Urge the Children's Commissioner to investigate the news portrayal of refugee children

Like the vast majority of this country we are dismayed in the extreme to witness the way certain newspapers have reported the arrival of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Calais.

Far from portraying this as a compassionate and humanitarian response, (not to mention a legal obligation), children have been identified, vilified and impugned by some politicians and parts of the media, much more intent on continuing the increasingly hostile anti-migrant agenda at large during and after the referendum, than treating children with the care and respect for their privacy and their childhoods that they are fully entitled to.

The publication of children’s images, no doubt without their informed consent, with disregard for the Independent Press Standards Office Editors’ Code and other media guidelines published by the likes of UNICEF is most harmful and creates a serious risk to these and all other asylum seeking and migrant children.

By exposing their images across a global media it puts children and their families at risk of identification by those who would persecute them, it undermines their ability to integrate in the country that is providing them with sanctuary and accuses them of being liars and cheats by pretending to be adults.

Age assessment policies and procedures are well established in the UK and have been the subject of much judicial scrutiny all the way to the Supreme Court concerning the practice, accuracy and utility of age assessment methods including those such as dental X-Ray.

Sections of the media have chosen to ignore the many sources of detailed information about these controversial practices and instead reached a peremptory conclusion using a crude visual appearance test, long dismissed by the courts as inadequate and inappropriate to serve their own sensationalist ends.

The climate of hostility and damaging, negative news stories about asylum seeking children must stop. When a football celebrity expresses his horror at the attitudes at large in certain sections of society and on social media and is in turn vilified for showing compassion for refugee children something has gone terribly wrong. Our media as a whole shares a very high degree of responsibility for creating this dangerous climate.

As more children arrive in the UK in the weeks and months ahead, including those under the so called ‘Dubs Amendment’ scheme, we call upon The Children’s Commissioner for England, using the powers invested in her Office under Part 6 of The Children and Families Act 2014, to investigate the UK’s print, audio, visual and digital media’s conduct in relation to these children’s arrival, to examine how and to what extent children’s individual and collective rights have been violated and to report publicly on how the media regulators should strengthen and enforce measures to protect all children’s rights in their work and in their regulatory frameworks.

At present the so called ‘independent’ press regulator lacks statutory powers and is constrained by a narrow code of conduct for its complaints framework. This does not meet the interests of children in a way that is consistent with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This is both urgent and long term work. Urgent in sending out a clear message about what is and is not acceptable in how children are represented as a group and individually across our media and long term in establishing a culture of responsible journalism about children and the promotion of their rights.

Freedom of expression of our media is a vital pillar of accountability. Protection of children, their rights and interests is not subordinate to that function but equal to it. That means for all children, all of the time.