Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain

Abstract

This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants and asylum seekers is discussed. These stories present a view of their tellers as alone and irreconcilably detached from past lives and relationships. These narrative repertoires as well as their telling draw from and elaborate certain views of the ‘proper refugee child’ that circulate through various regimes of immigration, welfare and emancipatory community work that all involved these young people. An approach to the stories as accomplished as well as situated performances that collapse the ordinary division between stories as ‘facts’ or ‘fictions’ is introduced. In this sense, the ‘children's voices’ heard in this study are recognised as situated and interested products of a research relationship.

Keywords:

• childhood
• migration
• children's narratives
• performance
• anthropology

Introduction

Maureen was already waiting for me when I arrived, early, to meet her at her aunt's bare flat. The conversation between the young teenager and her aunt, in Somali, suggested that the hour or so that Maureen was to spend with me had placed unreasonable demands on her aunt. I offered to reschedule our meeting but Maureen's aunt politely gestured her approval of my visit. Maureen, by now clearly anxious at the prospect of taking time out to spend with a relative stranger and researcher, assured me of her aunt's blessing. ‘Auntie says that we have to tell people how difficult things are for here, how we have nothing here, how we are staying without help and alone. She says that it is better for a child to report this’. (Field notes, spring 2003)

For every story that sees the light of day, untold others remain in the shadows, censored or suppressed. (Jackson 2001, p. 11)

This article examines one way that some young immigrants in Britain participate in the construction of a series of recent perspectives on childhood and, particularly, on refugee childhood through personal stories and storytelling. An anthropological approach to the young people's stories seeks to interpret, first and foremost, these practices form the point of view of the young people themselves.

The study takes as its starting point the question of why a culturally and socially heterogeneous group of young asylum-seekers should tell ‘how I am getting on in Britain’ in remarkably similar terms. Each story focused on young migrants' experiences of arrival as a stark and absolute dislocation from past lives and previous relationships, a point of radical personal transformation and enduring isolation. The study reflects on the production of stories as ‘dramatic moments’, both meaningful and strategic performances that were shaped and circulated with a careful eye to what was necessary and convincing.

The argument is divided into five parts. First, the context and purpose of the research with young immigrants is described. Second, a theoretical perspective on narrative practices and the politics of representation is introduced. The merits of a recent anthropological development in approaches to narrative as summative performance are discussed. Third, the major themes emerging from the narratives are identified and examined. The story themes and practices are rooted in a series of views on ‘the refugee child’ that circulated through regimes of immigration, welfare and emancipatory community projects. Finally, the anthropological contribution towards the study of young migrants' stories is highlighted. An anthropological view of narrative as dramatic practice avoids a view of stories as ‘either fact or fiction’; the anthropological method approaches such practices as socially situated claims of the moment.

The research context and the collection of young peoples' stories

The collection of some personal narratives1 from young people staying as refugees in south east England was initiated in the final months of a larger EU Daphne funded project organised between the four ‘port’ regions of Europe (Spain, Germany, Britain and Sweden) during 2002 and 2003. The project brief was to compare and contrast the national and regional immigration and welfare policy structures that directed the life chances of young migrants. From the outset the British and Swedish project partners were concerned at the lack of involvement of young migrants themselves and, in the final weeks of the project, these research partners were able to undertake a very brief study to gather the views of some of these young people.

Given the time constraints and the exploratory nature of the study, the research objective was modest: to collect and analyse some young migrants stories about their life situations in their host society. My research informants were seven young refugees who were already known to me (personally or though friends or colleagues), who were resident in south east England and who happened to be aged between 11 and almost 18 years.2 My informants were asked to tell me about their lives as recent immigrants to Britain and it was suggested that they might be able to organise their ideas around the question ‘how am I getting on in Britain?’3

