Survival over safety: non-reporting of criminalised violence by young migrants excluded from protection

Abstract

ABSTRACT Children and young people seeking asylum on their own face violence in many forms. Little is known about how they seek protection from criminalised violence. This article is based on ethnographic research, interviews and a survey of young migrants living precariously, mostly from Afghanistan, who fled to Sweden alone when they were children, but who did not have their protection needs recognised. Through lived experiences of not reporting criminalised violence to police, the article examines how protection is further denied in the context of recent changes to the Swedish migratory and welfare regime. This article finds that young migrants often perceive non-reporting as a zero-sum strategy of survival over safety. Insecure legal status prevents young migrants from engaging the law for protection from criminalised violence. Experiences of discriminatory and violent police treatment and institutional violence forming part of trajectories of displacement reinforce the lack of protection. Strategies of silence and solidarity are used to ensure the preservation of the self, the migratory project, to protect friends, and, occasionally, perpetrators. By examining young migrants’ experiences of non-protection from criminalised violence, intersecting structural forms of violence become visible. These failures of protection constitute part of a continuum of violence experienced by young people seeking asylum.