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Inside British Army’s child training college where violent abuse is the norm

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Original article by Sian Norris republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Widespread bullying and violence reported at the army training college
| James Battershill

An 11-month investigation reveals culture of violence, criminality and sexual abuse at army training centre for teens

The British Army is the only military in Europe that still recruits 16-year-olds.

That’s how old Hamish* was when he joined last year. As is required of all 16- and 17-year-old sign-ups, who are legally still children but are given the titles of ‘junior soldiers’, he moved into the residential Army Foundation College Harrogate in the north of England to begin his military training.

“In the first couple of weeks, it’s brilliant,” he said of his early days in the army, explaining that most teenage recruits “see it as a brilliant way of earning money”, particularly “if you haven’t really got any GCSEs”.

“But then things start to break down,” he said. Hamish soon witnessed boys being repeatedly punched in the head during fights with their peers or whipped with belts during initiation rituals, as well as other physical violence, including extreme bullying. Junior members of staff, he said, told the teenage recruits they did not need to know about such incidents, even encouraging them to physically “fight it out”.

Hamish is far from alone in his experiences at AFC Harrogate. An exclusive investigation by openDemocracy and the Children Rights International Network (CRIN) has revealed the shocking extent of the bullying, harassment, self-harm, sexual offences and safeguarding failures that teenagers who join the British Army are subject to.

Over the past 11 months, we have submitted dozens of Freedom of Information requests, worked with peers in the House of Lords to ask parliamentary questions, reviewed publicly available documents and data, as well as video footage of instances of violence at AFC Harrogate, and spoken to sources and experts to uncover the reality of life at the college. Our investigation found that between 1 January 2018 and September 2025:

The Ministry of Defence recorded 474 complaints of physical violence against junior soldiers at AFC Harrogate – an average of 62 a year
Staff members were the alleged perpetrators in 41 of these incidents
There were 176 complaints of “sexual allegations”, more than 30 of which were against college staff
The MoD recorded 214 complaints of bullying at the college
The college recorded an average of 20 incidents of self-harm every year
North Yorkshire Police recorded 24 crimes at the college in the first six months of 2025 alone, including five sexual offences

openDemocracy shared the number of allegations of physical violence with a teacher who spent more than a decade working in a mainstream school with a sixth form in England, where the pupils are the same age as those at AFC Harrogate, to ask if this was a normal rate. A school receiving such a high number of complaints in any given year, she said, “would be fucking nuts”.

Teachers from English state schools also told us that the 176 allegations of sexual abuse at AFC Harrogate “seems phenomenally high”. One said that in more than a decade of teaching at a sixth form college, she could only think of one such complaint.

Our findings raise serious concerns about the welfare of teenagers at AFC Harrogate.

Like many other Western militaries, the British Army is finding it increasingly difficult to bring in new recruits. In 2010, the army boasted nearly 110,000 troops; now, it struggles to meet its target of 73,000. The Ministry of Defence plans to spend £18m on attracting new personnel to the army this financial year, twice as much as The Daily Express reported it spent in 2023/24. It is likely that much of this spend will target 16- and 17-year-olds, whom CRIN has previously found make up around third of the army’s annual intake – but our investigation has thrown into doubt the care that the British Army will provide to those who sign up.

The failures we have uncovered at AFC Harrogate are not without tragic real-world consequences. CRIN previously found that more than half the British soldiers who have killed themselves while in active service over the past two decades had signed up to the military before they turned 18, with those who joined aged 16 or 17 more than twice as likely to take their own lives than those who joined as adults.

“These recruits,” CRIN’s Jim Wyke warned, “coming from the most deprived backgrounds, join wanting to serve their country, to better themselves, to build something of themselves – and what do they get? An education that would be illegal anywhere else in the UK. A significant risk of being bullied or physically and sexually abused, including by their instructors. And worst of all, a welfare system that prioritises the reputation of the army above the children under their command.

“The truth is simple: the army is exposing children to abuse, and when confronted with this is refusing to act. This is a scandal. Those who’ve signed up so young deserve better.”

Life at AFC Harrogate

As the UK’s only initial army training unit for child recruits, the Army Foundation College in Harrogate receives all 16- and 17-year-olds who join the British Army each year. On average, this is around 2,370 teenagers annually, according to data obtained through FOI.