My informants included two siblings born in Kosovo who had arrived as young children with their parents eight years previously and who were full refugees; two teenage boys from Albania who had arrived, unaccompanied, in the UK during the previous year and who were then accommodated by the Local Authority and awaiting outcomes of Home Office decisions on their refugee status; two Southern African teenagers who had each moved to the UK several years previously and who were staying with relatives whose own entitlements to stay in the UK appeared to be uncertain; and a 14-year-old Somali girl who had arrived in the UK the previous year to stay with a maternal aunt (who was a full refugee). In all, then, my informants were a diverse group of young people and all had some direct or indirect experience of the immigration process in the south east. They had arrived in the UK for a variety of different reasons, from different home countries, social class and family backgrounds; they had declared entry to the UK at different times (between 9 months and 8 years) previously. They had also taken various routes from home countries or through other European ports to arrive here. They also occupied different positions within the immigration and welfare systems, not least because some were part of families and others were lone migrants. However, all were engaged, directly or through close family members, in various statutory and voluntary sector services for refugees or asylum seekers within the south east. Also, all were, or had recently, faced the struggle to establish themselves as legitimate refugees through both Home Office applications and later appeals. All the young people were also busy with the continual tasks of persuasion: they felt that the majority of educational and welfare workers were always doubtful of them being ‘real refugees’.

During the research, the two or three meetings held with my informants lasted between 20 minutes and 2 hours, were loosely structured and directed by participants themselves.4 All but one initial meeting were conducted in participants' homes or lodgings while subsequent meetings were organised around social activities chosen by the young person. These activities included time in a coffee shop; visits to the beach; a window shopping trip; help with homework and sharing a small family meal.

It soon became clear that all of my research participants wanted to describe ‘how I am getting on in Britain’ in a particular way: their stories stressed the stark and dramatic contrasts between ‘life here and now’ and life in ‘past times and places’. These before/after stories raise the empirical question of why this diverse group of young migrants with different histories of arrival and relationships to homeland would tell a common story of radical and irreconcilable social dislocation.5

Before the central themes and social contexts of my informants' stories are considered more closely it is important to develop a view of the processes and products of young migrants' narrative from within the rich body of available narrative theory.

Narrative practice and the politics of representation

Narrative approaches, including that adopted in this brief project, have a particular appeal in research with children and young people. They readily combine the ‘new orthodoxy’ of childhood studies that recognises and values ‘the child's voice’, with an interpretive paradigm that recognises the partial and situated quality of research knowledge (Reeves 2007).

For various reasons, the telling of personal or collective stories is often a powerful aspect of experiences of migration. Jackson notes that the immediate refugee experience tends to generate an acute self-consciousness: the loss of relationships, possessions and home are circumstances where ‘any inner reflections on who one is eclipsed by the external definition of what one is in the eyes of others’ (2002, p. 68; original emphasis). Stories of migration might also circulate through and beyond migrant communities as a means of taking stock, bearing witness, shaping new forms of social identification or composing coherent versions of self and social experience against a turbulent past and uncertain future (O'Neal 1999).

Narrative researchers agree that stories do not so much reveal ‘the truth’ as craft it in a particular way. Stories are not transparent media for the communication of facts: they inevitably reduce experience to representational frameworks that carry value in particular contexts and for particular people (cf. Bruner 1986). As one of several ways of representing past experiences and events, certain narrative repertoires can become media through which tellers both express and negotiate their experiences and views from a particular social, cultural and moral vantage point.6 At the same time, several narrative repertoires, culturally respected ways of telling, can coexist in any society and, sometimes, for a single individual. Such repertoires are informally learned and selectively practiced by those occupying particular structural positions; they contribute towards the development of particular subjectivities as well as to collective histories of unity and difference.7

The purposes and effects of storytelling, or of the elaboration of a particular narrative repertoire, are likely to be various and manifold. For example, certain stories at certain times carry therapeutic potential: they become a way of imposing order on disruptive and distressing events and experiences (Becker 1997). At other times narratives carry a more obvious rhetorical weight and exercise a political claim to certain reputations, resources or relationships. We refashion our experience and learn to tell it in ways that are recognisable and valid to others: what we choose to emphasise or remain silent about; and how we tell of ourselves by our place in events, are always political activities.8 In all, narratives are inherently social: they are crafted into respected forms of expression and with an eye to the politics of hearing as well as to the shifting opportunities for their consumption (Gardner 2002, p. 31).

The stories offered by my informants were always highly strategic social productions. They were composed by young people with a keen awareness of the importance of a good – convincing and consistent – personal account. Such accounts contributed to the procurement of legislative and social recognition and sustained relationships with an array of professionals and support workers.

