Lost childhood
Children in Danish asylum centres.
S ixteen years ago, at the age of
twelve, I came to Denmark as a
refugee from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
For two and a half years, I lived in an
asylum centre while war and genocide
raged on in my country and politicians
in Denmark fought over whether we
should have the right to apply for asylum
or not.
The time I spent inside the asylum
system did put a lot of strain on me as
a child. For example, I still remember
how much I hated interpreting for adults
in my asylum centre since it put me in
horrible situations, like in the hospital
with people screaming in pain. On the
brighter side, I remember the Danish
children who came to play with us just
after a few days of our arrival. They
taught us our first words of their funny
language. A year and a half later, they
became our classmates when we were
allowed to attend regular school, with
our asylum status yet unresolved. It was
a good thing that our asylum centre was
in the middle of a small town and we
came in contact with the locals straight
away.
A lot has changed since then. The
government, to begin with. One of the
politicians who were against our right
to apply for asylum back in the 1990s,
Birthe Rønn Hornbech, is the current
refugee and integration minister.
Compared with our situation as
refugees, life for an asylum seeker in
Denmark is much harsher now. Most
of the asylum centres have been closed
leaving only eight of them in odd
locations such as the one in the middle
of the woods (Centre Avnstrup); next
to an airport (Centre Kongelunden);
or in a military exercise area (Centre
Sandholm). Families have spent years in
those facilities, caught in a limbo with no
end in sight. While they are not officially
recognised as refugees by the Danish
authorities, they refuse to go back to the
wars they fled from and understandably
so. Who would want to take their children
back to Iraq at this time? Despite all the
misery, life as a rejected asylum seeker
34 September/october 2009
By Amila Jašarevic
in Denmark is still much better than the
life in a war zone.
Today, the geographical placement
of the centres leads to social isolation.
Asylum seekers have very little, if
any, contact with the Danes. They are
not allowed to work and can not even
afford bus tickets to the nearest towns.
Politicians exploit this isolation for
manipulating public opinion through
the media, with some even comparing
asylum centres to summer camps.
For children, this isolation is
particularly devastating, as they grow
up with no sense of normalcy. There is
even a special word for them: asylbørn.
Asylum children, not simply children
like all others. The asylum centres
ensure a roof over their head and food in
their stomach, but these are not actually
designed to be family homes. Without
contact with Danish children who live in
normal homes with their normal families,
asylum children grow up surrounded by
traumatised, dysfunctional adults.
Many of them are not allowed to
attend regular schools. Instead, they
are confined to provisional schools at
the centres that offer a poor level of
education. In one instance, when a mother
complained about the poor quality of the
centre school, a teacher retorted: “They
don’t need to learn anything because
you never know whether they will be
here tomorrow or not.”
Then, about every six months, asylum
children are moved from one centre to
another. This means they make friends
and lose them again and again because
of the the moving, up to a point where
Some children insist on
sleeping in the same bed
with their parents because
they are afraid to wake up
and find that the parents
are gone too,
taken away at night.
Independent World report
many even give up making new friends.
An anthropological study by
Signe Smith Nielsen of University of
Copenhagen, in 2006, established that
for children who spend more than
one year in asylum centres the risk
of developing psychological illness is
thirty times higher than the children in
other sections of the society. In 2007, a
psychiatric report on the mental health
of six asylum children found serious
psychiatric disorders in all of them
with a wide spectre of emotional and
behavioural problems. These are among
a series of studies that have documented
the psychological problems endured by
asylum children because of their living
conditions.
In their desperate search for normalcy
and stability, these children often take
refuge in the virtual world of social
networking websites like Facebook or
Myspace. There, they create an alternate
reality where they are normal children
with normal interests and hobbies. For
them, this becomes a sanctuary where
they do not have to worry about when
they are going to be deported.
The fear of deportation is omnipresent
in their lives. Deportation usually
takes place at night or very early in the
morning, possibly to avoid any witness
or media attention. It is very common
for children to lose friends, never to
hear from them again, because they
were taken away at night. As a result,
some children insist on sleeping in the
same bed with their parents because
they are afraid to wake up and find that
the parents are gone too, taken away at
night.
In the Danish asylum system,
children are not represented since they
are merely regarded as their parents’
luggage. In Canada, for example, refugee
children have their own lawyers and
separate asylum cases. However, in
Denmark, whatever is decided for the
parents applies to the children as well.
The Danish government is often
criticised by human rights organisations
for routinely breeching the United
Grandparents for Asylum demonstrating in Denmark: Photo by Amila Jašarević.
Nations Convention on the Rights of the
Child, ratified by Denmark in 1991, when
dealing with refugee children.
For example, this June, five Danish
human rights organisations – Amnesty
International Denmark, Danish UN
Association, Rehabilitation and
Research Centre for Torture Victims,
Save the Children Denmark and Euro-
Mediterranean Human Rights Network
– asked the government not to forcibly
deport rejected Iraqi asylum seekers in
Denmark to Iraq. In a joint statement,
the organisations noted: “The children
of the asylum seekers, who have grown
up in Denmark, constitute a particularly
vulnerable group in need of help. They
have grown up in Denmark, speak Danish
and consider themselves part of the
Danish society. They have no ties to Iraq.
Studies have shown that it is harmful
for children to live in asylum centres
for long periods of time. The examples
are plenty that the parents’ ability to
fill the parental role and take care of
their children is demolished during
their prolonged stay in uncertainty and
that the children suffer from this lack
of attention. To forcibly return families
with children after several years of
residence in Denmark to uncertain
conditions, risk of violence and without
support and network will be against the
spirit of the United Nations children
convention.”
Like all other criticism of the Danish
asylum policy, the appeal fell on deaf
ears. The politicians seem immune to
criticism even in cases where families
have been torn apart because the father
and the children got asylum while the
mother was rejected.
Two years ago, a new movement
– Grandparents for Asylum – emerged
in Denmark, to campaign on behalf of
the asylum children. It all started with
a group of seniors who gathered in
front of Centre Sandholm every Sunday.
The group soon multiplied and spread
to Centre Kongelunden and Centre
Avnstrup. Grandparents for Asylum
have been very active in organising
rallies and marches against the current
asylum policy, while still gathering
Independent World report
in front of the centres every Sunday.
They have visibly made the politicians
nervous since the idea of grandparents as
activists speaks to the entire population
and automatically draws attention to
the ill-treatment of the “grandchildren.”
A population that knows the asylum
seekers, is a population that is unlikely
to accept their confinement to asylum
centres for years or their forced
deportation at night.
Maybe, that is why I and the others
from my asylum centre ended up getting
asylum. We had become somebody’s
classmate, somebody’s friend,
somebody’s girlfriend or boyfriend. We
were not just numbers in the press. That
is why the fight that is going on right
now is a fight to put human faces before
numbers and statistics. �
Amila Jašarević is a human rights activist
based in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Her weblog is available at:
amilabosnae.wordpress.com
September/october 2009 35