Science

Carla van Os and children's rights

She fights injustice

You should never deport refugee children. Of course, you knew that already, however, now there’s scientific proof. RUG researcher Carla van Os wrote her dissertation about it.
By Thereza Langeler / Photo Reyer Boxem / Translation Sarah van Steenderen

In the Netherlands, we are very concerned with children. We signed a special Children’s Rights Convention, appointed an ombudsman just for children, and demand perfection from our youth care and education. We become enraged whenever a child is in danger, in the hands of shady characters, or left to fend for themselves.

Except when it comes to children who weren’t born here. RUG researcher Carla van Os noticed that our feelings about them are radically different.

Van Os is getting her PhD at the faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences (BSS) on 14 June. She has been working for the Research and Expertise Centre for Children and Immigration Law. She works with the Best Interest of the Child Assessment, or BIC assessment in short. ‘I focus on the children’s interests.’
The Research and Expertise Centre has been doing assessments like these for approximately a decade. Through interviews and observations, researchers study children’s environments, cataloguing whether they’re safe, whether the children have room to develop, and whether they have a happy childhood.

Rooted

In the case of refugee children, the BIG assessment is meant to answer whether the environments in the children’s countries of origin sufficiently ensure the children’s development. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) can use the results when deciding whether or not a child should be deported.

‘But the problem is that the issue of deportation usually only comes up after children have been here for a long time’, says Van Os. By that time, the children have gotten used to the Netherlands and they’re potentially more at home with our language and culture than the ones from their countries of origin. It would really be better to catalogue the children’s interests at the start of their asylum procedure.

‘That was my research assignment’, Van Os explains. ‘To see if we could adapt the existing BIC method to use for children who only just came to the Netherlands as refugees.’

The child’s welfare comes before anything else

Because what works for children who have been used to the Netherlands for years may not work for children who don’t speak Dutch and who may still be traumatised from having to flee. Nevertheless, it’s important that the children are assessed through the BIC method before the first IND decision. And Van Os is not the only one who thinks so: ‘It’s actually set down in the Children’s Rights Convention. All actions concerning children should be taken with the child’s welfare in mind first and foremost.’ She emphasises: ‘That means the child’s welfare comes before anything else.’

Restrictive

The Netherlands signed the United Nations’ Children’s Rights Convention. So what happens when the IND starts asylum proceedings? Do they just forget this? Why is the children’s welfare not their first priority? And why are we always so concerned with all children, except the ones who weren’t born here?

‘Because that would mean that the government would have to admit that it’s often much better for children to stay here,’ says Van Os. ‘And that doesn’t fit in with our strict asylum policy, which says that we have to send as many people as possible back to their countries of origin.’

If there’s one person who knows all about the strict asylum policy, it’s Carla van Os. However, she hates it. She previously worked for Defence for Children, where she tried to influence the asylum policy as much as possible. In 2011 she went from talk show to talk show to plead the now famous case for Mauro Manuel, an Angolan boy who might get deported. And the children’s pardon that was included in the coalition agreement in 2012 was partially due to her. The pardon allows children who have been in the Netherlands for more than five years to stay here.

Help people

She would never have been able to predict these feats of hers thirty years ago, when she first started studying educational therapy in Nijmegen. ‘I don’t think I’d even heard of children’s rights back then’, she says. ‘I just wanted to help people. But on an individual level: children with issues, as well as their parents.’

It was a complete coincidence that Van Os started working with refugees as a volunteer, but what the things she saw and heard there left a deep impression on her. ‘It made me realise that one person wasn’t enough.’ The whole world needed to change for the better.

With that goal in mind Van Os went to Fontys University of Applied Science to become a journalist, but she soon found out that nuanced stories don’t help to change the world. She went back to school, this time to study law in Leiden.

And thus she became one of the most important advocate for children’s rights – especially those of child refugees. But in 2014, Van Os was tired of fighting for a little while, and so she went back to university. This time, she came to Groningen.

‘It may not have seemed like a logical choice’, she says, ‘but it was a really good one. I love learning. I’ve always loved it, but I used to have to take time off to do it. I’d lock myself and a case of books in a house on the island of Vlieland.’ She laughs: ‘Now it feels like I’m on holiday every week.’

So many post-traumatic stress-related complaints, it’s worrying

The next question: what is the best way to help these children talk about what happened to them? ‘We discovered that what’s especially important is agency. The children need to have control over the setting. Do they want to do it on a school day, so they can take the day off, or should it be on a different day so they don’t miss anything? Do they want to come to the research centre or do they want the researchers to come to them?’

Euphoria

The 27 children that Van Os assessed almost all chose the latter option. And so she travelled all over the country by bus, from one refugee centre to another. She saw children who came here with their families, but she also saw kids who had come to the Netherlands on their own. She remembers the euphoria she felt when her adapted assessments actually led to useful information: ‘It was amazing to find out that what we’d come up with actually worked in practice.’

She also remembers the practically tangible trauma in the children she studied. ‘That had a huge impact on me. I could see how fresh the escape still was in their minds, all the terrible things they’d been through.’ Both children and parents often had trouble focusing on the research because of this. ‘I would ask them things like “what would you do if your child skinned its knee?” when they were still focused on boats or the Balkan.’ She pauses thoughtfully. ‘There is this poem about refugees, which has the following sentence: “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”.’

Sent back

The conclusions of her study are clear: The children’s environments both before they leave their countries of origin and in the expected situation when they return do not allow them to sufficiently develop. Especially children who don’t have a family do poorly. With this, Van Os has provided scientific proof of what should really be common sense: that it’s better for child refugees to stay in the Netherlands rather than be sent back.

Unfortunately, not everyone in this country, with its strict asylum policy, likes to hear this. So putting theory into practice may take a while. ‘But we’ll make it happen’, says Van Os, without a hint of uncertainty. ‘If you feel that something isn’t right, you know you’re going to win.’

Dutch

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