One difficult question arising from established social science views of narrative as strategic practice is how to approach these stories in relation to both event histories and questions of meaning. The established ‘discontinuity view’ of stories focuses on the disjuncture between ‘life as lived’ and ‘life as told’ or positivist history and fictional narrative (cf. Carr 1997). It is particularly problematic to this study for two reasons. First, the research seeks to avoid a reductionist view of young people's stories as either individual contrivances or as factual replications.9 Second, these young people had an astute sense of the importance of stories to both inform their life chances as well as of the art of persuasive story telling. Young migrants' critical awareness of the impact and consequences of their stories cannot be ignored in an interpretive account. Mattingly's (2000) recent anthropological approach to narrative as performative process, a ‘distinctive … dramatic moment’ apart from ordinary time (p. 189) offers an approach to the stories of young migrants that usefully sidesteps the modern administrative concerns with the division between ‘fact and fiction’. As dramatic moments distinct from everyday life narratives are improvised apart from concerns about what is literally true. These stories depict ‘life in the breach’ (p. 189): they underscore or summarise definitive moments and deal with exceptional events rather than ordinary happenings. In this sense, stories communicate a special sort of truth.10 They might often omit what is ordinarily ‘factual’ to compose one convincing and accurate representation of oneself and one's life circumstances.

Britain and before: stories of contrast and personal transformation

As described above, the young participants in this study were all refugees however they were from a range of historical and social backgrounds and occupied very different positions within the British immigration and welfare systems. Nevertheless, all of my informants offered a common view of their life circumstances in Britain: of life as dramatically and irredeemably different to life before their arrival, in past times and places.

In one respect, this complementary binary, life before/after, was a convenient way of accounting for a vast range of complex events and ambivalent or contested experiences. Thus, long and complicated journeys to and through Europe, that often included enjoyable as well as terrifying sojourns, often tended to be collapsed into more manageable schematic description of life ‘before and after’ arrival in Britain.

For example, Ian, a 14-year-old Kosovan teenager opened his first story to me as follows:

The main thing is that we are safe here; there is no trouble here in Britain. In Kosovo, well like in other parts of that land, across the world really it's so different. Over there are many problems with houses burning, here there is no burning, none at all.

This teenager's horrifying escape from Albania as well as his sometimes difficult and sometimes exciting journey through Southern Europe was not part of this story he offered me. According to Ian,

It is very different here – over there I had family but it was dangerous, over here I have no-one but I am safe.

The stark contrast between places of violence and places of safety was echoed in other teenager's stories of past injuries and illnesses.

Peter, another teenage boy from Eastern Europe, spoke briefly of his back injuries as things that had happened ‘before England’:

It was the bombings in the village but also it was when I was working on the building site in G., anyway it all happened before I came here. Now I just think about getting better.

Most generally, then, all stories stressed the radical distinctions between life before and after arrival in England, often with reference to related contrasts between familiar and strange landscapes; safe and dangerous countries; pleasing or uncomfortable sensations; and freeing or constraining places. Occasionally, the stories opened a more complicated picture of the contested qualities of before/after arrival. For example, in a later meeting with Ian, the teenager returned to the question of personal safety and began to reflect on the difficulty of discussing this existential condition in terms of divisions of place and time.

I'm safe here but it's different being like this, feeling like this here. It's not being blown up but its well, a heavy feeling when I walk about by myself, like going about all alone. The big buildings in B (town) they make a person feel sort of safe but it is not the same as feeling that you know the buildings, like they are safe to walk around.

All informants drew dramatic contrasts between the environment of Britain and elsewhere. For example, Tsitsi, who had lived in several different countries in Europe as well as several Europeanised African cities, talked only of the remarkable contrasts between ‘British’ and ‘Africa’ landscapes.

Everything is so new here, like in this town, it's different to an African town. Here you have the town, the suburbs, then the country, they sort of mix in together. Over there you've got THE town and THE country and that dirt, that red air, the dust that gets everywhere. Here it is all too tidy.

The overwhelming difference between the small towns of Eastern Europe and the towns of South East England were also emphasised by young people who had travelled from there. Peter told me:

When I was over there I lived in the town but it was more like the countryside here and when I came here it was a bit exciting, all those things you have never done before and I did not know about life here. Now things were just coming, coming at me, which one to take? Not knowing where to go, everything was so big, just so big. At home everything was very small. Here this big buildings and things it makes my head spin.

The young people often discussed memories of past lives, their losses and longings, in terms of concrete and intimate bodily states and sensations: long descriptions of the cold British weather that first shocked the body and then became a source of enduring unhappiness were common. Feeling too cold was a sensible locus of social as well as bodily suffering.

