Every year, hundreds of children and adolescents arrive alone at the borders of Europe., embarking on migratory journeys marked by risk, uncertainty, and often trauma. Upon arrival, they are classified as unaccompanied foreign minors. (ORE), an administrative category that, while granting them a protected status, is often accompanied by labels, suspicions, and institutional responses that do not always live up to the protective mandate imposed by the legal system.
June 20, World Refugee Day, is a opportunity to critically reflect on the approach with which we intervene with these minors. Because beyond the files and statistics, we're talking about real children who have been expelled from their countries, their environments, and often from the margins of our own social policies.
An administrative category that homogenizes diverse realities
Spanish law defines an unaccompanied foreign minor as a third-country national under the age of 18 who is in Spanish territory without an adult legally responsible for them. This definition is practical, but also dangerous if it becomes the sole lens through which to view the subject.
This label groups adolescents with profoundly different life profiles: some are fleeing war or persecution, others are fleeing structural poverty, others have been sent by their families in the hope of a better life, and many are victims of trafficking networks. Treat all these minors as if they shared the same experience migratory and the same need for intervention is not only a technical error, but a form of institutional invisibility.
The risk is that interventions are carried out "from the label," rather than from the historical perspective. Resources are designed "for unaccompanied minors," without taking into account their backgrounds, cultural ties, migratory grief, or the violence they have suffered. This homogenization is a form of hidden exclusion.
Welcome, diagnose, intervene: what happens in the first steps
The first contact between the migrant minor and the system is often cold, impersonal, and fraught with mistrust. In many cases, they are given an age determination test without sufficient guarantees, and are referred to overcrowded emergency centers and, for weeks or months, lacks documentation that allows you to fully access basic rights such as schooling, specialized medical care, or participation in training programs.
Those first moments are fundamentals. Not only because of their legal or administrative value, but because they determine the type of connection the minor will establish with the system. If the placement is based on mistrust, bureaucratization, or suspicion, the young person is very likely to withdraw their request, activate defensive strategies, and reject institutional intervention, even if it is necessary.
Therefore, it is essential that the educational and technical teams involved in these contexts be trained in migration trauma, intercultural competencies, and critical reading of nonverbal language. The priority should be to build a relationship of security, not control.
Building the educational bond: between respect and agency
Many migrant children have developed survival strategies based on distrust of adults and radical self-management of their needs. They have learned that asking for help can be dangerous, that showing vulnerability can lead to punishment, and that authority figures do not always protect.
Therefore, educational work with these adolescents must be especially careful with the way limits are constructed, norms are generated, affection is transmitted, and identity is validated. The task is not to “integrate” the force, nor in imposing foreign models of behavior, but in creating spaces where trust can be rebuilt, the desire to belong and the life project.
The educational bond must be based on absolute respect for the culture of origin, the mother tongue, religious or family rituals, and avoid infantilizing those who, despite their age, have gone through profoundly adult experiences. Listening to their experiences, their silences, and their resistance is as important as facilitating educational or job placement paths.
The risk of institutional racism and the reproduction of stigmas
Although The legal framework recognizes these minors as subjects of rightsThe truth is that, in practice, many face barriers not experienced by other adolescents in care. Their age is questioned, their testimony is challenged, security protocols are activated without justification, or they are automatically referred to specialized, segregated resources with low educational standards, as if their only hope for the future is job survival or administrative invisibility.
This differential treatment is not neutral. It reinforces a social narrative that presents the migrant minor as a suspect, invader or potential criminal.Labels weigh heavily: if educators, technicians, or even peers repeat stereotypes, young people end up assuming that nothing more than obedience or resignation is expected of them. And this is a deeply violent form of exclusion.
Therefore, a ethical and professional intervention requires identifying, naming and combat forms of institutional racism that still persist in the juvenile protection and justice system. Doing so isn't ideological; it's technical.
Towards an intercultural, restorative and guarantor intervention
To adequately respond to the needs of migrant children, it is necessary to develop an approach that combines three dimensions:
- Interculturality, understood not as a one-off resource, but as a perspective that values the knowledge, worldviews and cultural practices of minors, adapting interventions to their life contexts.
- Restorative justice, which allows conflicts to be addressed without criminalizing them, rebuilding the relational fabric and promoting symbolic and emotional repair.
- The guarantor perspective, which focuses on the rights of minors, regardless of their administrative status, including full access to education and mental health.
- Active participation and the real possibility of building autonomy.
This type of intervention is neither more expensive nor less effective. On the contrary: it is the only one that can sustain real inclusion processes, without falling into re-victimization or forced integration.
Conclusion: Looking beyond the acronyms
To talk about migrant children is to talk about children. About rights. About support. About social justice. Every June 20, World Refugee Day reminds us that migration does not strip a person of their humanity, and that no child should be reduced to an administrative label.
Therefore, those of us who work with migrant minors have the responsibility—and the privilege—of viewing them as unique individuals, with a history, aspirations, and the right to build a future.
Would you like to delve deeper into this and other topics related to social work with minors? Enroll in the Postgraduate in Intervention with Minors from EIM and start working on your vocation.
