“But that’s what I’m saying”: experiential versus institutional truth in guardian-minor interactions

1 Introduction

Across EU+ countries, unaccompanied minors make up approximately four per cent of all applications for international protection (European Union Agency for Asylum 2024). Separated from their families, these children are particularly vulnerable during the harrowing journeys they undertake (Pfeiffer et al. 2022). The initial relief experienced upon arriving in a (temporary) country of destination is often only short lived; after the physical, national borders, they also have to navigate and overcome the “paper borders” of the asylum procedure (Van Buggenhout 2024). As applicants often lack official documents or evidence, the authorities critically examine their narratives, in which they “just” have to describe what happened to them (Herlihy et al. 2012). Presenting the asylum interview as an invitation to tell one’s story, however, obscures the high credibility standards which are actually in place (Maryns 2006; Smith-Khan 2019; Vogl 2024).

In Belgium, it is mainly lawyers and guardians, the legal representatives of unaccompanied minors, who familiarise young migrants with the bureaucratic expectations they are supposed to meet. This is not an easy task; the guidance they aim to provide usually requires a certain level of trust, which can be hard to earn but easy to lose. As such, lawyers have to maintain a careful balance between a care and justice perspective when supporting their clients in the procedure (Jacobs and Maryns 2022). For guardians, safeguarding rapport is arguably even more important. While they tend to be closer to the child, and are usually better able to access the emotional dimension in conversations, acting as a “truth-finder” can be especially detrimental to their – often brittle – relationship of trust (Van Buggenhout 2024), and could prevent minors from addressing future lifeworld concerns and struggles to them.

In line with international standards (FRA 2022), the Belgian Guardianship Act tasks guardians with providing information about the asylum interviews and appointing a lawyer, but not necessarily with the actual interview preparation (FOD Justitie 2002). Still, time constraints usually compel guardians to take up at least some share of uncovering the asylum narrative (Van Buggenhout 2024). This lack of time mainly relates to the tight schedule of migration lawyers specialised in counselling unaccompanied minors; as they are high in demand, lawyer consultations are limited in the period leading up to the interview (Dhondt 2019), and hence highly precious. To make the most of these encounters, guardians try to assist lawyers by already collecting as much information as possible, or even start rehearsing the interview themselves.

However, guardians receive no specific training to this end. As a result, they intuitively develop preparation techniques that are rooted in their experience with other asylum interviews, which they have attended in the span of their careers. In practice, this often translates into taking on an interrogatory stance or even an adversarial role (Van Buggenhout 2024). Although playing the devil’s advocate is usually a conscious effort to resolve inconsistencies or to probe for more detail, guardians may actually – unconsciously – mirror the bureaucratic rhetoric employed by officials, insisting on a coherent, ‘truthful’ account that is rooted in facts, and echo the culture of disbelief that asylum authorities are typically associated with (Jubany 2011). Research, therefore, emphasises the value of metacommunication in legal support to dissipate applicants’ confusion as to who is on their side (Jacobs 2022b; Jacobs and Maryns 2022).

To gain a better understanding of how this intuitive approach to uncovering the asylum narrative (i.e. mirroring asylum officers’ interrogation techniques) may impact trust and disclosure, this paper examines the case of an unaccompanied minor preparing the asylum interview with his legal guardian. More specifically, the article explores the dynamics of truth-finding and meaning negotiation in an intercultural setting. I^[1] adopt a linguistic-ethnographic approach in discussing transcriptions of an audio-recorded, interpreter-mediated interaction between the minor and guardian. Through interactional analysis of the data, the article looks beyond the interpreter as the primary filter of meaning, and identifies three different levels at which mutual understanding is hampered: (a) at a semantic level, (b) at a chronotope (time/space) level, and (c) at a normative level. These three levels of non-understanding, in turn, impact both the minor’s narrative rights (i.e. the opportunity and ability to tell his story), and the relationship of trust with his guardian. Finally, this paper argues that different versions of the ‘truth’ (experiential and factual/institutional) can exist at the same time, and that chronotopes may be a helpful narrative tool in aligning such different perspectives.