Maureen described:

At first I just got very cold, very cold, in fact I'm always cold here, even in the summer season it's never warm in England. It is never free and comfortable here. It might have been cold when it rained before but it wasn't like this!

Whereas Jane, a 13-year-old refugee from Kosovo who had lived most of her life in south east England asked:

Do I feel at home here? No. Here it is cold most months. Shall I tell you about my home? In my country its warm all the time … we play on the beach and on the farm everyday day! It is sunny there nearly always!

Differences between the tastes and textures of food in England and food in other places were often mentioned by my informants. Especially for young men who had spent their first months moving between hostels, their unsatisfying meals, because of limited funds and cooking skills, were another vivid first impression of a different life in England.

Peter told me that:

All I remember of those first weeks in hostels is beans, just beans, always beans every day, I dreamed of meat from home [war-torn Kosovo].

Doris talked of the problems with cooking African foods in England: the smells, tastes and textures were never the same.

I miss the things I ate everyday over there [in Zimbabwe], things you can get here if you look and things I am very good at cooking, like maize porridge and pumpkin leaves. But it never is the same, it just isn't right when it's made here, there must be something to do with the water or the cooker or something.

What Doris did not emphasise in her story was her family's continuing interest in African cuisine, an enthusiasm that distinguished and united them as Southern Africans in Britain and that, according to Doris' father, ‘kept everyone connected to home’.

Most young migrants' stories described their personal experiences of the separate worlds before/after Britain as marked by a moment of startling revelation (the moment of stepping from a truck; meeting a relative at the airport; entering the immigration lounge at D.). Thus, Peter continued,

It was when I was walking, walking up to R. [town] that I heard… nothing! Nothing! No sounds of bombing, no [army] trucks, and no smells of burning … this were when I knew a different life.

These stories also stressed the impossibility of reconciling the two different lives and relationships of ‘before’ and ‘after’ arrival. While, in many other social situations, my informants often spoke of their personal obligations as well as longings for enduring relationships to their homes and homelands, their narratives emphasised the impossibility of finding connecting threads between their past and present worlds. For example, Peter, who often mentioned his plans to return to his home village once peace had returned, told of a much more complex situation in his recorded narrative:

It is uncertain, very, very uncertain. Even in these months I am changed a lot, I ask myself would I settle there now? Even if the town that is my home is there now I wonder if people will know me, this is the difficult thing.

The idea of a radical break between life before and after arrival in Britain is also echoed in Doris' description of her flight from urban Southern Africa, an event that her older relatives who accompanied her described to me as a time of family reunification:

We left quite abruptly, I really didn't realise I was going until I was at the airport and I was like ‘but I didn't get to say goodbye’ even to some of my cousins. I remember the last time I saw them, in my Nan's yard by the back gate; everyone was just like ‘I'll be seeing you soon’. Then when we touched down at Heathrow, that's when I knew it, that's when it hit me. I knew that it was the last time I would know my family like this. I would never know them like this again.

For this older teenager, her irrevocable loss was not alleviated by her cousins' visit to Britain a year later: this event just reminded her that ‘I was already different by then, a different person by that time, just completely different. It was like, wow, now I see things so different to you!’

I asked Doris what sort of things was so different:

Everything, every little thing, from the way you spend the day, what you do in evenings, what sort of games you play, the stars [celebrities], clothes you can wear, even how you sit at a table and how you speak to your parents and who you go to with a problem it's all so different to over there.

This view of immigration as an event of personal transformation was echoed by Ian when I asked him to tell me a little more about what life was like for him in temporary hostels:

Sometimes people ask me is it different. Different? It's more than different! It's another world and here you just become another sort of person. Finding myself here, well, somewhere near R. [town], well that was it! Another life! I cannot begin to tell you how many things are different!

‘Before and after’ stories often organised traumatic experiences of displacement as well as contested experiences of change as a simple matter of ‘trade offs’: a deceptively straight forward question of costs and advantages. Thus Maureen, an unrecorded migrant from Somalia who was staying with a distant aunt commented:

You ask me how things are going for me here. Well, there are no things I miss from home, nothing, it was all terrible there in the [refugee] camp, we were hungry and the shelters were terrible … except I miss my Mum and she is there, well, in Africa … well really my whole family is still in Africa, well some are gone and now no one else is here, there is nothing from my home here and it is very difficult for me, it is the same for my aunt there is nothing for her here as well but it is safe here and dangerous there.

