Children arriving on small boats held in jail alongside adult sex offenders, say campaigners

Unaccompanied minors being ‘destroyed psychologically’, say activists amid controversy over Home Office age assessments

Rishi Sunak has promised to stop the small boat crossings (PA Wire)

Unaccompanied children arriving in the UK by small boat are being held in an adult prison alongside sex offenders, according to campaigners.

Some 14 under-age asylum seekers have been sent to HMP Emley, a prison in Kent where foreign nationals are detained in a block alongside criminal sex offenders.

While the cases involve migrants who ages are contested by the Home Office, the Humans for Rights Network said one child was 14 when they were held for seven months at Elmley.

Rishi Sunak’s government is now facing calls to investigate and release anyone believed to be a child who has been locked up in adult jail.

“Children are being exposed to great harm, hidden away behind prison walls,” Maddie Harris of the Humans for Rights Network told The Independent. “Young people who have been released say they are terrified to go back there. They can be destroyed psychologically.”

The campaigner added: “Nobody should be criminalised for seeking protection. How it that children are being incarcerated on the back on arbitrary Home Office assessment – essentially a 20-minute interview?”

Most of the dispute cases at HMP Elmley involve children from Sudan or South Sudan who arrived via Libya. The Humans for Rights Network said most were either victims of human trafficking or had suffered from exploitation.

The prison’s latest inspectorate reports shows that 70 sex offenders are still held there, despite the facility being “no longer designated to hold prisoners convicted of a sexual offence”.

The Home Office considers the alleged minors sent to HMP Elmley and other adult prisons to be 18 or older, based on highly-controversial age assessments.

HM Prison Elmley in Kent (PA)

More than half of the unaccompanied children who undergo tests on arriving in Britain are later confirmed to be children, according data obtained to The Observer – which first reported on the HMP Elmley cases.

Of the 1,416 age assessments carried out on asylum seekers in the five years to April 2023, some 809 were found to be children by local authorities’ specialist social workers.

Syd Bolton, co-director of Equal Justice For Migrant Children group, said: “Age assessment has developed into the most monstrous of procedural devices”. Anita Hurrell of children’s charity Coram, added: “It is wrong to criminalise these children and dangerous to send them to adult men’s prisons.”

Responding to the claims about HMP Elmley, a government spokesperson said: “We have not been provided with the information needed to investigate these claims,” before adding that ministers were trying to strengthen the age verification process “by using scientific measures such as X-rays”.

They added: “Assessing age is a challenging but vital process to identify genuine children and stop abuse of the system. We must prevent adults claiming to be children, or children being wrongly treated as adults – both present serious safeguarding risks.”

It comes as Mr Sunak comes under pressure to fulfil his “stop the boats” promise and vow to crack down on bogus asylum claims.

A new poll has found that almost two thirds (63 per cent) of Tory Leave voters say the Sunak government is doing a bad job on immigration. Some 47 per cent said the government is trying “not very hard” or “not hard at all” to deal with the issue, according to the Public First survey.

Meanwhile, Tory veterans minister Johnny Mercer has defended the push to remove Afghan refugees from hotels by a government-imposed end of August deadline – insisting that the pledge would be met.

Mr Mercer told Times Radio: “By the end of this month we will have closed the hotels, because they not a place of permanent accommodation for these Afghan families.”

However, Peter Marland, the Labour leader of Milton Keynes Council, told The Independent that around 30 of the 55 Afghans in hotels in the area had declared themselves homeless.

Some moved to areas such as Watford and Milton Keynes – where they were then placed in hotels again. “It’s been chaotic, and we’ve had no rhyme or reason from the Home Office on what they want to do,” he said.