Queer youths who seek asylum are not well enough protected. The system which decides whether their claims are credible lacks child-specific approaches often fails to see the harm suffered by these youths.
On Friday the 8th of December, Elias Tissandier-Nasom participated in the LGBTQIA+ Research Day 2023 organised by The Flemish-Dutch LGBTI Research Network, VU Pride, UvA Pride, Utrecht University and the Centre of Expertise of LGBTQIA+ Issues at the University of Groningen and held in Utrecht.
During his presentation, he reflected on the credibility assessments of LGBTQIA+ youth's asylum claims. More specifically, he addressed the multifaceted obstacles that they may face in trying to see their sexual orientation or gender identity recognised by asylum adjudicators. In this sense, the presentation focused on the impact of social views of children's capacity to develop a stable identity on the approach taken by asylum assessors in deciding whether their claims are deemed 'credible'. The widespread view that children are incapable of being LGBTQIA+ leads to an incapacity of adjudicators to see them as fitting the 'immutable characteristics' criteria for membership to a particular social group under the refugee definition. In turn, this translates into a failure to see the harm suffered by those children as amounting to persecution and a lack of child-specific approaches in the process. Altogether, this process enables an erasure of queer youth identity which leads to weak protection of LGBTQIA+ children in asylum qualification procedures.
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