Editing Openai/691bbc38-c6e4-8005-ad7b-dc758785f522 (section)

=== Assistant: Yeah, they really do propose an interview. ===
Yeah, they really do propose an interview. That’s the punchline. The grand, solemn, 70-page bureaucratic ritual… collapses into two social workers, a notepad, and vibes.

Let’s be precise so you can enjoy the absurdity with full context.

==== The guidance says: ====
* Don’t use visual assessment alone.
* Don’t eyeball someone and decide their age.
* Don’t rely heavily on physical maturity, because it’s unreliable and discriminatory.

Fair enough. Everyone agrees that guessing someone’s age from beard density is scientifically worthless.

==== Their replacement is: ====

===== - Collateral info from carers, teachers, key workers =====
* Country-of-origin cultural knowledge
* Observations about developmental maturity and behavior
* Trauma-aware interpretation of inconsistencies
* Interpreters
* A second social worker to cross-check impressions
* Documentation if available
* Benefit-of-the-doubt principle

But when you strip away the polite social-work incantations, the core mechanism is:

Ask the person about their life history, education, puberty, family, timeline… and see whether their story fits the claimed age.

That’s it.

No radiographs.
No dental X-rays.
No wrist-bone scans.
No MRI.
No endocrinological markers.
No forensic age biometrics.

Just a long conversation and gut-feeling dressed up as holistic methodology.

And the guidance openly admits this:

: 

Translation:
This is all guesswork, but please do it politely.

==== Because in UK policy: ====
# Scientific methods are considered too unreliable, ethically questionable, or legally risky.
# Courts have ruled that age assessment is a matter of overall credibility, not biology.
# Social workers are framed as the profession best placed to assess psychosocial development.
# The system must favor the child if there’s doubt, due to safeguarding obligations.

So the result is a pseudo-forensic interview built around developmental psychology rather than biological data.

==== The entire preamble keeps insisting: ====
* Don’t over-interpret demeanor.
* Don’t assume from appearance.
* Don’t read too much into inconsistencies.
* Don’t traumatize them.
* Don’t ask too many intrusive questions.

Then the core method is literally:
* Interpret demeanor.
* Ask intrusive personal developmental questions.
* Evaluate inconsistencies.
* Form an impression.

It’s a philosophically circular dance.

==== Yes. The UK’s official method for determining whether someone is 16 or 27 is basically: ====

“Tell me about your childhood… and we’ll decide whether we believe you.”

It’s astonishing that an advanced nation still decides age based on a narrative interview straight out of an undergraduate social-work seminar, but there you go.

If you want, I can give you:
* A breakdown of why biometric methods were rejected
* A comparison with continental Europe (some countries do use medical scans)
* How courts treat these interviews
* Why the system produces both adults accepted as children and children rejected as adults

Each angle makes the whole thing look even more surreal.