton called the Home Office's age assessment the most "monstrous" of procedural devices, which deliberately bars children from accessing asylum protection and children's services and discredits an asylum claim.
The Guardian has contacted the Home Office for comment about the claims but is yet to respond as of this report.
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