Today we are pleased to announce a new and exciting multidisciplinary report under the auspices of the CREDO 2 project. The Heart of the Matter: Assessing Credibility when Children Apply for Asylum in the European Union, published by UNHCR, and funded by the European Commission's European Refugee Fund, brings expertise from across a range of disciplines to bear on the complex question of how the credibility of unaccompanied children and adolescents can best be assessed in the context of the EU asylum process.
CSEL's Child Psychology Researcher Zoe Given-Wilson contributed a chapter on 'The Importance of a Multidisciplinary Approach', having spent 2014 working on a rigorous and wide-ranging review of the current literature relating to child credibility assessment, both in the context of asylum proceedings, and also other legal processes such as child protection cases. Zoe looked at a variety of aspects of child psychology, such as memory, fear, trust and shame, alongside studies and papers focusing on the psychology of decision-makers, ranging from the assumptions decision-makers hold about children from other cultures, to how such decision-makers attempt to deal with the emotional impact of hearing distressing or traumatic testimonies from children.
