Considering children's credibility at IGC

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In June, Zoe Given-Wilson was invited to speak at a meeting of the IGC, an international, intergovernmental group of immigration policy makers who meet regularly to develop strategic thinking and share knowledge and best practice about migration around the world.

At their latest meeting, the group were particularly concerned to address the increasing numbers of children arriving in North America and Europe, fleeing conflict and other dangers such as gang violence or persecution. Many are trafficked, and some travel ahead of parents. All are vulnerable because of their age. Most protection mechanisms developed by governments to assess asylum applications and provide sanctuary are designed primarily to deal with adults, and have to be adapted to meet the needs of children.

by monique kittan @ flickr.com

Zoe was invited to speak after her review of the literature on child and adolescent psychology and child development was published as a chapter in the CREDO report Heart of the Matter. The report examines the key issues to take into account when assessing the credibility of children and young people making applications for asylum. Zoe’s research is being recognised at high levels as an important reminder of the need to take an interdisciplinary approach to protecting unaccompanied children seeking asylum. In her presentation, Zoe talked about the key factors that need to be taken into consideration when making credibility assessment in children – both those relating to the child, including both normal child development and autobiographical memory; and those relating to decision making, the assumptions that underlie the judgements of decision makers, and the need to ensure that these are in line with scientific evidence for what we know about child development, and memory.

Zoe will be speaking at the London launch of Heart of the Matter on 25 June, with fellow contributors S Chelvan of No 5 Chambers, and Debora Singer of Asylum Aid.

Meaningful and Credible: Researching *With* Refugee Women

At CSEL we're not only interested in conducting and disseminating research, to improve the fairness of decision making, but also in exploring ways to ensure the quality of research findings, and the integrity of research processes. As part of this enquiry, the Evidence into Practice project is exploring the issue of participation of refugee women in research projects.

How can researchers involve refugee women more in the development, design and delivery of research into refugee women’s experience? Why should they? What challenges do participatory approaches pose to the need to balance meaningful involvement by marginalised stakeholders, with the production of reliable, credible research findings? What can be learned from the community sector to help find answers to these questions? These are some of the questions that have emerged through the preparation for our roundtable on Researching With Refugee Women, to be held later this year.

Photo from Participate2015

To explore these questions I’ve been reading some of the literature evaluating the vast experience of participation in the community sector, the user involvement movement, and the international development field. Grassroots community activists have been using participatory methodologies for many decades to support marginalised people to be meaningfully involved in decision making and research that affects their lives. What can more conventional academic researchers learn from this literature?

In May I presented these questions and some of this learning from the community sector at a conference in Paris on Producing Knowledge on Migration. It was an exciting chance to raise these issues with migration researchers, and hear their concerns about ‘participation’ and participatory approaches. These included worries about the integrity of the 'participation'; differences in objectives of researchers and stakeholders; and a loss of objectivity and quality of findings. Many of these concerns have been explored in depth in the community sector - it seems to me there’s a real need to share the knowledge gained outside academia with those working within.

The questions we are exploring in this strand of work raise exciting challenges for conventional researchers. They also open up space to suggest possibilities for new ways of working, and opportunities to support the empowerment of refugee women. This is an important objective for those working on refugee women’s issues, whether as practitioners or researchers, and I’m looking forward to convening the roundtable in October to discuss it further. To find out where we get to, watch this space! c.cochrane@csel.org.uk

The Heart of the Matter: credibility assessment of child asylum seekers in the EU

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.

Continuing our work in Europe

We are delighted to have been invited to join the Prague Process Targeted Initiative of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD).  I attended a kick-off meeting in Vienna this week for the “Pilot Project 7: Quality in Decision-making in the Asylum Process” – a training and ‘train the trainer’ project which will continue ICMPD’s work implementing the EU pan-European approach to migration and asylum, particularly in eastern and south-eastern regions of Europe.  We are looking forward to working with decision makers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkey and other Prague Process member states. 

Experienced judges from Austria, Germany and the UK and myself have joined the project as experts, bringing not only training expertise but also deep knowledge of the intricacies of hearing claims for protection and making decisions based often on very little corroborated evidence – or sometimes even none.

It seems to me that this project is well placed to carry forward the work of the Credo project, drawing on and further disseminating the multidisciplinary and evidence-based training manual: Credibility Assessment in Asylum Procedures. I’m looking forward to our first seminar, and another opportunity to take psychological research findings to decision makers.  Watch this space!

Our Director Jane Herlihy reflects on multidisciplinary asylum interviewing and decision making

I'm back home from Hungary today and reflecting on my first international meeting of 2015 with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the UNHCR Division of International Protection and UNHCR’s Global Learning Centre, in Budapest. 

Image by: Edgar Barany C

Guest post: 'Your Grandmother's Middle Name was Rose'

CSEL friend and colleague Jennifer Verson of Migrant Artists Mutual Aid writes below on the impact attending a CSEL session on psychology and memory had on her work as an artist...

Digested: The importance of looking credible: the impact of the behavioural sequelae of post-traumatic stress disorder on the credibility of asylum seekers

Behaviours such as averting one’s gaze, fidgeting, and hesitant speech are commonly interpreted as signs of dishonesty, yet they are also symptoms of PTSD. What, if any, are the effects of this overlap on credibility assessment in the asylum process?

Associate Researchers Hannah Rogers and Simone Fox, and CSEL Director Jane Herlihy have recently published a new study in Psychology, Crime and Law, investigating whether observable symptoms of PTSD can be confused with perceived cues to deception, and how such confusion, where it arises, affects the assessment of an individual’s credibility in the context of a mock asylum interview. You can read through our digest below. If you would like more detail or to cite the paper in the future, click here to access the full paper (£), or here for a pre-print copy. (Image credit: Tori Rector)