Forced returns and protracted displacement

Key findings • The needs of unaccompanied migrant young people transitioning to adulthood with precarious or no legal status are absent from UK policy agendas. • Current policies governing possible outcomes for these young people particularly forced return to country of origin can undermine young people’s wellbeing and fundamental rights. • Returns policies are expensive and have unintended consequences such as re-migration and/or forced transitions to survival through illegal means. • The prospect and reality of forced removal have severe adverse impacts on young people’s health and wellbeing, often leading to protracted displacement over many years. • Forced return to countries of origin fails to acknowledge the connections and potential contribution made by these young people in the UK and underestimates the challenges to reintegration in countries they haven’t lived in for several years

Understanding causes and consequences of going ‘missing’

Key findings • Local authorities and central government define ‘missing’ in different ways reflecting differing concerns and agendas. • There is limited attention given to ‘missing’ unaccompanied young people seeking asylum once they turn 18. • The transition to institutional adulthood (at 18 years) greatly increases young people’s anxieties and fears about their futures. Fear of being apprehended and deported drives many young people with no secure status to disengage from services and abscond. • Disengaging from services means for many an abrupt transition into precarity and destitution. Absconding means relying on community and support networks and may lead to forms of exploitation and vulnerabilit

Protecting the ‘best interests’ of the child in transition to adulthood

Key findings • Out-of-county placements for unaccompanied asylum seeking children have increased in the last few years. • Placements happen without transfer of responsibility between Local Authorities (LAs). LAs receiving young people report having little or no information provided about them. This lack of information affects the capacity of professionals within the LA to address emerging care needs and provide timely access to services and support. • Money-saving concerns are affecting the care LAs are able to provide to young people seeking asylum in their care. Services for older children seem particularly affected and there is evidence that the quality of service provision can sharply decline as they become care leavers at 18. • Closer collaboration between LAs and the Home Office means that social workers find it more difficult to build trust with and to fulfil their statutory duties towards migrant young people in their car

Reading Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move

This forum is around Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones, the winning volume of the first edition of the biennial book award of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society with IBG (PolGRG) in conjunction with Political Geography Journal. The book award was established in 2016 to give recognition to new academic volumes that engage with the thematic remit of PolGRG and contribute to develop the diverse field of political geography more widely. In line with the diversity of PolGRG interests and membership, the PolGRG Book Award is aimed at published volumes advancing the debate around themes spanning territoriality and sovereignty; states, cities, and citizenship; geopolitics, political economy and political ecology; migration, globalization and (post)colonialism; social movements and governance; peace, conflict and security. All this appreciating the implications of these phenomena with gender, race, class, sexuality and religion. Importantly, the idea of a book award was conceived to reward the slow and cumulative work that goes into publishing scholarly volumes

Migration, Racism and the Hostile Environment: Making the Case for the Social Sciences

Cite as: Social Scientists Against the Hostile Environment (SSAHE)(2020). Migration, racism and the hostile environment : Making the case for the social sciences. London. https://acssmigration.wordpress.com/report/

‘You just have to work with what you’ve got’ Practitioner research with precarious migrant families

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor and Francis in Practice on 09/10/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2017.1385756 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Undocumented migrant families experience high levels of food poverty, exclusion from mainstream benefits, and sometimes from social work services. This is an under-researched area for social work in the UK, and there is no statutory guidance for social workers on supporting undocumented migrants. Practitioner research is one way of ‘visibilising’ their experiences. Six migrant families accessing a voluntary sector stay and play project were interviewed using a practitioner research model of semi-structured interviews on the themes of food, access to services and children. The research found that families responded to their situation with a seemingly contradictory strategy of resignation and resilience. The implications for practitioners working with this user group are considered, and suggestions for support services for this group of families are offered

Effectiveness of service screening: a case–control study to assess breast cancer mortality reduction

The aim of this study was the evaluation of the impact of service screening programmes on breast cancer mortality in five regions of Italy. We conducted a matched case–control study with four controls for each case. Cases were defined as breast cancer deaths occurred not later than 31 December 2002. Controls were sampled from the local municipality list and matched by date of birth. Screening histories were assessed by the local, computerised, screening database and subjects were classified as either invited or not-yet-invited and as either screened or unscreened. There were a total of 1750 breast cancer deaths within the 50 to 74-year-old breast cancer cases and a total of 7000 controls. The logistic conditional estimate of the cumulative odds ratios comparing invited with not-yet-invited women was 0.75 (95% CI: 0.62–0.92). Restricting the analyses to invited women, the odds ratio of screened to never-respondent women corrected for self-selection bias was 0.55 (95% CI: 0.36–0.85). The introduction of breast cancer screening programmes in Italy is associated with a reduction in breast cancer mortality attributable to the additional impact of service screening over and above the background access to mammography

Non-hexagonal neural dynamics in vowel space

Are the grid cells discovered in rodents relevant to human cognition? Following up on two seminal studies by others, we aimed to check whether an approximate 6-fold, grid-like symmetry shows up in the cortical activity of humans who "navigate" between vowels, given that vowel space can be approximated with a continuous trapezoidal 2D manifold, spanned by the first and second formant frequencies. We created 30 vowel trajectories in the assumedly flat central portion of the trapezoid. Each of these trajectories had a duration of 240 milliseconds, with a steady start and end point on the perimeter of a "wheel". We hypothesized that if the neural representation of this "box" is similar to that of rodent grid units, there should be an at least partial hexagonal (6-fold) symmetry in the EEG response of participants who navigate it. We have not found any dominant n-fold symmetry, however, but instead, using PCAs, we find indications that the vowel representation may reflect phonetic features, as positioned on the vowel manifold. The suggestion, therefore, is that vowels are encoded in relation to their salient sensory-perceptual variables, and are not assigned to arbitrary gridlike abstract maps. Finally, we explored the relationship between the first PCA eigenvector and putative vowel attractors for native Italian speakers, who served as the subjects in our study