The idea of lost relationship due to migration to Britain was emphasised as much as lost relationships due to war and flight. When I asked Peter to tell me a little more about life in town B. he insisted,

I have contact with no one since I have come here, there is no one here I know. Over there it was hard, very hard and some of my family are killed and now I am here I just have to cope alone. Some are still living there but I have left that behind me now. So I now manage always alone.

A playful disagreement between Jane and her sister, my youngest informants who had spent several years of their lives in Britain, suggests that for the young, the composition of a convincing story was an important aspect of their identity as asylum-seekers or recognised refugees.

One Saturday evening in their cramped family flat, as Jane's mother enjoyed a new video of her favourite Kosovan talent show, and her father struggled to tell me of the similarities between this show and one showing on British ITV, Jane caught my eye. She told me ‘in Kosovo my grandfather has a big farm with many animals, not like this place here. Kosovo is Europe and so there are many farms, not like this town. My grandfather's farm has livestock like cows and sheep and goats and elephants’. Her older sister teased her, ‘no good us going back there then, you will never be able to milk an elephant, anyway they don't have these things now, and they stay in a room in town. You know that, too!’ Jane's older sister reminded her of the reasonable limits of stories about different worlds. Then Jane made her case more clearly: she snapped back, ‘but I never see them, it's not like to know them or they know me, I won't ever see them because of the passports, we have ones for refugees!’.11

Telling stories: event, experience and representation

The migration narratives presented to me by young people emphasised a particular view of ‘how they were getting on in Britain’ as always radically distinct and disconnected from past lives and relationships. The impossibility of meaningful home or community connections was noted repeatedly. In young people's stories they (along with any immediate family with whom they lived) were always depicted alone: strangers in Britain who are torn from everything connected to previous lives. For these young people their perspective on ‘how I am getting on in Britain’ might have developed along different lines. For example, Doris mentioned nothing of her arrival in Britain as an event of family unification or of her family's active participation in the Southern African-British community; Jane and her sister overlooked the complicated and costly efforts of their parents to keep homeland ties and their avid interest in Kosovan TV.; Maureen made no mention of her own and her aunt's participation within a vibrant local and transnational Southern Somali community network. Neither did my young Kosovan informants tell of the complexity of internet and text messaging that maintained them within local and regional migrant networks. Similarly, the narratives offered always highlighted the overwhelming differences between British and non-British places, times and experiences and tended to elide the complexities of, and overlaps between these social worlds. The social detachment of the child refugee from past times and places was always emphasised, along with his or her isolation from meaningful relationships.

My young informants shared no common collective or personal histories of homeland or displacement from which cultural narratives of immigration are sometimes shaped (cf. Eastmond 2007). What the young people did share were a series of engagements with immigration, welfare and voluntary services institutions. The young people's stories and storytelling drew from and elaborated a series of views on the refugee child that circulated through these regimes. These views were of a ‘proper’ child refugee as an apolitical individual, a basic human being that could be understood apart from the complexities of distinctive cultural histories and ongoing social relationships. In the next section these views of the refugee are briefly traced out from documentary as well as ethnographic evidence.

Immigrant children: vulnerability and the negotiation of entitlement

Giner (2007) makes the important point that UK immigration policies are not principally concerned with matters of age when entitlements to refuge arise. Instead, the relatively recent innovations in ‘child-centred’ national legislative frameworks (notably the Children's Act 1989 section 17 and section 20) and international guidance (principally arising from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)12 have cut across immigration regulation, notably for those under 18 years of age and who arrive unaccompanied.13

In present UK law an unaccompanied child is automatically granted leave to remain in the UK until reaching his or her 18th birthday. Before this time such children fall under the care of the Local Authority and not under the more exclusionary regimes of the National Asylum Support Service and of involuntary dispersal away from London and the south east. After their 18th birthdays young temporary refugees are generally treated as adult asylum seekers and subject to a decision of their entitlement to remain in the UK (Dennis 2002). In effect, the entitlements of an unaccompanied child seeking asylum rests on the absence of a guardian. A guardian is required because of presumed incomplete competence (they are below a designated chronological age).

