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He fled war in Sudan. Now the UK doesn’t believe he’s a kid

The Home Office guesses asylum seekers’ ages using ‘inaccurate and unethical’ tests. These are the consequences

By Monica Montero
He fled war in Sudan. Now the UK doesn’t believe he’s a kid
Migrants who cannot pay smugglers the costly passage of crossing the English Channel by inflatable dinghy will try to reach the U.K., hidden in a lorry, Sept. 4, 2023. | Monica Montero
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It was around 8 o’clock on a January night when several men from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) barged into Fati’s* home in Darfur, Sudan.

Machine guns in hand, they assaulted him, his uncle and older brother. The soldiers came with an ultimatum: join them to fight the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or die. Fati’s family would choose neither. Within a matter of days, they gathered some clothes, food and water and fled by car. They were headed for Libya. The ride took two weeks.

It would take several more weeks for Fati’s thin limbs and torso to recover from the kicks, but the scars inside his mouth remain. He tells openDemocracy he was 16 at the time.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0