Paper borders: children and young people inside the Belgian asylum procedure. A multi-voiced and performative study

In recent years, the political discourse surrounding migration has garnered increasing significance, prompting a parallel surge of interest within criminological science, notably with the emergence of theoretical frameworks such as "crimmigration." This trend has extended to encompass the experiences of children on the move who find themselves entangled in a "criminalizing" approach. In contrast, a children's rights perspective emphasizes the vulnerability and "at-risk" status of migrating children, advocating for special care and guarantees. This PhD study addresses the inherent tension between a (children’s) rights-based approach and the imperative to ascertain the veracity of claims in asylum processes, specifically present in asylum interviews. The perspective adopted in this work is holistic as it attends to both the bureaucratic underpinnings of the asylum procedure in Belgium and the examination of the everyday experiences of young people subjected to asylum processes.
The research is structured around two fundamental pillars. The first pillar involves the narratives of key professional actors, such as migration officers, guardians, and a legal representative, providing an empirical perspective on children's rights. The second pillar builds on collaborative visual research with young newcomers in Brussels, where the performative experiences of these individuals resonate with the previously collected data from professional actors.
The results, echoing multiple voices, reveal the challenges young people face to meet institutional requirements in a system not set up with children in mind. The anticipation of a seamless, detailed, and anecdotal storytelling style often proves challenging for children whose narratives of migration risk being too brief, incoherent, or lacking detail in an “ultimate” exam that impacts young people's life course. Notably, the narratives and performances of the young participants in the project, represented in rich ethnographic material, and in the co-creative movie Paper Borders, underscore that an understanding of asylum hearings cannot be isolated from young people's experiences of injustices before, during, and after the hearing itself. As such, the results depict the complex interaction between waithood, time, and existential uncertainty and shed light on experiences of procedural injustices that permeate the asylum process. This PhD research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges faced by children and young people within the immigration systems and recognizes the interconnectedness of these experiences with broader socio-political issues.