22-07-2025
U.K. To Stop X-Raying Child Asylum Seekers For Age, Use AI Instead
Migrant children picked up at sea in Dover, southeast England, on June 12, 2024. (Photo by Ben ... More Stansall / AFP) (Photo by BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)
The government of the United Kingdom has announced it has decided to stop using methods such as x-rays to assess the age of unaccompanied child asylum seekers. NGOs and civil society organizations have welcomed the decision, though warn about the government's plans to instead use Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition.
Many countries in Europe - including the U.K. - have used such 'scientific methods' as x-rays of bone density to try to determine whether an asylum seeker or irregular migrant is a legal adult. Such methods are considered unreliable, in particular as they are often based on evidence sets from European children that don't match the physiognomies of young people from other place in the world. Among the critics of such methods are the U.K.'s Society of Radiographers, who called the practice 'unethical, inaccurate and illegal.'
The United Kingdom's border authorities have also been known to use other unreliable measurements to determine a potential child's age, such as examining their hair line or the hair on their arms.
Whether a child is recognized - or not - as being under the age of legal adulthood can have huge ramifications for their futures and wellbeing in the U.K., as is the case elsewhere. Organizations such as the Humans for Rights Network and Helen Bamber Foundation have for years sounded the alarm over hundreds of children per year declared to be adults and put into the adult legal system. This has led in some cases to children being locked in up adult prison for extended periods of time before they are recognized as children. Many children have faced criminal charges as adults for border-related offenses, and some of those have been convicted or accepted plea deals. This is known to regularly occur in Greece and Italy as well, for various reasons including similarly out-dated and unreliable methods for age assessment.
In 2024, data collected from the government by the Helen Bamber Foundation via freedom of information requests show that there were 1,338 referrals made to U.K. child services of young people put into adult detention. Just over half of these referrals which led to an age assessment were found to be of children, meaning well over 600 children were put into adult detention or accommodation.
'Every year hundreds of unaccompanied children seeking protection are incorrectly determined by border officials to be adults based on a cursory visual assessment," said Kamena Dorling, Director of Policy and co-chair of the Refugee and Migrant Children's Consortium. 'Not only are they then forced to share rooms with strangers in adult asylum accommodation, many are now also ending up in adult prisons after being prosecuted for illegal arrival.'
While the scrapping of x-rays in age assessments has been welcomed by experts and migration advocates, there is still concern that the current plan - confirmed today by borders minister Angela Eagle - will rely on AI facial recognition technology to assess age instead.
'Existing evidence has found that AI can be even less accurate and more biased than human decisions when judging a person's age — with similar patterns of errors,' reads a press release from the Helen Bamber Foundation.
