Soon I ended up on the streets. For four years, I was homeless. I slept on buses and trains just to stay warm and avoid being attacked. I begged for food. As a teenager alone in a foreign country, I was at a constant risk of exploitation. All because one official took a quick look at me and made a wrong assumption. Because I was too tall, I looked too old.
And I know there are young people going through exactly the same thing today. Asylum seeking children who don’t have documents – because their home is a war zone or a place where records simply don’t exist – are still being wrongly labelled as adults. That misjudgement can lead directly to homelessness, abuse, or worse.
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But instead of fixing age assessments, the government now wants to use artificial intelligence to decide who is a child and who is not. We’ve seen bone and dental scans fail before. AI won’t magically know someone’s history, or trauma, or the way stress and survival can distort how we look.
A computer cannot tell the difference between a scared 16-year-old and a 26-year-old who has suffered. What kind of society are we in if we trust algorithms over young people about their own lives? We are more than just data points taken out of context.
As we approach Christmas, I always remember my childhood back home. Being an only child and feeling so loved, learning to ride my first bike with my mum. These memories are full of joy.
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But my first Christmas in the UK was the opposite. I was alone, frightened, missing my parents and wondering if despite everything I’d fled, I’d made a terrible mistake coming here. I didn’t feel safe and I didn’t feel like a child. And today, there are children and teenagers who will spend Christmas scared and alone because no one believes their age and who they are.
Thankfully, my story didn’t end on the streets. I eventually found help through Freedom from Torture. For the first time, I felt like someone cared whether I survived. Therapy helped me understand and come to terms with what I’d been through. And I met other young survivors who had also been ignored and disbelieved. For the first time since leaving home, I had people who cared about me.
In 2018, a judge finally recognised the truth. That moment changed my life. Someone in authority had finally listened. Now, I work full-time supporting young survivors at Freedom from Torture’s youth activism group, Young Outspoken Survivors. I help make sure that others don’t fall through the same cracks I did.
And I have a family. A wife and three children. Now we’ve built new Christmas memories together. There is joy in my life again.
If the government wants to protect children, it must start by believing them. Not interrogating them. Not mislabelling them. And definitely not outsourcing decisions about their identity to machines.
Behind every age dispute is a child or teenager who has already survived the unimaginable. They deserve a childhood. They deserve dignity. They deserve safety and our protection. And they deserve a chance to grow up.
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This author’s name has been changed to protect their identity. Freedom from Torture is the only UK-wide charity that exists specifically to support people who have survived torture to recover and rebuild their lives.
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