Half-time in their regular Thursday night seven-a-side game, and the St Christopher’s All Blacks are 3-1 down. Lips pursed with disappointment, they gather on the crisp astroturf for a team talk. At the touchline, manager Alex Jones paces nervously. “They could really do with winning this,” she says.
The football pitch is a special place for the All Blacks team, Jones explains. The squad consists of young British people who are in care or are care leavers, and teenage asylum seekers who have arrived in the UK alone and been taken into local authority care. Most are current or former residents of council-commissioned supported housing in London run by the St Christopher’s Fellowship, a charity that provides children’s homes and accommodation for over-16s. “It doesn’t matter what has come before during that day or where you’re from,” says Jones, the charity’s life skills and participation coordinator. “When you’re playing football, everyone is equal.”
The degree to which asylum seekers are integrated into British communities is in the spotlight in the wake of the attack on teenager Reker Ahmed in Croydon earlier this month, and the warnings that followed of increasing abuse directed at refugee children.
In the year to September 2016, unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) made 3,144 asylum applications in the UK – a 15% increase on the year before. The largest number – 783 – came from Afghanistan, while 435 were Iranian and 426 Albanian. There are no centrally available figures on where they have ended up under the National Transfer Scheme, which was introduced last July to relieve pressure on councils such as Kent and Croydon, which had previously taken most of the unaccompanied children because they arrived via Dover or had made an asylum application at Lunar House in Croydon.
More are expected in the coming months. Aid groups say that five months after the clearance of the Calais refugee camp, refugees – many of them young and without their families – are once more starting to gather in and around Calais, from where they may try to cross to Britain on lorries.
And 150 are due to arrive under the “Dubs amendment”, the last group admitted under the shortlived scheme set up last April. The government provoked a furious outcry when it quietly announced in February that only 350 of the thousands of children reaching Europe alone would be brought to the UK under the amendment to the Immigration Act sponsored by the Labour peer Lord Dubs; campaigners had hoped the number would be 3,000.
Because UASC tend to be over 16, they are often placed in supported housing – also known as semi-independent living – with other looked-after children, rather than in foster care.
At St Christopher’s, where more than half of new placements – 30 out of 57 – were UASC last year, compared with less than a quarter the year before, encouraging cohesion is fundamental. What do these two groups of young people bond over, aside from football? Food, says Martin Cole, the manager at one of the charity’s homes in south London, without hesitation. Residents cook together and share food from their home countries, and there are group meals out sampling everything from fish and chips to Nigerian, Kurdish and Albanian cuisine.
Freselam Russom [not his real name], an 18-year-old from Eritrea who spent a year with the south London service, has fond memories of cooking injera – an east African flatbread – for the other young people there. “I felt proud,” he says, “because I’d never introduced my culture to other people before.”
St Christopher’s says no asylum-seeking young person in their care has been a victim of hate crime. “It’s part of life skills that young people should be able to get along with whoever they meet, wherever they go in life,” says the charity’s head of development, Andrew Lewis. “What I really hope is that we’re challenging some of the views that the UK young people may be coming to us with and they’re having their eyes opened because they’ve had positive experiences with the young people from overseas.”
Cole remembers one boy whose family had strong anti-immigrant views. “He ended up advocating for asylum seekers and telling his family they didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says.
The British residents at St Christopher’s were shocked to hear the details of Russom’s journey to the UK, crossing the Mediterranean on a wooden boat with 600 other people and stowing away on a lorry from Calais. “They were like ‘this is a horrible journey’,” he remembers.
Russom was taken aback by some of their stories and the situations they had found themselves in. “Back home they force you to risk your life, but here in the UK, young people choose to do risky things.”
The arrival of asylum seekers has contributed to a calmer environment in the accommodation, Cole says. “It’s a much more chilled atmosphere because most of them just want to learn and get acclimatised and speak English. They’re pretty much all in college, and that has a positive knock-on effect because others see things are moving positively for those guys – if they’re going to college they’re able to get a bursary, so it becomes a bit aspirational.”
Though neither the young people who have grown up in care, nor those who are seeking asylum, tend to discuss their past, there are parallels in their experiences, says Jones.
“Some of the young people have got visible scarring from torture,” she says. “The young people from the UK are so concerned and sad for them, but they can’t see that that’s what’s happened to them as well.“ It’s the same for all of them. That the people you assume you should trust in life have been the very people who have done awful things to them. A lot of their journeys have been full of things that make them mistrust adults, and when they’re playing football they get a chance to do something where adults are not the ones with power. Then the trust comes.”
Jemmel Cophen, 21, who was in care from the age of seven, has become firm friends with one of his teammates, a 17-year-old Eritrean. “He doesn’t speak English but I help him,” he says. “We go to the same college and we just talk, we do shopping together and stuff. If we go to the shop I’ll tell him what to say and I’ll make him do it. He’s like a little brother to me.”
Friendships like Cophen’s are quite unusual in the experience of Razia Shariff, chief executive of Kent Refugee Action Network, which in 2016 worked with 233 unaccompanied young people aged 16 to 24 in Kent, one of the counties that took the most new arrivals. Young asylum seekers are frequently keen to mix with local young people but do not always get the opportunity. “They’re all so desperate to go to college, for that chance to be there among equals and feel that they’re part of that community and society,” she says.
But because they’re often put in English classes, they find they’re not able to get to know British students. Last year the charity started a buddying system with local sixth-formers, after pupils at one school asked how they could help. It was such a success that this year it is hoped up to seven schools will take part. “It helps with their language, obviously,” Shariff says, “but also that they belong and that they have an identity within the wider community. It’s a really good leveller for them to just have fun and enjoy themselves.”
While none of the young people the Kent charity works with have suffered physical attacks, “petty” negative comments and attitudes are a common experience. “The alleged hate crime in Croydon is symptomatic of a failure in the way society is talking about and normalising attitudes towards these young people,” she says. “The government’s rhetoric is around ‘them and us’, and ‘good and bad’ refugees. But this should be more about cohesion than integration. It’s about respecting and recognising people from other parts of the world and celebrating that difference and diversity, not feeling they have to become like us in order to fit in.”
The All Blacks’ match ends in a 6-2 defeat, and most of the team head straight to the changing rooms, too stung by the defeat to talk. The next day, Jones emails an update. “We all went to cook dinner together after you left us,” she writes. “We had a chance to think about the game and our performance, and make a plan for how we are going to come back stronger next time.”
By Rachel Williams
12 April 2017
