Teeth and Truth? Age IDentities of Migrants in the Making

ABSTRACT

Although the birth date on state documents is proposed as an unambiguous marker of IDentity, the age assessment of migrants into Germany reveals a contested and black-boxed practice behind the seemingly neutral numbers. This is a practice of contested bureaucratic and scientific decision-making turned into a stable truth. This article examines this process by drawing on ethnographic research into forensic practices assessing migrants’ ages in Hamburg, Germany. Ultimately, a migrant’s assessed age has crucial consequences for their identity, rights and possibilities. Through a study of the technologies of assessment, this paper shows that the making of age IDentity is relational and ambiguous, and not a truth that is fixed in one’s body as ‘biological age’. This challenges one of the promises of biometrics, an ability to measure ‘the body’ objectively. Rather, the paper proposes that what that body precisely is is an outcome of a specific practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Forensic age estimations
• age assessments
• unaccompanied minor refugees
• migration
• biometrics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Amade M’charek, who supervised this study in 2015. I am also very grateful for Katharina Schramm’s supervision of my research since 2016. I would like to thank the participants in the workshop ‘IDentities and identity: biometric technologies and migration in the border world’, held in Copenhagen in 2017, for their comments, the anonymous reviewers for their thorough reading of an earlier draft, and the editors of this special issue for their careful editing work. I am also grateful for Sarah Blacker’s, Robert Parkin’s and Basil Ibrahim’s English proof-reading. Most of all, I am indebted to all the interlocutors in this study. A part of this work was supported by the German Research Foundation under Grant SCHR 981/10-1.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I define migrants as persons who move from their home to another place or country. I deliberately chose this broadly defined term to cover the variety of claims that my interlocutors made on the German state as refugees, asylum-seekers or claimants of humanitarian protection. Moreover, after being assessed as over eighteen, some migrants were illegalised or left the country. None of my interlocutors came to Germany with a work or education visa.

2 The complex legal category of the ‘unaccompanied minor refugee’ draws on several laws, among them the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, especially Articles 3 and 22; the Reception Conditions Directive of the European Union (2013; the Sozialgesetzbuch VIII or SGB, the Social Act) that governs youth services (Jugendhilfe) in Germany; and the German Residence Act and asylum law.

3 Unaccompanied minors may not be deported unless family members or a qualified reception centre in the country of origin have pledged verifiably that they will accommodate and care for the minor (§58 subparagraph 1a Residence Act). Minors may not be deported within Europe under the Dublin Regulations.

4 While social workers often call their practice ‘age assessment’, forensic physicians deliberately speak of ‘age estimations’.

5 All names and dates in this article have been rendered fictitious to guarantee the anonymity of interlocutors.

6 For a more in-depth discussion of age estimations in relation to this literature, see Netz 2019.

7 All translations from German are mine.

8 The certificate states the age of a person at the date of issue.

9 The roots of teeth under the skin and the X-ray images are not the same: ‘There were elements of the body that did not produce image traces on the X-ray, and there were representational elements on the X-ray that did not correspond to identifiable characteristics under the anatomist's knife’ (Daston & Galison 1992: 106).

10 Up until November 2015, majority age also meant that migrants could be transferred to other, sometimes isolated, places, while unaccompanied minors could stay in the place where they registered.

11 Still, some find ways of pre-empting this fixation by trying to register (and get a new age assessment) in another federal state or country or changing other parts of their identity (like their names). Furthermore, the regime of identity documents can be subverted or has unforeseen effects (cf. Kelly 2006; Cabot 2014).