Based on insights from a recent scoping project, this paper explores how competing conceptions of childhood are mobilised in law/policy and public discourse to enhance or undermine unaccompanied asylum-seeking children’s (UASC) agency, broadly understood as one’s ability to act (Ottosson, Eastmond and Cederborg, 2017), and make choices for their own lives.

Migrant children, and UASC in particular, are a unique group of migrants situated amidst complex international legal frameworks governing children’s rights and protection, as well as migration and asylum. Despite having rights to special protection due to vulnerabilities of age and unaccompanied status, UASC are also subject to the UK’s immigration framework, a system increasingly punitive under the Home Office Hostile Environment Policy. Most UASC arriving in Europe and the UK are teenagers between 16 and 17 years of age, inhabiting a space where boundaries of childhood and adulthood begin to merge.

Amidst global concerns about migration and the touted ‘refugee crisis’, UK media discourses complicate notions of childhood by promoting either strong public narratives of the innocent and vulnerable refugee child or questioning whether those arriving as UASC are children at all, referring to them as ‘fake child refugees’, capturing ongoing debates on how the age of newly arrived refugees should be properly assessed (McLaughlin, 2018). These discourses highlight the liminal position of UASC that oscillates between a vulnerable child who lacks agency and a dangerous ‘other’ who is a threat to a country’s integrity (Crawley, 2010).

Informed by critical discourse studies (Blommaert, 2005; Krzyżanowski, 2011), we examine how historical and contemporary notions of childhood are entextualised in relevant European/ UK legal instruments and newspaper articles dating back to 2015 (start of so-called refugee crisis). We show how different framings impact on UASC’s ability to integrate in the UK/ Scotland and the relevance for policy and practice.