Introduction

This chapter examines how discourses on asylum and childhood intersect in policy and practice in the UK asylum process, and explores the role of judgements on ‘social worth’ (Morris, L., 2012a) and mechanisms of social control. In May 2010 the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government declared that it would end the detention of children for immigration purposes. This followed campaigns that had highlighted the psychological and physical health impacts on children being held in immigration detention (Campbell et al, 2009; Burnett et al, 2010). This initial coalition declaration was later modified by Immigration Minister Damien Green, who said that the intention was now to ‘minimise’ child detention (McVeigh and Taylor, 2010). Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (2010) had described concerns for the welfare of children as the ‘starting point’ of the coalition's approach to this issue. However, with a commitment to maintaining the restrictive asylum system that currently operates in the UK, the end point of government policies appears more complex.

Debates on child welfare and on the reception of asylum seekers share some parallels, as each centres on concepts of ‘vulnerability’, the ‘ethical responsibilities of society’ and ‘rights to recognition’. However, asylum-seeking children are subject to inherently conflicting policy and practices on child welfare and asylum. While child welfare discourses are increasingly inclusive (Giner, 2007), asylum seekers have been marginalised and excluded over the last two decades. Asylum-seeking children occupy a contradictory status between these two policy agendas.

This chapter explores how claims for recognition in the asylum process are formed around notions of ‘social worth’ (Morris, L., 2012a) and vulnerability, and examines how these are identified, ordered and regulated through the asylum process. It is argued that claims for recognition are acknowledged according to a judgement of social worth based on an accepted ‘performance’ of passive vulnerability and absence of perceived threat. People are positioned as vulnerable and in need of protection, or framed as deviant and in need of exclusion or expulsion. The chapter explores how mechanisms of social control operate using surveillance, conditionality and sanctions to mark out those to be included or excluded. Through a focus on the experiences of asylum- seeking children there is an analysis of how understandings of the social worth of children are engaged in these processes in ways that reinforce or challenge restrictive asylum policy and practice.