Recurrent Spectres: Children on the Move between Calais and the UK

Anonymous collages are evidence of the presence of children on the move who come through Calais daily. Secours Catholique keeps the vestiges of what I call their Derridean spectral absent presence next to the sketches of an artist volunteer who has also made portraits of some of these children who transit through. Through these sketches, I contend that the children are ‘living-on’, co-existing in the same space time as children who currently occupy the premises of Secours Catholique, their ghostly presences haunting the premises. In France, where repression has overtaken compassion, charities attempt to look after children’s wellbeing while they are in transit. France’s protection of minors is contingent upon the young person first requesting refugee status and this extends to children who undergo an evaluation process to determine whether they are legally minors, much like the UK’s National Age Assessment Board. For children in transit, such protections are inexistent. They are ghosts in a system that does not recognise them until they make their presence legally known. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Calais and in the UK, this paper looks at the ways in which these two places can function as a limbo space that exists outside of time as previous children and current children also co-exist with future children who are inevitably always to come due to the lack of legal routes to apply for asylum in the UK.