Many of these junior soldier recruits have specific vulnerabilities.

The majority come from disadvantaged backgrounds: recruitment to the army is 57% higher in deprived areas than the wealthiest parts of the country. Last year’s AFC Harrogate intake also included 39 registered care leavers – twice as many as you might expect based on the proportion of children in care in the UK – according to a parliamentary question submitted on our behalf by Labour peer Baroness Lister. And 182 junior soldiers had an initial assessment at the MoD’s department of community mental health between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2024, an FOI revealed.

Upon arriving at AFC Harrogate, these teenagers are placed in the care of around 500 members of staff at the college, the vast majority of whom are themselves members of the army who have undertaken a two-week course at the army instructor training school at Pirbright, before receiving on-the-job training.

The new junior soldiers join one of two ‘Phase 1’ courses: a 49-week programme for recruits who intend to join combat roles, and a shorter 23-week course for those who plan to go on to roles such as military engineers, field doctors, or logistics specialists. Both courses, the army website says, teach aspects of military life including fieldcraft, skill at arms, fitness training, qualities of a soldier and battlefield casualty drills.

Trainees also receive some, albeit limited, education from civilian staff. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is not bound to the Education and Skills Act 2008, which requires 16- and 17-year-olds to be in education or training. As such, the college offers short ‘Functional Skills’ courses in English and Maths, which are below the level of GCSEs and do not offer an easy route to further qualifications.

AFC Harrogate’s promotional material often boasts that it has repeatedly been rated ‘outstanding’, the highest grade, by England’s education watchdog, Ofsted. Not mentioned is that the MoD has a bespoke commercial contract with Ofsted, with the government covering the costs of the inspections of AFC and other Initial Army Training Establishments. Under this memoriam of understanding, Ofsted inspects AFC on different criteria than it would a mainstream college.

In a glossy video on the army’s website, teenage recruits at AFC Harrogate extol the benefits of signing up to the military. One talks of the college’s “really good” facilities that include “pool tables and even a cinema, so you can always go down there and watch some films with your friends”. Another says the “wage here is mint”, boasting that “you’re 17 and earning like a grand a month”, and says it’s true that “the army is like a massive family” because she’s made “the strongest friends she’s ever had” in just five months.

But headlines from recent years reveal a darker side to the college.

Last year, former AFC Harrogate instructor Kerry-Anne Knight won her employment tribunal against the MoD over sexist and racist behaviour by her colleagues. And in February this year, an inquest into the suicide of 19-year-old royal artillery gunner Jaysley Beck heard that she had previously been in a relationship with an adult instructor at AFC Harrogate, which she attended from the age of 16 – an abuse of power that the military has since banned. The relationship officially started after she left the college. Another former Army sergeant major last month pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Beck at Larkhill military base, which she went to after leaving Harrogate and where she took her own life.

Jaysley Beck is not alone. We’ve found systemic sexual abuse in UK military

27 February 2025 | Ethan Shone , Sian Norris

For over a year, openDemocracy has worked to reveal how military enables abuse then closes ranks around perpetrators

Our investigation proves that these cases were not one-offs. We found widespread incidents of physical violence and bullying among junior soldiers and staff, as well as reports of criminal behaviour and sexual abuse.

Responding to our findings, Harrogate MP Tom Gordon said: “Cultures of harassment, abuse and misogyny have no place in our society, least of all within our Armed Forces. The Armed Forces are already suffering from significant recruitment and retention challenges, and statistics like these only serve to discourage young people from joining. It is crucial that the Armed Forces take direct and decisive action to address these issues.” Gordon also confirmed he has arranged a meeting with AFC Harrogate, saying “I look forward to hearing directly from the College about the steps they are taking.”

Describing our findings as “worrying,” army veteran, campaigner and author Diane Allen told openDemocracy: “The MoD stated recently that their values were laid out clearly in written doctrine. But my response was that ‘paper values’ are useless, unless young recruits see their instructors and the wider leadership demonstrate those values day to day. We hear the MoD press trot out the same, standard message – that the issues in our recruit training establishments are historic and resolved. This investigation shows up the lie.”

Physical and criminal violence

The Ministry of Defence recorded 433 complaints of physical violence between junior soldiers at AFC Harrogate between January 2018 and September 2025, an average of 62 a year. There were a further 41 complaints of staff being violent towards young recruits.

