Petition calls for better services for child torture survivors

There are currently an estimated 6,000 unaccompanied children in the UK, most of them aged between 15 and 18. Some of them will have been given a place at a local school, but while their peers go home to the comfort of their families where a ready-prepared meal and a warm bed awaits, many of these children have little more than the blank walls of a bed sit to return to.

It is the inadequacy of care and the insufficient level of services provided for torture surviving children that the Medical Foundation is seeking to redress. Already, more than 500 people have signed up to our petition calling on the Government to make an urgent and significant improvement in its treatment of children.

Spurred on by prominent socialist thinker Billy Bragg, supporters of the MF, both existing and new, expressed their outrage at the current situation by signing our petition, which was instigated by the Reading Local Group and MF lawyer Syd Bolton at this year's WOMAD festival. The campaign calls for more stringent mechanisms to ensure children fleeing persecution are provided with effective help in their recovery and reintegration when they reach the UK.

"Violence against children is pandemic. Children are so often the main casualties of war, breakdown of civil societies and the collapse of state infrastructures," says Syd Bolton, MF's Legal and Policy Officer (Children and Young People). "They are especially vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and neglect. Worse still, they are tortured or compelled to witness the torture of their families and communities. Yet there is a deafening silence in the responses of those states capable and obliged to offer protection and recovery."

By exploiting a loophole in the UN Children's Convention, a staggering 95 per cent of children who arrive in the UK unaccompanied by adults are refused refugee protection by the government, if they are recognised as children' at all at the initial assessment stage. In some cases, even where the Home Office does accept children's accounts of torture, the government has declared it is "safe" to return these children to countries where they are likely to face further trauma.

The MF is calling on the government to fully adhere to the UN Children's Convention and to demonstrate that it has mechanisms in place to firstly identify children as torture survivors and then to provide them with the services and environment to meet their needs.

Signatures will be collected throughout the course of the year, at the end of which, the petition will be presented to Home Secretary John Reid and Children's Minister Beverley Hughes.