Christian Rossipal introduces a 2017 Swedish Information Video for Asylum Seekers.
In the wake of the “European Refugee Crisis” in 2015, when more than 240,000 people entered Sweden to seek asylum, a controversial age assessment technique was introduced in the country. Since many of the asylum seekers claimed to be under the age of 18 – and thus eligible for certain child privileges protected by law – the increasingly restrictive Swedish government gave The National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) the mandate to create a new process for age assessment. As a result, RMV introduced MRI scanning of knee joints in addition to more established and scientifically validated methods. The use of this method caused a heated and still-ongoing debate inside and outside scientific and medical communities, with allegations of eugenics and racial biology. In addition to the ethically fraught nature of age assessment itself, some scholars have argued that the data analysis used by RMV rests on false statistical assumptions (Tamsen and Mostad 2019).
In 2016, RMV commissioned a short film to inform asylum seekers about the new practices of age assessment. Thanks to the work of artists Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson (2018), and the Swedish principle of public access to governmental documents, we can trace the production process behind the film by way of script drafts and the email exchange between RMV and the film production company.
Public documentation of email exchanges between the production company and The National Board of Forensic Medicine. Courtesy of Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson.
Public documentation of the screenplay behind the information video. Courtesy of Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson.
These documents show how RMV rephrases language that would otherwise claim the method to be able to establish the exact age of asylum seekers: The scripted voice-over carefully avoids the question of scientific precision. The final film, however, arguably portrays the practice as both safe, harmless, and scientific by other cinematic means.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnv9tNWbo1k]English subtitles are available under Settings
As evident, the informational film is used to streamline the medical-bureaucratic process by disseminating information efficiently across language barriers. (The film is available with subtitles and voice-overs in Arabic, Tigrinya, Pashto, Dari, Somali, English, and Swedish.) Even if age assessment is portrayed as a consensual choice, the fact is that those asylum seekers whose age is thrown into doubt are forced to make their real age plausible. If they don’t consent to age assessment they will most likely be seen as noncooperative and assessed as adults. Hence, the choice is, in reality, a false choice. Bertil Kågedal (2020), professor emeritus at Linköping University and former chief physician at Linköping University Hospital, further argues that the unscientific nature of the statistical method used by RMV presents asylum seekers with an additional unethical and false choice: Even if they do want to validate their age by way of MRI scanning, it is not a reliable technique. Needless to say, these issues in turn complicate the status of the short video – which portrays the method as scientifically reliable and legally uncontroversial – something I explore in-depth together with Jelena Jovičić (Dept. of Sociology, Stockholm University) in a forthcoming co-written article.
Sources:
Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson, Direktupphandling av kortfilm om medicinsk åldersbedömning (Stockholm: Vägra döda, 2018).
Kågedal, Bertil. “Populationsstatistik kan inte användas som RMV gör.” (Läkartidningen, 2020): https://lakartidningen.se/opinion/debatt/2020/05/populationsstatistik-kan-inte-anvandas-som-rmv-gor/?fbclid=IwAR3fpxUtXpxYKsiJCxL25oAcgxB051vRycGNMk0oIO3k4BUCU7y9pflDA2Q
Petter Mostad and Fredrik Tamsen, “Error rates for unvalidated medical age assessment procedures,” International Journal of Legal Medicine volume 133 (2019): 613–623.