Alden Jones is humorous like Twain without being cynical; she treats all her amazing encounters and strangers with mucho love. She makes highly entertaining and fresh stories out of culture clash, traveling as an observant gringa, fluent in Spanish. She arrives at many deep insights about other cultures and ours, while transcending the form of travelogue into amazing and dramatic storytelling. - Josip Novakovich, Man Booker International Prize Finalist and author of April Fool's Day

Fourteen-year-old April May Manning spent her life on airplanes with her flight attendant parents. When her father dies in a crash, April's mom marries a pilot who turns out to be an abusive jerk, and gets Mom confined to a psychiatric hospital. So April takes off, literally, living on airplanes, using her mother's flight benefits, relying on the flight crews who know she's been shuttling between divorcing parents for a year. Then, there's a hijacking, but why is April's "dad" on board? April flees to the cargo hold with another unaccompanied minor she's met before, and they fight to thwart the hijackers, faking a fire, making weapons from things they find in luggage. At last, locked in the cockpit with a wounded police officer, the boy, and his service dog, April tries to remember everything her parents said to do in a crisis above the clouds. But she knows it won't be enough.

This volume explores the various challenges faced by ​migrant unaccompanied children, using a clinical sociological approach and a global perspective. It applies a human rights and comparative framework to examine ​the reception of unaccompanied children ​in European, North American, South American, Asian and African countries. Some of the important issues the volume discusses are: access of displaced unaccompanied children to justice across borders and juridical contexts; voluntary guardianship for unaccompanied children; the diverse but complementary needs of unaccompanied children in care, which if left unaddressed can have serious implications on their social integration in the host societies; and the detention of migrant children as analyzed against the most recent European and international human rights law standards. This is a one-of-a-kind volume bringing together perspectives from child rights policy chairs across the world on a global issue. The contributions reflect the authors’ diverse cultural contexts and academic and professional backgrounds, and hence, this volume synthesizes theory with practice through rich firsthand experiences, along with theoretical discussions. It is addressed not only to academics and professionals working on and with migrant children, but also to a wider, discerning public interested in a better understanding of the rights of unaccompanied children.

Unaccompanied minor migrants are underage migrants, who for various reasons leave their country and are separated from their parents or legal/customary guardians. Some of them live entirely by themselves, while others join their relatives or other adults in a foreign country. The concept of the best interests of a child is widely applied in international, national legal documents and several guidelines and often pertains to unaccompanied minor migrants given that they are separated from parents, who are not able to exercise their basic parental responsibilities. This book takes an in-depth look at the issues surrounding the best interests of the child in relation to unaccompanied minor migrants drawing on social, legal and political sciences in order to understand children’s rights not only as a matter of positive law but mainly as a social practice depending on personal biographies, community histories and social relations of power. The book tackles the interpretation of the rights of the child and the best interests principle in the case of unaccompanied minor migrants in Europe at political, legal and practical levels. In its first part the book considers theoretical aspects of children’s rights and the best interests of the child in relation to unaccompanied minor migrants. Adopting a critical approach to the implementation of the Convention of Rights of a Child authors nevertheless confirm its relevance for protecting minor migrants’ rights in practice. Authors deconstruct power relations residing within the discourses of children’s rights and best interests, demonstrating that these rights are constructed and decided upon by those in power who make decisions on behalf of those who do not possess authority. Authors further on explore normative and methodological aspects of Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child and its relevance for asylum and migration legislation. The second part of the book goes on to examine the actual legal framework related to unaccompanied minor migrants and implementation of children’s’ rights and their best interests in the reception, protection, asylum and return procedures. The case studies are based on from the empirical research, on interviews with key experts and unaccompanied minor migrants in Austria, France, Slovenia and United Kingdom. Examining age assessment procedures, unaccompanied minors’ survivals strategies and their everyday life in reception centres the contributors point to the discrepancy between the states’ obligations to take the best interest of the child into account when dealing with unaccompanied minor migrants, and the lack of formal procedures of best interest determination in practice. The chapters expose weaknesses and failures of institutionalized systems in selected European countries in dealing with unaccompanied children and young people on the move.

Born with a famous name to an unhappy marriage, Alexander Newley is the son of the Hollywood stars Joan Collins and Anthony Newley. Their life was one of almost unparalleled privilege and glamour but under the glossy veneer there was trouble: drugs, infidelity, insecurity and emotional trauma. Both Joan and Anthony were infantilised after being thrust into the spotlight so young, rendering them ill-equipped to care for Alexander and his sister Tara when they were born. This book, written with humour and compassion, tells the story of Alexander's nomadic childhood; the disintegration of his parents' marriage; and his battle to make sense of the past. It is also a meditation on art, identity and inheritance, and a portrait of London and Hollywood during the swinging sixties and the seventies. Complementing Alexander's vivid and razor-sharp prose are more than twenty of his own artworks depicting the people who played a pivotal role in his early years.

In the past few years, there has been an influx of immigrant children into the school system, many with a limited understanding of English. Successfully teaching these students requires educators to understand their characteristics and to learn how to engage immigrant families to support their children’s academic achievements. The Handbook of Research on Engaging Immigrant Families and Promoting Academic Success for English Language Learners is a collection of innovative research that utilizes teacher professional development models, assessment practices, teaching strategies, and parental involvement strategies to develop ways for communities and educators to create social and academic conditions that promote the academic success of immigrant and English language learners. While highlighting topics including bilingual learners, family engagement, and teacher development, this book is ideally designed for early childhood, elementary, middle, K-12, and secondary school teachers; school administrators; faculty; academicians; and researchers.

