Age Fraud and the Collapse of Child-Only Safeguards
When a state cannot reliably distinguish adults from children, every child-only safeguard becomes conditional. Schools, care homes, foster placements, and youth accommodation stop being protections and start being bets. Britain learned that lesson again in late 2025, not because the system malfunctioned, but because it operated exactly as designed.
In December 2025, a British court convicted Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, two Afghan asylum seekers, of the rape of a British schoolgirl. The crime itself was brutal. What should disturb us just as deeply is not only who committed it, but how they came to be placed in proximity to children at all. (RELATED: Importing Chaos: The Paradox of Nation-building)
Both men entered the United Kingdom claiming to be unaccompanied minors. On that basis, they were not processed as adults moving through a migration system, but treated as children requiring care. They were placed into child-specific accommodation, education, and safeguarding frameworks, spaces that exist only because society accepts a degree of trust in exchange for the protection of minors. Court reporting shows that Jahanzeb underwent an age assessment on arrival that concluded he was 17, while Niazal was likewise accepted into the system as an unaccompanied child asylum seeker and placed into care before the offence occurred.
Responsibility for the crime lies entirely with the perpetrators. Responsibility for placing unvetted adults among children lies with the system.
That procedural detail matters. In Britain’s migration system, age determines placement. Those treated as minors are routed into child-only settings. Adults are not. In this case, the men were treated as minors before any robust, formal process had resolved doubts about their age, and were placed accordingly. The assault did not occur because of age fraud. It occurred in a setting made possible by unresolved or weakly resolved age claims. Responsibility for the crime lies entirely with the perpetrators. Responsibility for placing unvetted adults among children lies with the system.
This was not an unforeseeable breakdown. The numbers have been pointing in this direction for years.
Home Office data reported in December 2025 show that the number of people identified as adults after claiming to be children has quadrupled over the past decade, rising from 224 cases in 2014 to more than 1,000 a year. Between mid-2022 and mid-2024, the U.K. Border Force raised 11,449 formal age disputes involving self-declared minors. Of the 8,791 cases resolved, 3,570 were found to involve adults.
Nor is this a recent development. An analysis by MigrationWatch UK, drawing on official age-check outcomes between 2016 and 2020, found that more than half of asylum seekers whose ages were examined after claiming to be under 18, around 1,600 of roughly 3,100 cases, were ultimately assessed to be adults.
More recent reporting suggests the scale has grown further. GB News, citing Home Office data obtained by the outlet, reported that thousands of people have been found to misstate their age in bids to gain asylum.
The courts have been forced to intervene. In a separate 2025 case, a Sudanese asylum seeker who arrived by small boat and claimed to be 16 was found by the Court of Appeal to have deliberately sought to mislead about his age and lost his appeal against being treated as an adult.
Where age determines access to foster care, schools, youth accommodation, and child-only services, misclassification becomes a safeguarding failure, not a paperwork error.
Britain has already seen where this can lead. Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, an Afghan asylum seeker who provably lied about his age, was convicted of fatally stabbing Tom Roberts, a 21-year-old aspiring Royal Marine, after being treated as a minor and placed into youth accommodation.
Responding to that case, Reform U.K. MP Rupert Lowe warned that authorities often have no idea how many of the people who come here claiming to be children are adults, and that unresolved age claims place minors at risk.
All of this sits uneasily alongside the Home Office’s own guidance. The department’s Assessing Age policy, updated in June 2025, sets out when age assessment is required, how Merton-compliant assessments should be conducted, and why age cannot be determined by appearance alone.
Britain is not alone. Where European states have actually tested claimed ages, the results have often been even starker. In Switzerland, authorities recorded 2,639 applications from unaccompanied minors in 2024. Of the 1,304 cases formally assessed, 719, around 55 percent, were found to be adults. I
Belgium reported that of 2,345 self-declared unaccompanied minors registered in 2024, 823, more than one in three, were ultimately classified as adults. In Ireland, late 2025 reporting showed that nearly 200 people placed into children’s accommodation over three years were later found to be adults, meaning adults had been housed directly within child protection facilities.
Following the 2015 migration surge, Sweden found that roughly 80 percent of those presenting as minors were adults once assessed, with Denmark reporting similar outcomes. (RELATED: Poland’s Fusion of Hard Borders and Human Duty)
Most recently, Greece introduced a new age-verification framework and published early results in November 2025 showing that more than 60 percent of 104 self-declared minors were adults once examined.
Across borders, legal systems, and assessment methods, the conclusion is unavoidable. When age is examined seriously, adulthood is frequently revealed.
European institutions acknowledge the difficulty. The European Union Agency for Asylum recognises that age assessment must be holistic and cautious, but also that no system can operate safely if age remains unresolved at the point of placement.
The British schoolgirl raped by Jahanzeb and Niazal did not consent to live under a system that resolves doubt only after harm occurs. She was owed the most basic protection the state offers any child, separation from unvetted adults. That protection was not provided. This is not a debate about ideology. It is about function. A system that cannot reliably distinguish adults from children cannot responsibly operate child-only protections. The events of late 2025 did not create that problem. They made it impossible to ignore.
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