Recent studies indicate that of children who seek asylum, around half of them are age disputed and treated as adults (Crawley 2007). Without recognised papers, individual age assessment is as open to manipulation by those who detain children as adults as it is by those refugees who seek protection as legal minors (Sporton et al. 2006). The formal processes of age assessment tend to hinge on a series of assumptions about what constitutes proper childhood. Crawley's (2007) study reveals that in legal processes of age dispute, the young are less likely to be accepted as children if there is evidence of their sexual or political activity. Decisions about the identity of a person as a child rest on a particular modern view of them as asexual and apolitical.

Young migrants who arrive in the UK with adult relatives are not the particular subjects of restrictive immigration policy. As ‘family dependents’ their legal status and welfare entitlements is largely determined by the immigration status of their parents. In fact, Crawley and Lester (2005) argue that the exclusion of accompanied asylum-seeking children from UK child policy frameworks has allowed the same restrictive asylum standards operating for single adults to be used for families. Young migrants who arrive within asylum seeking families enter the National Asylum Support Service and the dispersal system while their claims are considered. However, especially since recent legislative changes, accompanied asylum-seeking children have occupied an ambivalent position in Government legislation and in national and international initiatives. As asylum-seekers they are situated within legal processes oriented towards their social exclusion while, as children, they are presumed to have certain particular welfare needs and entitlements. As Giner (2007) notes, the enactment of legislation towards rejected asylum applicants that allows for the removal of welfare support, detention and forced removal is often frustrated in the case of asylum-seeking families. Social activists often invoke the interests of accompanied children ‘in their own right’. In such debates the young stand as an internationally recognisable ‘moral touchstone’ whose neglect spotlights a negligent society (Giner 2007; cf. Jenks 1996, p. 108).14

This brief overview of the significance of age in determining the structural position of young migrants within the British immigration and welfare regimes is underpinned by a particular idea of what constitutes childhood. In these regimes children (unlike adults) are viewed as natural objects of social concern: as weak, incomplete and automatically requiring family (or state directed) care and control. For unaccompanied young refugees, the differentiation between childhood and adulthood was paramount in the determination of life chances. As some young informants complained to me, the condition of age eclipsed all other dimensions of a refugees claim to legitimacy, including that of forced displacement, war trauma or risks connected with repatriation.

Welfare and educational interventions for ‘refugee children’ were more likely to recognise the special needs of young asylum seekers and refugees. However, it was also known that educational and social service professionals were less interested in personal histories as in the special requirements of ‘the asylum-seeker/refugee’.15 For example several young people, including Jane and her sister, had become adept ‘shape-shifters’ in schools and colleges. Beneath the label of ‘special educational needs’ they managed to assume certain ethic identities and immigration histories that were less stigmatised by their college peers or classmates.

A rather different process of categorical reductionism of young migrants' life histories was evident from informal discussions with some foster carers and community volunteer workers. In their views young refugees (or, at least, those they found convincing) were ‘just like our own really’. They were approached as part of a natural and immutable social group of ‘children’ could stand apart from differences in cultural practices, social relationships and disturbing or incomprehensible past.16

In all, one hegemonic view of a convincing child refugee relied on a view of these young people as ‘only children’ or as ‘children with special requirements’ whose essential nature was only clouded by matters of culture and history. Young migrants' past experiences and relationships were imagined as a surface gloss or ‘optional extra’ that could be skimmed off or peeled away to reveal the essential child.

It seems to have been this view of the universal child, standing apart from the complications and distinctions of other times and places, that my informants were eager to portray in their personal stories.

The unique voice of a migrant child

The young refugees I knew were all also engaged in social care perspectives on child refugees that challenged the more orthodox regimes of immigration and welfare. They participated in various youth, church, community and volunteer projects that usually challenged the bureaucratic as well as the exclusionary approach to asylum seekers and refugees. The thrust of such projects was emancipatory: to give each child a ‘voice’ and to recognise each as a self-directed, entitled and unique and so authoritative subject.17

The various recreational projects assembled by voluntary organisations working with young people I knew often took the form of liberal arts activities for example, improvisational dramas, visual art projects, and storytelling and small discussion or interview projects. These often had the aura of therapeutic as much as ‘consciousness rising’ activities.

The elicitation of personal feelings and experiences through the spoken word, drama or visual media, expects young people to be self-defining and revealing agents able to stand apart from, or even transcend, the social histories and relationships that compose them. For volunteer drama teachers and student play therapists young refugees' stories were often gathered and circulated like precious objects or buried treasures that had been recovered from the confusions of past homeland and cultural histories.

