The sentencing this week of Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa has reignited the immigration debate. The two 17-year-old Afghans arrived in the country by small boat, claimed to be minors, and were duly absorbed into the British care system before they committed this horrific crime.
We continue to ask ordinary families, often single women like me, renting modest semis, to absorb adolescents who may speak no English, observe strict religious codes, and carry more trauma than most adults ever will
But behind the justified outrage, a quieter, more uncomfortable truth has been forgotten: the care system we ask to absorb these young men was never designed for them and everyone is paying the price.
It’s not hard-hearted to point out that a strapping youth who has crossed several safe countries in the company of smugglers is rather different to a shivering toddler in a foil blanket rescued at sea. The first is likely to have seen things no child should, the second is, in fact, a child. Both deserve compassion, but only one fits the model of ‘looked-after child’ that still governs fostering in this country. It’s an obvious mismatch that shouldn’t be controversial to mention.
I have been a foster carer for 20 years. I have taken in babies born addicted to heroin, toddlers who spoke only Romanian, and once a ten-year-old boy who arrived clutching a plastic bag containing everything he owned: two T-shirts and a photograph of a woman he said was his mother, though no one ever discovered whether she was alive or dead. I thought I had seen the full spectrum of human distress. Then came the unaccompanied asylum-seeking teenagers.
Some stories end better than others. Alem*, a 15-year-old Eritrean, arrived refusing to eat from plates that weren’t ‘halal’. I bought him his own set, clearly marked. When I asked him to load the dishwasher he laughed outright: ‘You woman’, he said, flicking an apple core towards my feet. Jamie, my adult son, quietly informed him that sort of thing wouldn’t wash in our house. Weeks passed. One evening Alem silently placed a plate in the rack. A month later he handed me a mug of tea. ‘I was making one anyway,’ he said with a shrug. Small victories, but real ones. He left for supported lodgings at 17 speaking fluent English and able to cook a tolerable spag bol.
Other stories are darker. A male carer I know discovered a collection of homemade knives under the mattress of a 16-year-old Afghan boy placed with him. The police were called; the boy was moved on. Another friend, Sarah, took in a teenage girl whose age assessment swung between 14 and 19 depending on the assessor. From the moment she crossed the threshold she rocked violently, gnashed her teeth, and tore at her clothing. When Sarah confessed to the social worker that she felt unsafe, the girl drove a fork through the back of the social worker’s hand. These are not everyday fostering challenges; they are the consequences of a system that has lost the plot.
Dessi, a 15-year-old Sudanese girl, arrived at my home in the autumn of 2019. She had spent three weeks in a Home Office hotel while social services hunted for a placement. When the car finally pulled up outside my house she looked, though it sounds cliched, like a frightened animal. Her coat was three sizes too large, her eyes darted in every direction, and she clutched her rucksack as if it were a life raft. The social worker, Maisie, a woman I like and admire, handed over a single sheet of paper with the barest of details written on it with the weary briskness of someone permanently late for the next crisis. ‘I’ll email the paperwork,’ she shouted over Dessi’s sudden, keening wail. ‘Emergency assessment tomorrow. Got to dash, sibling group of four just landed.’
Before I could even close the front door, Dessi began screaming in a language I didn’t recognise, and clawed at her scalp until tufts of hair came away in her fingers. My son Jamie, then nearly 20, emerged from the kitchen holding a glass of orange juice and found himself faced with a full-scale panic attack. She lunged at him, spitting, shrieking, convulsed with terror. I called an ambulance. The paramedics were gentle but visibly baffled: they had a first name, an approximate age, and nothing else. By morning Dessi was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. ‘It’s the backlog,’ Maisie told me, as if that explained everything.
That was six years ago, and since then the backlog has only grown. The number of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) rose from 5,080 in 2020 to 7,380 in 2024, making up 9 per cent of the entire looked-after population in England. Kent County Council alone received 2,837 of them last year, mostly teenagers.
The National Transfer Scheme is supposed to move them from Home Office hotels into local-authority care within five working days. In practice many wait weeks, even months. When foster places run out, children are shunted into unregistered accommodation: bed-and-breakfasts, static caravans, bargain-basement holiday parks. By early 2023 some 440 had gone missing from such places; many have never been found.
Meanwhile the fostering service itself is in quiet collapse. Ofsted recorded a net loss of 765 fostering households in England in 2024, part of a three-year decline. The Fostering Network estimates we need another 6,000 carers simply to stand still. Yet we continue to ask ordinary families, often single women like me, renting modest semis, to absorb adolescents who may speak no English, observe strict religious codes about food and gender, and carry more trauma than most adults ever will.
The problem is not that we lack compassion, it’s that we seem to be short on common sense. A 17-year-old male from Sudan is not a ‘child’ in any meaningful sense except a bureaucratic one. He is a near-adult, often physically mature, usually testosterone-fuelled, almost certainly with experiences that would give most veterans nightmares. He needs supervised hostel accommodation, intensive language tuition and male mentors who understand both sharia law and how county lines gangs operate. What he frequently receives instead is a spare room in a house full of women and younger children, a £50-a-week tutoring allowance depending on the postcode, and the bewildered goodwill of a local foster carer.
We can do better. But not until we accept that fostering a traumatised adolescent male requires different skills, different accommodation, and different safeguards from fostering a five-year-old refugee from Syria. British children already in the system are waiting longer for placements. Foster carers are burning out and handing in their resignations in ever-growing numbers. And some young men, hurled without preparation into a culture they barely comprehend, do terrible things that might have been prevented by firmer boundaries and honest expectations.
There is a tapestry in my hallway stitched by my late mother when I began fostering. It reads, in careful cross-stitch, ‘I am safe here’. For many years I believed it. Increasingly I wonder whether the promise still holds, and for whom, exactly, it was ever intended.
*Some names in the piece have been changed.
