This paper concerns children and families in Sweden whose application for asylum has been rejected but who are not eligible for deportation, and who remain in the country for an indefinite time with formal status neither as asylum-seekers, refugees, irregular or residents. In the international literature this group is sometimes referred to as Non removed rejected asylum seekers (NRAS), a term that will used hence forward (Atac, 2019). While there is a body of important critical research on refugee children’s political rights, agency (or lack thereof) and vulnerabilities in regard to/produced by Swedish asylum politics (c.f. Josefsson, 2017; Karlsson, 2019; Wahlström Smith, 2021; Lind, 2019; Lundberg, 2020), an initial review of literature showed that NRAS, and particularly children in families, is a group that has received little attention in migration-research, both in a European and a Swedish context. The latter was noted also by experts that we talked with at the Swedish Migration Agency (SMA) and DELMI (the Delegation for Migration studies). Rejected asylum seekers are however often targeted in the migration-critical political discourse of the new right wing coalition that came into power in Sweden in October 2022, supported by a far right radical ethno-nationalist party (cf. Rothstein, 2023). Recent policy propositions include that rejected asylum-seekers should be detained and closely surveilled until deportation. In this context, investigating how deportability affect NRAS children is urgent from the perspective of children’s human rights as declared in the UN Child Rights Convention (CRC), which was made Swedish law 2020-01-01. As children’s rights and agency are tightly connected to the situation of the family and to parents’ capacities to see to their needs, and as for NRAS parents these capacities are constrained by extreme legal and economic vulnerability (Samzelius, 2023), the study will also highlight parenthood and family-life in the context of deportability.

Research questions

• What is known about NRAS children in Sweden and their situation
  • through statistics from the Migration Agency, e.g. their age, country of origin, time in Sweden, household, housing?
  • by experts in authorities (e.g. Migration Agency) and civil society know about the situation of NRRA children and their families?
  • through research (also international research and NRAS children  generally)
  • How are childhood and parenthood enacted in the context of deportability for NRAS families in Sweden, and how do children and parents understand and cope with deportability, as a part of their every day-lives?
  • How does deportability affect NRAS children’s agency and rights directly, as well as indirectly through the parents’ positions as NRAS?

Objective

The objective of the study is to highlight the situation of NRAS children in Sweden, and how deportability affects their everyday lives, rights and agency, both directly in regard to e.g. education, well-being and relations, and indirectly, through their parents’ positions as NRAS. We thus want to contribute to the critical discussion of asylum-politics and their effects on children in regard to CRC and social justice from the perspective of NRAS, but also to sensitizing institutional practice to children’s and parents’ perspectives on their situation and needs in their position as NRAS.

Theoretical and conceptual framework

The study will combine theories and concepts from different fields, mainly from sociology of childhood and migration studies, but also policy studies may be relevant as part of the theoretical framework. Central concepts include agency, children’s rights, lived rights, deportability, migration regimes and vulnerabilities.

The study will be organized in two work packages: 1. Mapping 1 a) Collection and analysis of statistics concerning NRAS to map the group in regard to available data on age, nationality, time since asylum-application, family constellation and housing. 1 b) Interviews with experts and officers at SMA, and NGO:s that meet NRAS (possibly also professionals such as teachers/head masters and social workers) about how they perceive the children’s situation and needs. 1 c) A scoping literature review including research and reports from authorities and civil society, focused on studies that include NRAS, but also more generally childrens’s rights and ageny in deportability and extended precarious migration situations, and studies about parenting in these conditions. 2. Ethnographic studies We plan to involve 10-12 NRAS families in ethnographic field studies that include shadowing in their everyday life during approximately three days (ideally focusing at one family-member each day), taking field-notes, having field conversations, but also suggesting a range of creative art-based methods depending on the age and interest of the children (cf. Lenette, 2019; Nunn, 2022). We will also interview the children on two occasions based on a time line, and on material from the above, and on a time-line starting with their first memory of migration and reaching to an imagined adulthood. We will include families who live in asylum accomodations as well as other housing, single- two parent families and families in rural and urban settings.

As the research about childhood and parenthood in the context of deportability generally is very scarce, and especially related to NRAS we hope by the mapping and synthesizing existing research and reports to fill an important knowledge gap concerning the situation for this group, and the policies that condition their lives and access to human rights, but also identify need for further, empirical studies. Through seeking to use and develop participatory, creative methods and decolonializing ways of representation, we further hope by our ethnographic studies to get close to the lived experience of doing childhood and parenhthood under protracted conditions of deportability, and how rights and agency are enacted and constrained in different instances.

Ataç, I. (2019) Deserving Shelter: Conditional Access to Accommodation for Rejected Asylum Seekers in Austria, the Netherlands, and Sweden, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 17:1, 44-60, DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2018.1530401 Josefsson, J. (2017). Children's Rights to Asylum in the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal. I International Journal of Children's Rights, 25 (2017) 85-113 Karlsson, S. (2019) ‘You said “home” but we don’t have a house’ – children’s lived rights and politics in an asylum centre in Sweden, Children's Geographies, 17:1, 64-75, DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2018.1474173 Lenette, C. (2019). Arts-based Methods in Refugee Research: Creating Sanctuary. Springer Singapore. Lind, J. (2019). Governing vulnerabilised migrant childhoods through children’s rights. Childhood, 26(3), 337–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219847269 Lundberg, A. Undocumented children, In Cook, Thomas D. (eds), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies : Sage Publications; 2020. ISBN: 9781473942929 Nunn, C. (2022). The participatory arts-based research project as an exceptional sphere of belonging. Qualitative Research, 22(2), 251-268. Samzelius, T. (2023). Starka mammor-Trygga barn: En rapport om asylsökande och nyanlända ensamstående mammors situation i Sverige. Wahlström Smith, Å. (2021) Challenging the deportation regime: reflections on the research encounter with undocumented refugee children in Sweden. Children's Geographies 19:1, pages 101-112.