Why “the Best Interests” of Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children are Left at the Border: Structural Violence and British Asylum Policies

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of the UK government’s asylum policies on unaccompanied asylum seeking children whose protection is supposedly guranteed by the UK’s ratification of The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and domestic law intended to secure “the best interests” of children. I argue that the government’s migration regime and associated policies and practices create additional links in an already long chain of structural violence directed at child asylum-seekers which takes the form of a myriad different types of routinized, bureaucratized and banal forms of violence which enmeshes and “harms” these children and which is aimed at preventing them from securing protection.