Safeguarding of children PB1 noted that, although the immigration issue is reserved, if a child or young person was in Northern Irland then issues relating to their care were in the remit of devolved public services and agencies. As a result, even though asylum seekers’ accommodation is the responsibility of the Home Office and its contactor Mears, devolved public services were responsible for any child safeguarding issues that arose in that accommodation. Despite this, CSO9 noted that issues related to children had tended to be seen through an immigration lens rather than a children’s rights or safeguarding lens: “I suppose that’s our biggest concern… it looked to us like a… system deference that didn’t reflect the devolved responsibilities to children. And I think it’s because the immigration lens had been applied, you know, that this is a reserved matter, this is Westminster and this is just what happens” (CSO9). CSO9 gave an example of this deference in relation to the apparent absence of a Mears safeguarding policy: “… it’s not the same as in other jurisdictions of the UK; we require everyone who works with children to have a separate child safeguarding policy… But Mears have been operating here since 2022 without that… our devolved bodies have and continue to allow Mears to operate in this jurisdiction without that, and we’ve never, ever had an answer to why are they allowed?” (CSO9). PB1 noted a similar concern and said that they hadn’t yet been able to see Mears’ safeguarding policy, despite the Department of Health and the Home Office having been asked; there was no published version available. CSO9 noted that a further example of deference was that the Department of Health did not carry out its own safeguarding inspections of contingency accommodation but had asked the Home Office to do it. This was carried out by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, however, CSO9 noted concerns that the inspection team did not include safeguarding experts, the report could only be published with permission of the Home Office, the Home Office had editorial control of the report, and that any recommendations would not be binding on devolved public services. W1 participants raised concerns that asylum seeker and refugee children were “unseen” . Children and mothers could be vulnerable and some participants noted that child protection concerns about Contingency Accommodation had been well documented by the voluntary and community sector. Families could go missing, in the sense that public services would not know if they were moved on, returned home, or went to another country. As a result, children could be at risk but this issue was hard to track. Some W1 participants expressed the view that it was only a matter of time before something very serious happened and that a serious case review was required. Current systems for safeguarding were not up to par and there was a real danger of harm to individuals, families, children.
CSO11 commented on the lack of appropriate mental healthcare for children who had been through trauma: “There is no mental health assessment for any child when they first arrive, forgetting that children also have assimilated a trauma during their period of fleeing and their journey to a safe place” (CSO11). PB8 noted the gap in provision of specialist services for dealing with trauma: “… Specialist trauma informed paediatricians, specialist trauma informed counselling for our young people regarding… historically, we have gone over to England to get specialists in regarding, who have got expertise around young people who have been tortured and kept in captivity… there is a real gap of that knowledge within Northern Ireland” (PB8). CSO1 agreed: “there’s no real provision for those children here at all, in terms of, in our experience, in terms of mental health support, or torture support” (CSO1). PB3 pointed out that there was a need to plan for service provision for increasing numbers of asylum seekers and refugees arriving into Northern Ireland with trauma : “[people] seeking international protection, the majority have experienced extreme trauma in terms of what’s happened in their own country, through persecution, war, torture, whatever the reason why they fled. And we know that the journeys here as well can be traumatic, and there can be trafficking, modern day slavery… we’re aware of that… I suppose it’s about looking up and looking out and scanning the horizon for how we can support people that are going to be arriving” (PB3). W3 participants agreed that access to mental health services was problematic and that the trauma element that came with asylum was hardly assessed. Trivialisation of medical concerns CSO8 noted that clients could often feel that they were not listened to or that their health concerns trivialised: “I know of a particular female and she had to keep coming back because her worries weren’t being answered… she was basically told, ‘we’ve already put in referrals, we’ve already talked about that, if you’re going to come back to us, then talk about something else, you’re not getting a call’. Like, what, do you know? And it was actually the case that she never felt listened to at all” (CSO8). CSO11 referred to a child with mental health difficulties, who was similarly unable to get a referral from his GP: “This is a child that all he draws when you ask them at the youth centre to draw something that represents who they are, and he will draw decapitated bodies, because these are the images he saw before he left Syria, you know… The GP still insists that he’s just sad, he’s not going to do anything” (CSO11). CSO11 gave a further example of a client he had worked with: “It took her constantly visiting the A&E for nine months and it took her to collapse and was taken by the ambulance for someone to carry out a scan only to find out that she had cancer… But in one of those visits, she said the doctor told her ‘there is no need to scan today, if you feel worse, here are paracetamol, you can get some over the counter. But if you feel worse, come back.’ And when she came back, the nurses were asking, ‘oh you were here last week, you are back again’, those kind of words, you know, see, not believing a black woman in a hijab. It’s horrible” (CSO11).
Final report of the of Ombudspersons and the Protection of Refugees and Asylum Seekers (OPRAS) project | 39
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