For example, one popular document circulating around several community groups was ‘Dreams, Struggles and Survivors’, a Children's Society publication (2002), with the front page caption ‘we need to find a way to let people know who you really are – not just what country you are from’. This sort of approach hinged on the notion that each child's unique and authentic experiences can be retrieved and revealed to others.

In one respect, popular demands for social recognition of the ‘voice of the refugee child’ are an important moral challenge to the dehumanising and exclusionary bias of recent British immigration regimes. However, in another respect, this emancipatory view posited another sort of hegemony: that of the modern subject.18

It was very difficult for the volunteer teachers and youth group assistants to accommodate a view of the young as both competent and interested; young people's agency was expected to be always naive. However within, and beyond, these community projects young migrants were always engaged in ‘high stake’ efforts to find social and material securities. Social projects, as well as social research, were useful to this search.

As ‘dramatic moments’, the young people's stories drew from and contributed towards a view of the ‘proper child refugee’ that circulated in the various regimes of immigration, welfare and emancipation. An important perspective is of a child that stands apart from the distinctions and distractions of past lives and relationships, acting as an individual and independent witness of their own situation. In their stories my young informants elided the various social and cultural entanglements of home and migrant social ties that were also part of their lives.19

Conclusions

Nearly a decade ago O'Neal observed the importance of research into the ways that new immigrants ‘attribute meaning to the historical circumstances that produced them in the first place’ (1999, p. 225). Young migrants' stories and storytelling are examined here as rehearsals of and elaborations of what my informants' considered to be a convincing child refugee. The narratives, as products and practices, framed their subjects as lone individuals, as single newcomers with a lost past and as ‘only children’ requiring protection.

This interpretation of the child migrants' stories does not deny the very real traumas and losses faced by these young people. Rather, it highlights the fact that, as migrants within the asylum seeking system, they felt obliged to cast such experiences in ways that would be deemed legitimate by others and that they knew that they had to be adept at this.

My informants were never disinterested research subjects: they were keenly aware of the pragmatic effects and rhetorical potential of narrative and, particularly, of children's narrative. They appropriated a vague research agenda for their own pressing reasons: to build potentially influential alliances, foster ‘good’ reputations for themselves and their families and to ensure the documentation of a particular sort of story. As Maureen and her auntie knew the respectability of a child's story hinged on their presumed incapacity to exercise their social interests. However, also from the point of view of young people, it is argued that their stories must be respected as much more than fictive productions. As ‘dramatic moments’, these personal stories did tell of certain states of personhood and social relationships but in ways that struck chords with those in authority. From their own or others' bitter experiences, young migrants knew that recognition by those in authority relied on a convincing story. However, in other situations, usually away from the formalities of professional as well as research relationships, there were other ways of telling about migration. An anthropological approach insists that we all tend to tell our lives discordantly and ‘in ways that suit the predicaments in which we find ourselves at the moment and we edit and revise for different audiences’ (Hoskins 1996, p. 6).

This might have been why, when I bumped into Peter in a local shopping centre, he found it impossible to greet me. A few weeks before I had met him in a bleak hostel lounge where, clearly frail and anxious, he told a little of his lonely and uncomfortable life. This afternoon he was ‘hanging out with the lads’, a brave and dashing leather jacketed man, flirting with girls and irritating Saturday shoppers. Both ‘life narratives’ are significant dimensions of Peter's experience as a young asylum seeker however only the former might win legitimate advantage

This might also have been what Jane hinted at when we queued on the beach for ice cream. She asked me to check if I had lots of paper left for writing the stories. If I had, she promised that she would tell me some more. That way we could also buy an ice cream for her sister.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the international conference Children and Migration: Identities, Mobilities and Belonging(s), Department of Geography, University College, Cork, Ireland. April 2008. I thank the co-ordinators and collaborators of the Daphne funded project, and Adrian Adams, Samia Abidiche and Emmanuel Jovelin for their support of my contribution. A particular thanks goes to my informants.

Notes

There is extensive debate in the social sciences over a precise definition of narrative and over how the boundaries between text and context might be established (see, for example, Garro and Mattingly 2000). In this study narrative is defined as story-telling through the spoken word.

These young people were known through local youth or family groups within two areas of the south east. Originally 12 young people were contacted by letter through these groups as well as through their guardians, social workers or mentors. Before the research commenced three foster parents explained that their children were too sick or anxious to participate in the research and two children moved from the south east.