To put this into perspective, openDemocracy asked three randomly chosen mainstream colleges across England that had also been rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted how many complaints of violence they received during this same seven-and-a-half-year period. Two had not received any such complaints, while the third college had received just one.

Hamish, who left the British Army last year after six months, has since become a whistleblower over the extreme violence he witnessed and himself suffered at AFC Harrogate. He told CRIN there were “many fights, beatings in the bathrooms” at the college. These include one fight in which he was punched in the face, and another in which he saw a recruit “get scratched on the neck and then kicked in the stomach” by fellow junior soldiers.

These fights were often encouraged by AFC Harrogate’s lower-ranking staff, Hamish said, explaining that rather than attempting to stop physical violence, infantry corporals would encourage junior soldiers who were arguing to put on boxing gloves and fight it out in a ‘sanctioned fight’. Their attitude was “more or less, fuck it, fight it out. I’m not bothered [if you] do it behind closed doors, and I won’t need to know about it,” Hamish said.

openDemocracy has reviewed footage of one sanctioned fight, which Hamish filmed in 2024 and shared with the CRIN. The fight ends with one boy being repeatedly punched in the head after the instructor leaves the room. Hamish also shared a video of an initiation ceremony, known as a “hazing”, in which a boy doing press-ups is repeatedly whipped with a belt by a fellow junior soldier.

These altercations can spill into criminal behaviour. The Royal Military Police opened 105 investigations into physically violent crimes by soldiers at AFC Harrogate between 2018 and 2025, including 58 reports of battery and 22 reports of actual bodily harm, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years, or seven where an attack was racially or religiously motivated. The outcomes of these investigations are not known.

While a soldier making a complaint against another member of the armed forces would likely be directed by their superiors to the military police in the first instance, any person alleging a soldier has done something that would be a crime in the civilian courts can instead choose to report it to civilian police force. AFC’s local force, North Yorkshire Police, recorded 13 incidents of “violence against the person” – a broad category of crimes that could range from common assault to more serious crimes such as grievous bodily harm – at the barracks in the first six months of 2025.

Bullying is also a serious problem at AFC, with the Ministry of Defence receiving 214 bullying complaints about the college between 2018 and 2025. The data, which was obtained under FOI, does not show whether the complaints relate to peer-on-peer bullying or staff-on-student bullying.

Hamish said that while senior staff would likely take action to stop bullying if they became aware of it, junior staff members’ attitude would again be, “if you’ve got a problem with somebody, fight it out, sort it out.” That approach might be okay for adults, he added, but “it shouldn’t come down like that at AFC.”

David* saw first-hand the impact that bullying at AFC had on his son, John*, who signed up to the British Army in September 2024, when he was 16. John had wanted a fresh start away from a group of friends who were getting into trouble, and David described his son’s first six weeks as “brilliant”, but said things soon took a darker turn.

“One of the corporals – an instructor – had it in for him,” said David. “He was singled out, made to do essays until early morning. It was just him.”

John’s parents turned to social media for advice. They contacted the college and the corporal was moved on from Harrogate, but worse was to come. “When he started phase one of training, the other boys in his room were bullying him,” David said. “He got hit, he got assaulted. When my wife FaceTimed him, he had a mark on his face.”

David and his wife complained to the Officer Commanding, the most senior position at AFC Harrogate – a difficult decision as they were worried it could lead to further bullying. The OC told the pair that it was being dealt with, but ultimately John chose to leave the army.

“My son has totally changed since he came back,” said David. “He’s a totally different boy than when he went away and not in a good way. He’s now got a referral to see a mental health nurse. It’s affected our family as my wife and I have been worried sick.

Bullying can leave recruits suicidal. In 2023, a teenager at AFC Harrogate attempted to take his own life with a gun, after experiencing severe bullying. A whistleblower told The Times that the man’s injuries were so severe he had to be air-lifted to help on a stretcher.

AFC Harrogate recorded 103 incidents of self harm between in the five years to 31 March 2024, an average of 20 a year, according to data that the MoD disclosed to Labour Peer Lord Coaker, the minister of state for defence, following a parliamentary question. openDemocracy and CRIN asked the MOD how many suicide attempts there had been, but was told it does not record this data.

