Unaccompanied Migrant Children

Abstract

Although children have migrated unaccompanied for centuries, the past decade has brought an increasing visibility of unaccompanied children in the media and among policymakers. An unaccompanied migrant child is defined as an individual under the age of eighteen years old who migrates across international borders and is separated from their parent or legal/customary guardian. Depending on national and regional laws, other terms include unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, independent child migrants, unaccompanied refugees, or separated children. The term “unaccompanied child” is a legal definition, not a lived experience. Often presumed alone, independent, or shorn of kinship ties, research shows that unaccompanied children are members of families and communities who may rely on migration as a means to escape violence or conflict, to navigate precarity or marginalization, or to advance individual or familial migratory projects. That is, unaccompanied children are not simple victims or dependent minors; they enlist their social agency to navigate conditions not of their own choosing. Unaccompanied child migration exists at the lived interstices of global discourses on race, gender, class, and ideologies of childhood and parenthood that are created and re-created through social structures and institutions. The fields of anthropology, sociology, social work, and legal and childhood studies predominantly have focused on the experiences of young migrants in so-called destination nations such as the United States and European Union countries and the policies and practices which govern their im/mobility. Whereas the legal category of “unaccompanied child” predominates in the Global North, only following the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration in 2018 has the term been taken up in other regions of the world. As a result, the literature specific to unaccompanied child migration is geographically uneven. Key areas of inquiry about unaccompanied child migration include their hostile reception in countries of arrival; often-indecipherable legal systems; the humanitarian sector’s involvement in the detention and deportation of children; differing conceptualizations of care and caregiving; and the mental health consequences of past traumas, present challenges, and future uncertainties. Scholarship has only recently emerged on the experiences of unaccompanied children and youth in countries of transit and origin or return. This literature provides critical historical, social, and cultural context to the causes and meanings of migration, individual and familial decision-making processes, the violence young people encounter en route, and their experiences in the aftermath of deportation. The socio-legal literature challenges the false dichotomy between voluntary and forced migration that is reproduced in policy and humanitarian aid and additionally focuses on the best interests and rights of children.