Abstract
Abstract Intending to support the cultural integration of unaccompanied refugee minors into the Swedish society, the Save the Children charity organization arranged meeting places in 2018 in four municipalities in Sweden. The mentors for the activities at these meeting places were recruited among former refugees who themselves had arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors. The study aimed to explore the experiences of being a mentor offering peer support to unaccompanied minor refugees at the meeting places. In this study, four semi-structured group interviews were conducted at the meeting places with 14 mentors, also former refugees. Data were analysed using thematic network analysis. Although the respondents expressed frustration concerning the Swedish migration politics, they all perceived the helping role as of utmost importance and connected this to positive emotions. The study highlights the unique contributions of peer support to the integration process of refugee minors by mentors providing social support, sharing experience-based knowledge and helping minors to navigate an often confusing and complex welfare system.
Highlights
Society faces a challenge of promoting the health, empowerment and integration of unaccompanied refugee minors, as well as to find ways to facilitate and establish their integration
The support given by mentors to minors at meeting places was examined from the perspective of the mentors, who were themselves unaccompanied refugee minors seeking asylum in Sweden
The mentors reported that the unaccompanied refugee minors were occupied with questions about whether they can stay in Sweden, some of the minors had already received rejections
Summary
Society faces a challenge of promoting the health, empowerment and integration of unaccompanied refugee minors, as well as to find ways to facilitate and establish their integration. The support given by mentors to minors at meeting places was examined from the perspective of the mentors, who were themselves unaccompanied refugee minors seeking asylum in Sweden. The study provided an opportunity to investigate how the experience-based knowledge of being a former refugee was used when meeting newly arrived refugee minors without parents or guardians. The number of children seeking asylum who came to Sweden without their parents or other guardians increased sharply in 2014–15. In Sweden, the Migration Board handled 35,369 applications by unaccompanied children in 2015 (Swedish Migration Agency 2019). Since the border controls between Denmark and Sweden were introduced in 2016 as part of a more restricted immigration policy, the number of asylum-seeking children has fallen dramatically. One study, investigating the importance of education on labour market participation in Sweden among refugees in comparison with native Swedish, shows that unaccompanied and accompanied male and female young refugees have higher risks of being in insecure work force and NEET (neither education, employment or training) compared to native Swedes with comparable levels of education (Manhica et al 2019)
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