The short film Script version 5.0”Medical age assessment” (2019) is part of the artistic research project Refuse to Kill – stories of the conscientious objectors and contains public documents requested from the The National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV). The documents deal with the script writing process of an information film made for RMW by the film production company Populate in 2016–2017 following a so-called direct procurement.
The film’s target group is young people seeking asylum in Sweden who cannot prove their age with identity documents. In these cases, the Swedish Migration Agency offers the asylum seeker to undergo a dental X-ray and magnetic camera examination of the knee. With the examinations as a basis, RMV makes a medical age assessment, and a forensic doctor writes a forensic medical statement which describes in words the probability that the asylum seeker is over or under 18 years of age. The Swedish Migration Agency uses the statement as part of its assessment of the asylum seeker’s age and decides whether he or she should be considered a child or an adult.
This is an information post by Rättsmedicinalverket – the Swedish Forensic Medicine Agency – comprising a short film in Swedish on “Medical age assessment in asylum cases” that is available on YouTube with subtitles variously in English, Arabic, Dari, Pashto Somali and Tigrinya. The text explains that: “Asylum seekers who state that they are children need to be able to show that they are under 18 years of age. If the Swedish Migration Agency does not consider that a person has made it likely that he is under 18 years of age, the asylum seeker has the option of undergoing a medical age assessment. It is an assessment of a person’s age in relation to the age limit of 18 using various medical methods.”