Introduction

In making claims for sanctuary, asylum seekers tell stories of their persecution and flight, which they hope will get them through whatever border stands between them and an ordinary life outside their homeland. Sometimes, when they have to, they embellish their experiences, rewrite their scripts, polish up the presentation and talk of persecution in compelling ways. They sometimes pluck out a series of linear events even when their lives and trajectories are wayward and untidy, because the ways in which asylum receptors accept stories are often in linear form, with a sequence of suffering making the links in a chain of events. As they smooth and order their disordered lives, and use mechanical means to contain and structure the organic nature of living precariously, they learn to choose what to say, what not to say, and how to blend events into narratives that are purposeful and credible – ones that assessors and helpers in the country of asylum will buy into and believe. In that respect, people seeking asylum are acting no differently to anyone else who seeks to make the best of themselves in a testing situation. However, the contrast is that theirs is a strategy of survival, rather than one that seeks an extension of established comforts.

So, the focus of inquiry in this chapter is on how asylum seekers’ lives are displayed through the stories they provide, in order to bridge potential credibility gaps and to optimise their claim for protection. In particular, I focus on the lives of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) who have come to industrialised nations with stories to tell – and stories to hide. I develop the argument that our purpose as receivers of their narratives is to understand the amalgamations that children sometimes use in these circumstances, in order to enable them to experience us as fair, trustworthy and helpful people. Moreover, I suggest that there are advantages for the storyteller and the listener in working with silences, fractured narratives, and their complex underbellies, in that, over time, multiple stories can co-exist, allowing the sometimes solitary and neat ‘truth’ about an asylum claim to fit within a broader frame of a life experienced as coherent, fluid and whole. This chapter is based on research published elsewhere (Kohli, 2006), reporting on the relationships that social workers in the UK have with unaccompanied children.