We also asked the Yorkshire Ambulance Service how many call-outs it had received to AFC Harrogate since 2020. The total number was 86, of which 11 were category one, which are deemed to be the most urgent, life-threatening emergencies. Fifty were category two – “not life-threatening but require rapid response” – while the remainder were category three and four, the lowest two tiers of call-outs.

In contrast, three randomly selected Ofsted-rated ‘outstanding’ colleges received a total of 34 ambulance call outs in the same time period.

We put these figures to Rachel De Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, whose website says she has a legal duty to promote and protect the rights of children, especially “children who are living away from home”. Her office said it was aware of the issues at AFC Harrogate but did not respond to repeated requests for comment before our publication deadline.

Sexual abuse

The MoD has been dogged by repeated sexual abuse scandals in recent years, and AFC Harrogate is no exception.

In 2023, CRIN revealed that North Yorkshire Police had recorded nine rapes at the college between July 2022 and August 2023, as well as four lesser sexual offences.

Updated data shows the situation has not improved. The force told us it had recorded ten sexual offences at the college in the 18 months to July 2025, including rape of a male aged 16 and over, sexual assault on a female aged 13 and over, and sexual assault on a male aged 13 and over. There were also reports of harassment, stalking and assaults with and without injury. The data does not show how many of each of these assaults were recorded.

These figures do not include cases dealt with by the military justice system, such as a court martial last year, where a junior soldier received a suspended sentence after being found guilty of assault by penetration committed against a 17-year-old colleague who was in the medical wing.

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13 June 2024 | Sian Norris

Exclusive: Pervasive misogyny means 77% of troops accused of rape are found not guilty in military courts

The Royal Military Police recorded 122 sexual crimes against under-18s in uniform from 2021 to 2024. The data does not show how many of the victims and perpetrators were at AFC Harrogate, as some could have been in the equivalent training colleges for the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force.

We submitted multiple FOI requests to the MoD to determine the extent of sexual complaints, abuse and violence at the training barracks. While most were refused, a question asked to Parliament on our behalf by Baroness Lister revealed there were 176 “sexual allegations” at AFC Harrogate between 1 January 2018 and 30 June 2025, of which 32 were made against staff – an average of five a year.

Court martial records also gave some insight into sexual violence committed by staff at AFC. In 2024, instructor Corporal Irwin was found to have had sex with a child while acting in a position of trust, and instructor Corporal Conway was convicted of raping an adult colleague in her room. In January 2023, instructor Corporal Bartram was convicted for the serial sexual exploitation of six female under-18 recruits over ten months from July 2021.

“Sexual trauma can cause setbacks and life-long disadvantages for young people, impacting their emotional, mental, and physical health,” said Mags Godderidge, CEO of Survive North Yorkshire, which supports survivors of sexual violence in the region. “Many survivors face PTSD symptoms and psychological distress, including panic attacks, anxiety, and depression.

“Given the long-term and sometimes lifelong impact, organisations and institutions should be doing all they can to protect children from sexual harm – whether that harm is caused by peers or people in positions of trust.”

A college or a military base?

Despite the clear safeguarding concerns raised in this investigation, Ofsted continues to rate AFC Harrogate as “outstanding” for welfare – including in its 2023/24 report, the inspection for which came three months after the bullied recruit tried to take his own life using a gun and nine months after Cpl Bartram was convicted of sex offences against recruits under his care.

“If you’re an Ofsted inspector, you look at the fact that they have a welfare [officer], they have the chaplain, they have the games room and everything,” said whistleblower and former junior soldier Hamish. “So that ticks boxes. But I think if they went round the college and asked some of the recruits: do you feel that the support that is there? Do you feel like you can go to it? I feel like they would get quite a couple of noes.”

We approached Ofsted for comment but it told us it does not comment on individual units. It referred us to its handbook which states: “The aim of inspection is to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of arrangements to provide for the welfare of and care for trainees.” Inspections look at “quality of training and support; professional and personal development of trainees; quality of facilities, infrastructure and resources; and effectiveness of leadership and management.”

An Army spokesperson said that “unacceptable and criminal behaviour has absolutely no place in our Armed Forces”, but stood by the Ofsted report, saying it “highlighted that high standards of care, welfare, and safeguarding are deeply embedded in the Army Foundation College (Harrogate) training programmes”.

