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twelve - Twenty-first century eugenics? A case study about the Merton Test
- Edited by Michael Lavalette, Laura Penketh
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- Book:
- Race, Racism and Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 December 2013, pp 223-242
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
In this chapter Moran and Gillett, both active practitioners in the asylum field, raise disturbing questions about the age-assessment test (the Merton Test) that many social workers will be asked to participate in. The PCF domain 2 is concerned with ensuring that social workers practise in an ethical way that reflects social work values. Yet Moran and Gillett suggest that the Merton Test effectively breaches social work ethical codes: it is, they suggest, a new form of eugenics. Their case is that the Merton Test has no basis in science, that questions asked are culturally insensitive, and that the test is only applied to those deemed as ‘other’ by institutional racist immigration and asylum laws. Given this, they argue, social workers, whose primary concern should be with safeguarding vulnerable children, should not engage in age-assessment ‘tests’.
Introduction
This chapter is about exposing and resisting the institutionalised racism (as defined by Macpherson 1999) that is practised through the test known as the Merton Compliant age assessment that, through its introduction into the field of social work practice, is an indicator of the advancement of the neoliberal agenda (Harman 2007).
The Merton Compliant is the general guidance to local authorities about how to decide whether a child seeking asylum who claims to be a child, is a child. It was included in the findings of Judge Burnton in the High Court in 20031 and, when it is used, it is applied by practising social workers to a child who is, in conjunction, being ‘processed’ as an asylum seeker by a United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) ‘caseowner’.
The authors textually analyse: policy and legal case documents; the guidance accompanying one local authority's Merton Compliance assessment tool alongside the empirical content of that tool as applied to a 15-year-old boy by a local authority social worker; and anonymised extracts from the audit trail of that ‘Merton Complied’ case study. Through this combination of sources and method, the authors explore whether and how this test, and in particular the guidance about the ‘tool’ used to apply it, offers a contemporary example of a judicially and medically supported operationalisation, by social workers, of an essentialist and deeply racist statutory policy.