Survey finds NI youth ill-informed on asylum issues

A new survey carried out on behalf of Amnesty International has shown that young people in Northern Ireland are ill-informed on asylum issues.

While most young people are positive towards refugees and asylum seekers and would want the right to a fair asylum process if they ever had to flee persecution, less than a third thought the Government treated asylum seekers fairly and 70% were opposed to the use of prison for detaining some asylum seekers in Northern Ireland.

However, the poll, published in the run-up to Refugee Week which begins next Monday, also shows that a significant minority of young people have negative or hostile attitudes towards refugees and asylum-seekers, with almost one in four objecting to a refugee marrying a member of their family.

Patrick Corrigan, Programme Director for Amnesty International in Northern Ireland, said: “The poll appears to confirm what we have long believed - that young people have an innate sense of fairness and while lacking in-depth knowledge of asylum matters, believe that government treats refugees unjustly.

“However it is extremely worrying that there is a significant strand of this coming generation who see asylum seekers and refugees in a negative light. It is perhaps surprising that there is not more hostility among young people given a diet of often unfair media coverage and next to no discussion in schools.”

On the whole, the sample showed a low level of understanding of the asylum seeker situation in the province. Young people also massively overestimated the proportion of the world’s refugees who come to Northern Ireland, on average believing that 6.9% of the world’s refugee population came here, more than 300 times the true figure of less than 0.02%.

Nine out of ten of the teenagers reported they have never or rarely been taught about asylum seekers and refugees in school.

(MB)