This focus was negotiated with foster families and welfare professionals who were concerned that a more open question ‘tell me your life story’ would add to the anxieties of these young people.

None of the young people were comfortable with taped conversations; notes of our conversations were hand written by me and later checked with my informants. Interviews were conducted with the young people alone or, if they chose, in the presence of a sibling, close family member or support worker. Young people chose their own names for the research. My youngest informants chose the names of their social workers. It is notable that all but one of my informants chose popular English names.

Clearly, the elicitation of stories around the general question ‘How are you getting on/how is it going in Britain?’ would have shaped the narratives in certain directions. However, this question could have stimulated different narrative responses – for example, discussions of plans for the future or (as this researcher envisaged) reflections on life changes associated with ageing and age-related entitlements to refuge.

According to Aristotle (1970) narration is more than the conveyance of selected knowledge: it is the assertion of a moral position. The shape of a plot or the sequence of a story involves claims about causality and motive that make a moral argument (cf. Mattingly 2000, p. 185).

For example, men and women or young and old may tell their stories to different audiences and in ways that indicate ‘what they think of themselves and how they wish to be seen’ (Gardner 2002, p. 63).

The question of silence is especially pertinent in the consideration of migrants' narratives for a number of reasons. Some might be more familiar with cultural situations and events where the spoken language is expected to disguise more than reveal. Also, however, composing a narrative about oneself, rather than about other aspects of one's experiences or community, might be an unfamiliar practice. In addition, one's life experiences are not automatically one's own to tell.

As Jackson notes of the modern antimony between science and art ‘[f]actuality is friendly to administrative control while fiction threatens it’ (2002, p. 101).

As Ricoeur (1981, p. 289) remarks in his essay ‘The Narrative Fiction’, while references to the empirical and to the fictional are often clear cut, there are also times when they ‘cross upon’ each other – at these points that Ricour identifies ‘the historical condition of man (cf. Good and Good 2000, p. 66).

Jane is here referring here to her parents’ difficulties with obtaining travel documents without passports. Her comments indicate the extent to which the young might be informal participants in their family's dealing with immigration authorities.

The details of these processes are available in Rutter (2001); Dennis (2002).

Recent studies report that a estimated 15,000 young people aged under 18 years have now entered the UK without legally recognised guardians and usually without identification or documentation; some 6,200 of them have applied for asylum (Sporton et al. 2006, p. 204). Of the children entering Britain to seek independent asylum between 2001 and 2003 it is known that two-thirds were male and that over 60% were aged over 16years (UNHCR 2004 in Hopkins 2008, p. 37). However, as these various writers argue, such figures obscure the differences in migration events and experiences. ‘Unaccompanied minors’ like other refugee groups, are remarkably heterogeneous.

The conditions and behaviours of the young easily catch the western contemporary social imagination: their treatment at the hands of others along with their own (glorified or vilified) social interests and orientations might tell us something of the social futures that they advance through themselves (cf. Ortner 1998).

As James (2002) has observed in a much more thorough examination of institutional approaches to children in a British school, young people are often the distinctive subjects of broad sweeps of policy that seek to recognise ‘difference’ in homogenising terms and through ‘check lists’ of special requirements.

Less often, sympathetic social workers also discussed a charge as ‘only a child really’: a familiar subject with no more than a few extra ‘cultural’ or ‘political’ risks and vulnerabilities.

The practice of ‘giving voice’ to each migrant child draws from a wider rethinking of sociologies of childhood. In this view the young are no longer approached as an homogeneous collection of ‘passive, adults-in waiting’ but as diverse social agents ‘playing out and shaping their own lives within the structures that surround them’ (Matthews 2005, p. 217). The most radical revisions within this paradigm are by writers like Bucholtz (2002). She argues for a perspective on childhood as a distinctive ‘life world’ rather than a ‘developmental way-station’; as an event of ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’; and a series of social engagements that might not even be concerned with the adult world.

As Komulainen (2007) argues, the recent social recognition of competence, creative agency, entitlement and self-realisation as natural attributes of the young resonate with the series of late modern social and symbolic values of democracy, personal autonomy and individual authenticity.

The stories did not; reflect my informants' different legal positions within the immigration or asylum-seeking system in a straight forward way. As far as these young people were concerned, sustaining a convincing reputation as a child migrant did not begin and end with the judicial system but continued to colour their relations with teachers, welfare workers, classmates, friends and researchers.