They added: “Robust procedures are in place to address any allegations, and we work hard to create an environment where personnel know any report will be met with action. This includes the Violence against Women and Girls Taskforce and our Victim and Witness Care Unit, which provides independent support to victims. The Defence Serious Crime Command assures all serving personnel that any reporting of a serious crime will be investigated independently from their chain of command.”

As well as Ofsted, wellbeing at AFC Harrogate is supported by a body known as the Independent Advisory Panel (IAP), set up in response to the Deepcut scandal in the 1990s, when four young soldiers at the barracks were found dead from gunshot wounds over a seven-year period.

In its terms of reference – obtained by openDemocracy and CRIN through FOI laws – the IAP described itself as “an independent, non-statutory source of advice, challenge, encouragement, and support.” But the document also states that “the IAP has no responsibility for and will not attempt to override the fundamental army principle of self-regulation vested in the Commanding Officer and the higher chain of command” and that it will “observe and record what they see without judgement.”

These terms raise questions over the panel’s effectiveness. As with Ofsted, the IAP has repeatedly failed to sanction AFC Harrogate during periods when our investigation has found distressing levels of sexual, physical and emotional violence within its ranks.

As for David, whose son John was so badly bullied at the college, his views on their failings are clear. “The college did not do enough to protect my son,” he said. “They’re 16-17-year-old boys, they are dumped in a room at night, they are left to their own devices, the corporals are not watching what’s happening. I’ve got twin boys aged 13 and I wouldn’t want them to go to Harrogate at all.”

*Names have been changed

Original article by Sian Norris republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

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Post author:dizzy
Post published:17 November 2025
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Children prosecuted as adult ‘smugglers’ in UK, Italy, Greece

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Original article by Frey Lindsay republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Protestors hold a banner outside Canterbury Crown Court to demonstrate against the conviction and sentencing of teenager Ibrahim Bah in February 2024
| Andrew Aitchison/In pictures/Getty Images. All rights reserved

Governments are locking teenagers up in a bid to catch smugglers – and failing vulnerable kids in the process

In December 2022, an inflatable dingy carrying dozens of people across the English Channel capsized. At least four people died. Ibrahima Bah, a teenager from Senegal, was identified by authorities as steering the dinghy and was arrested.

One of the people who died was Ibrahima’s friend. Neither of the friends had money, so Ibrahima initially agreed to steer the boat in exchange for their passage. He tried to back out when he saw the condition of the boat, but the adults organising the passage forced him to continue.

In February 2024, Bah was sentenced to almost ten years in prison for manslaughter by four counts of gross negligence, and for violating immigration rules. Despite Bah saving other passengers’ lives on the journey, mainstream headlines slammed him as a guilty ‘boat pilot’ and described him, wrongly, as an adult man.

Bah is one of dozens of children who have been charged for immigration offences across the UK and Europe. Most of those children are Black teenage boys travelling alone. Most of them were seeking safety and protection.

Accused children and their lawyers have spoken to openDemocracy from Greece, Italy and the UK about these huge miscarriages of justice.

They tell a story of racist and outdated age assessments, a lack of access to legal support and translators, bureaucratic mistakes, biased prosecutors and a fundamental lack of support.

“A dark place”

When he arrived in the UK, Bah didn’t know exactly how old he was. He was given an age assessment and declared to be over 18. Only later did a birth certificate emerge, showing that he was a minor. The courts rejected it and relied on the age assessment instead.

“I think Ibrahima struggles to understand, as do we, how he can possibly be held accountable for those people’s deaths,” says Maddie Harris of Humans for Rights Network, an organisation supporting people subjected to hostile border regimes.

Since June 2022, Humans for Rights Network has identified at least 23 minors prosecuted as adults for immigration offences. All of them are Black Africans, the majority Sudanese or South Sudanese.

“The reality of the child’s experience versus what they are accused of – they’re just not the same thing at all,” said Harris.

Most if not all children travelling irregularly go through a lot on their way to the UK. For more and more children, part of their transit now also includes getting coerced into steering the boats by those arranging the passage, often through violence, threats, or because they cannot afford the fare. Once they’re in the UK, they struggle to understand how the legal system can then paint them as criminals.

“They told me, ‘you are under arrest because you arrived in the UK without a visa,’” said Ameen (a pseudonym), one of those prosecuted children. “A couple of minutes later, they said, ‘you have to go to prison for a couple of days, and then you will go to court.’”