In 2014, the arrest and detention of thousands of desperate young migrants at the southwest border of the United States exposed the U.S. government's shadowy juvenile detention system, which had escaped public scrutiny for years. This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children who are driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, and who embark alone, risking their lives, on the perilous journey north. They suffer coercive arrests at the U.S. border, then land in detention, only to be caught up in the battle to obtain legal status. Whose Child Am I? looks inside a vast, labyrinthine system by documenting in detail the experiences of these youths, beginning with their arrest by immigration authorities, their subsequent placement in federal detention, followed by their appearance in deportation proceedings and release from custody, and, finally, ending with their struggle to build new lives in the United States. This book shows how the U.S. government got into the business of detaining children and what we can learn from this troubled history.

Taking a multi-disciplinary perspective, and one grounded in human rights, Unaccompanied young migrants explores in-depth the journeys migrant youths take through the UK legal and care systems. Arriving with little agency, what becomes of these children as they grow and assume new roles and identities, only to risk losing legal protection as they reach eighteen? Through international studies and crucially the voices of the young migrants themselves, the book examines the narratives they present and the frameworks of culture and legislation into which they are placed. It challenges existing policy and questions, from a social justice perspective, what the treatment of this group tells us about our systems and the cultural presuppositions on which they depend.

In this affecting and innovative global history—starting with the European children who fled the perils of World War II and ending with the Central American children who arrive every day at the U.S. southern border—Anita Casavantes Bradford traces the evolution of American policy toward unaccompanied children. At first a series of ad hoc Cold War–era initiatives, such policy grew into a more broadly conceived set of programs that claim universal humanitarian goals. But the cold reality is that decisions about which endangered minors are allowed entry to the United States have always been and continue to be driven primarily by a "geopolitics of compassion" that imagines these children essentially as tools of political statecraft. Even after the creation of the Unaccompanied Refugee Minors program in 1980, the federal government has failed to see migrant children as individual rights-bearing subjects. The claims of these children, especially those who are poor, nonwhite, and non-Christian, continue to be evaluated not in terms of their unique circumstances but rather in terms of broader implications for migratory flows from their homelands. This book urgently demonstrates that U.S. policy must evolve in order to ameliorate the desperate needs of unaccompanied children.

Unaccompanied Children: From Migration to Integration Edited by Işık Kulu-Glasgow, Monika Smit and Ibrahim Sirkeci | Published: 19 April 2019 | Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-912997-14-5 | “The statistics show that children move in great numbers, and many do so alone. While some of the reasons which motivate them to undertake such journeys alone are similar to those of adults – e.g. wars, pursuing aspirations for better social and economic opportunities, ethnic violence, cultural differences, examples of others migrating – others are more specific to children, such as forced child marriages, lack of educational opportunities, forced conscription or being sent ahead to realize family reunification in another country. Similar to adult companions, they suffer and react to ‘democratic deficit’ and ‘developmental (economic) deficit’ and yet they may become more vulnerable in their flight. Reaching their destination often does not mean they are then less vulnerable either. They are faced with specific challenges of integration on economic, social, and cultural dimensions and in many cases also face burdens of the reunification of their family. Yet, there is little attention paid to unaccompanied minors in the literature on ‘forced’ migration. This was an important reason to initiate this book. This book largely focuses on unaccompanied minors who arrived in a European country in 2015, with special attention paid to the top-three nationalities of unaccompanied minors, namely Syrian, Afghan and Eritrean minors.” Content INTRODUCTION – Işık Kulu-Glasgow, Monika Smit, Ibrahim Sirkeci CHAPTER 1 Syrian Unaccompanied Minors Journeys to Germany and initial experiences upon arrival – Raphael Kamp and Katie Kuschminder CHAPTER 2 ‘I just wanted to be safe’: Agency and decision-making among unaccompanied minor asylum seekers – Işık Kulu-Glasgow, Sanne Noyon, Monika Smit CHAPTER 3. Ways into and out of exploitation Unaccompanied minors and human trafficking – Hilde Lidén and Cathrine Holst Salvesen CHAPTER 4. Best Interests of the Child assessments to facilitate decision-making in asylum procedures – Carla van Os and Elianne Zijlstra. CHAPTER 5. Navigating the Immigration Process Alone: Unaccompanied Minors Experiences in the United States – Jennica Larrison and Mariglynn Edlins. CHAPTER 6. Dropping out of Education: Refugee Youth Who Arrived as Unaccompanied Minors and Separated Children – Aycan Çelikaksoy and Eskil Wadensjö. CHAPTER 7. Eritrean Unaccompanied Refugee Minors in The Netherlands: Wellbeing and Health – Anna de Haan, Yodit Jacob, Trudy Mooren and Winta Ghebreab. CHAPTER 8. Social Inclusion Processes for unaccompanied minors in the city of Palermo: Fostering Autonomy through a New Social Inclusion Model – Roberta Lo Bianco and Georgia Chondrou.