Protection of unaccompanied child and adolescent migrants in Catalonia: Inhabited places, occupied places or non-places?

In response to the so-called “refugee crisis,” the Catalan regional government set up experimental services for children migrating without guardians, with the explicit aim of safeguarding their rights. With their continued arrival, however, overcrowding in the facilities and the youths’ educational and life prospects have become topics of fierce debate. This article investigates whether young migrants can live in the educational centers that host them. Basing ourselves on the distinction between occupying and living in a place, we call into question the conditions of non-life that, from the educational perspective, the reception system offers migrant youth. A qualitative study was undertaken to gather and triangulate the views of the young migrants ( n = 42), and that of their social educators ( n = 15), and of the management of the reception centers ( n = 2). Despite efforts to put in place policies affording quality attention, a series of contradictions cause the system to favor the homogenization of outcomes rather than adequately acknowledging and addressing the youths’ individual needs. This added to the lack of resources mobilized, has yielded the result that the system that supposedly provides protection for minors, rather than being a lived-in place, has become a classical example of a non-occupied space. Providing a habitable place depends on the pedagogical commitment of social educators and managers to offering these children the chance to build emotional ties with the center, so that it may become a proper place in the world despite the bureaucratic and structural hurdles.