The next three days in the police station were the “darkest days” of his life, Ameen said. “One room, with nothing. A dark place. Nobody talks to you, nobody answers you. Stress. Words are not enough to explain those days. They were bad days, the worst that I have ever had in my life.”

Ameen went on to spend six months in an adult prison.

UK age assessments are “highly subjective”

Child asylum seekers get caught up in this system because of the way authorities determine their ages.

“When people arrive, they have the opportunity to state their age, usually by putting their finger on a number on a piece of paper,” said Vicky Taylor, a researcher at Oxford University and lead author of the 2024 report No Such Thing as Justice Here.

If a child is recognised as under 18, they are put in the care of the local authority. If they say they are a minor but are suspected of being older, they are subjected to further assessment.

“These initial inquiries have been shown to be unreliable,” said Taylor. “People are often in a confused state, having just landed in the UK after a long, dangerous and traumatic journey. They are not offered legal advice, interpreting or support.”

Age assessments tend to have three stages, according to Taylor. First, the young person is asked to recount their own personal timeline – when they left their home country, for instance, or the last birthday they can remember.

“Obviously it can be difficult [to assess] when people are from cultures in which birthdays are not celebrated or marked in the same way,” said Taylor. “Trauma also greatly affects young people’s ability to tell their story in a way that is legible to authorities.”

The second check is physical appearance. Assessors look at the potential child to see if they have beard lines, or to check how hairy their hands are, or how far back their hair line is. These are racialised markers, said Taylor.

Third, a person’s demeanour is assessed – how they engage with officials, react to questioning, and how they carry themselves.

All these checks “are highly subjective,” said Taylor, “and very difficult to ascertain within a ten-to-40-minute assessment.” Children travelling alone, as well as those who have been through difficult and traumatic experiences, are also less likely to present in ways that are obviously child-like.

It’s estimated that over 1,300 children were wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office from January 2022 to June 2023

Many children who went through this process say they did not understand what they were asked. And for those who came away with a new age assigned to them, the number was often arbitrary.

Age assessments have been widely criticised by rights groups and researchers. An inquiry by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration between 2021 and 2022 described age assessments as “perfunctory” and noted that concerns had been raised at various times about the process.

“[Children’s] experiences include not being provided with the correct interpreter, being called liars and facing inappropriate comments about their physical appearance,” said Labour MP Andrew Western in the House of Commons. “This is unacceptable, and the reason it is so worrying is that the stakes are so high.”

Earlier this year, Refugee Council, Humans for Rights Network and the Helen Bamber Foundation reported that over 1,300 children had been wrongly assessed as adults by the Home Office from January 2022 to June 2023. The charities reported that children as young as 14 were forced to share rooms with unrelated adults, with no safeguards in place, and that children felt “unsafe, scared, and traumatised” by their experiences.

According to Harris, these figures are likely to be an undercount, since not all local authorities responded to requests for information, and some children continue to be prosecuted as adults.

“It’s a sort of conveyor belt,” said Harris. “They continue to prosecute children without adequately resolving their ages.”

Children branded as ‘traffickers’ in Italy

This is not just a problem in the UK. Italy is also taking child migrants to court, said Cinzia Pecoraro, a lawyer in Sicily. Similarly to Britain, outdated and racialised age markers are partly to blame.

Some of the methods Italian authorities use to measure people’s ages date back to the 1950s. One method uses X-rays to examine bone structure, based on samples of an Anglo-Saxon population. Its margin of error is between six months and two years, according to Pecoraro.

The moment I was arrested as a trafficker I was worried, because they accused me of something I didn’t do

Pecoraro represented one child from West Africa who was identified as steering the dinghy he arrived in.

“The moment I was arrested as a trafficker I was worried, because they accused me of something I didn’t do,” said Ola (a pseudonym) over text message.

Ola was originally identified as underage, but the Italian authorities intervened and subjected him to a flawed age assessment. He was moved to adult prison as a result.

“I felt sick, because they gave me an age that is not my age,” Ola said. “I felt it was racism.”

Ola spent a year in adult prison until Pecoraro was assigned to his case. “I realised that this was a child,” she said. “It was obvious.” She eventually got hold of a birth certificate, and after multiple delays his case was sent back to a minors’ court.

Ola is an adult now and the case is still pending. Despite being tried as a minor, he still faces serious consequences for allegedly steering the dinghy. “It’s been nine years,” Ola said. “Let’s hope to finish it soon so I can feel calm, because every moment I think about it.”

Pecoraro is confident Ola will be acquitted, but said he is lucky she was assigned to his case. She has a lot of experience defending minors in his position. “You need a proper defence,” she said. “Without it, they get convicted.”

These convictions are not happening in a political vacuum. The government of Georgia Meloni – who rose to power on the back of anti-immigrant rhetoric – has aggressively sought to reduce numbers of people arriving in Italy.

More and more people have been criminalised for the crime of ‘facilitation’ across the EU, allowed under the soon-to-be-expanded Facilitation Directive. And in Italy, Pecoraro says prosecutors seemed determined to continue.

“It’s common knowledge these journeys do not have a formal crew or driver. They are only passengers, forced to steer the boat,” she said. “This is [well] known, but prosecutors don’t want to surrender.”

Kids caught up in Greece’s hostile system

Thousands of people are likewise in prison in Greece for the crime of ‘facilitation’, with at least one or two people arrested per dinghy arriving. As a result, racialised people serving time for ‘smuggling’ related offences comprise the second largest prison population in the whole of Greece.

Sometimes just being seen by authorities at the rear of a boat is enough for a person to be identified as ‘driving’. Kani (a pseudonym), a young person from an African country, was 19 when he arrived in Greece. He was arrested after being falsely identified for driving the dinghy.

M. E., now 16, is awaiting trial and faces a possible 4,670-year sentence for ‘smuggling’

“I didn’t touch the steering wheel, and I have no idea about driving or anything else,” wrote Kani in a text message. “They took me to prison after that. I had no idea why they took me in the first place. I didn’t even realise that the matter was this serious. I didn’t understand anything. I said to myself, ‘what is happening’? I was literally terrified.”

In 2023, H. E.*, an Egyptian fisherman, was sentenced to 280 years in prison for piloting a dinghy from Libya to Crete. Unable to pay for himself and his teenage son, he had agreed to steer. His son, M. E.*, now 16, is awaiting his own trial and faces a possible 4,670-year sentence for ‘smuggling’.

In reality, M. E. won’t serve a sentence of this length – even if he could live that long. Maria Flouraki, the teenager’s lawyer, said he’ll likely be released before a decade is up. While Greek courts regularly hand out decades or even centuries-long sentences for smuggling cases, sentences are generally capped at 20-25 years, with options for early release.

The crime of ‘facilitation’ – legalese for smuggling – comes from the 2002 EU Facilitation Directive, and is interpreted very widely by Greek authorities. In this case, the child providing his father support while he steered the boat – helping pass out food and water, for instance – was enough to make him legally complicit.

Flouraki said M. E. could not understand why he was accused of being a smuggler. “He was just a kid following his father. He had no other option.”

She is hopeful he will be acquitted once in front of a judge, as is generally the case for minors. Flouraki’s client is not being prosecuted as an adult, but children are sometimes identified and charged as adults.

Dimitris Choulis is a lawyer on the Greek island of Samos. Many of the minors he works with have spent months in adult prison before being released. “To be honest, it’s always been like this,” said Choulis.

One of Choulis’s clients is a child currently locked up in an adult prison. Choulis says he has the birth certificate, and hopes it will help him to get his client out of adult prison and into the minors’ system soon.

Choulis does not believe Greece is deliberately trying to criminalise children. Rather, he thinks that children are getting caught up in a system beset with structural failures. But, he said, such problems could be avoided if the system gave children more time and support.

“They don’t give them the opportunity, and these [children] don’t know what they have to say,” said Choulis. “They are [hearing] a strange language, in a strange country, and they’re in handcuffs. They don’t know what to say, and they haven’t seen a lawyer.”

Whether children are locked up because of embedded racism in age assessments, overzealous prosecutors or bureaucratic errors, the result is the same.

Children are paying the price because the UK and EU governments are more intent on securing their borders than safeguarding the rights of people seeking asylum, said Vicky Taylor. “States are willing to override their obligations to children because they’re preoccupied with the performance of security.”

*Full names have been withheld to protect their identities