2 Institutional versus experiential truth in the asylum procedure

In 1951, the Geneva Convention defined a refugee as someone “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (UNHCR 2010, p. 3). Since then, the definition has become the international standard outlining the criteria for refugee status determination. Over the past two decades, however, scholars have demonstrated how asylum adjudication has shifted from evaluating compliance with the refugee definition to a credibility inquiry of the applicant’s story (Kagan 2002; Maryns 2006; Smith-Khan 2019; Vogl 2024). The asylum interview, then, is a means to scrutinise their narrative in light of a number of credibility indicators. Whether or not an account is deemed truthful depends not solely on its “veracity”, but also on the applicant’s ability to meet the required level of narrative skill (Vogl 2024). As such, the bureaucratic expectations of a genuine account imply a sufficient level of detail and specificity, internal and external consistency, and plausibility (UNHCR 2013), but also coherence and, preferably, a chronological order of the events (Maryns 2006).

The UNHCR’s Beyond Proof report confirms that asylum decisions cite inconsistency, vagueness or lack of detail as indicators of non-credibility, while these could actually be indicative of recalling an actual lived experience (2013). Indeed, research on autobiographical memory shows such criteria are unreasonable, and can be deemed “absurd proxies for truth” (Vogl 2024: 10). These studies refute the premise that autobiographical memories can be “reliably, consistently and accurately” recalled (Herlihy et al. 2012: 662). Instead, they demonstrate how, over time, it becomes difficult to recollect temporal and peripheral information, proper names or verbatim utterances, and how people can even struggle to distinguish repeated events (Cameron 2010). These findings already highlight the unrealistic demands of bureaucratic truth, without even considering the effects of trauma, stress and emotion on recall. That is, the distress experienced when encoding and retrieving traumatic or highly emotional events, which are part and parcel of applicants’ narratives, has been shown to distort and complicate recall even further (Herlihy and Turner 2007; Herlihy et al. 2012).

The required level of detail and consistency almost expects applicants to become omniscient narrators (Vogl 2024), which is in stark contrast with the often vague and fragmented nature of their lived experiences (Maryns 2006). As a result, applicants for international protection crucially depend on the support of legal professionals, whose guidance is of the utmost importance in order to meet institutional credibility standards (Jacobs and Maryns 2022; Smith-Khan 2017, 2020). Jacobs and Maryns, for example, show how Belgian immigration lawyers help their clients develop an appropriate narrative strategy to reorient their lived experiences towards more factual, structured accounts (2022). In doing so, applicants have to learn to walk the fine line between delivering an authentic narrative and providing “irrelevant” contextual details (Barsky 1994; Maryns 2006).

The narrative which eventually makes up the asylum official’s written report is often far from the lived truth as experienced by the applicant. Their story undergoes several layers of transformation throughout the course of the procedure; apart from the lawyer’s presence in the co-construction of their narrative (Jacobs and Maryns 2022), a certain extent of bureaucratic filtering can be identified at multiple levels of the asylum hearing as well. As such, the applicant’s account is mediated by an interpreter, who may already anticipate textualist criteria such as consistency, and is subsequently transformed from a highly contextual, oral account into a depersonalised, factual, written synthesis easily digestible for the decision maker (Jacobs and Maryns 2023; Maryns 2006). Despite their significance, the interpreter’s or officer’s input are rarely acknowledged in the report. Instead, this version of the “truth” is attributed solely to the applicant, even if they may not recognise their own words (Maryns 2006; Smith-Khan 2019).

So far, however, research on how ‘truth’ or ‘facts’ are interactionally achieved has primarily focused on (highly) formalised, institutional settings such as police and asylum interviews (Benneworth-Gray 2015; David et al. 2018; Maryns 2006) or lawyer-client consultations (Jacobs and Maryns 2022), where truth-finding practices are part and parcel of the professionals’ institutional responsibilities. These settings therefore differ from the less formal, interactional context of guardians and minors, which is presumed to represent a safe and trusting environment. At the same time, these less formal encounters are still permeated by institutional concerns (such as the need for a coherent and factual story), which nevertheless urges guardians to orient to the institutional role of ‘truth-finder’ (Drew and Heritage 1992; Van Buggenhout 2024). As a result, these semi-institutional encounters, like their formal counterparts, are characterised by clashes between experiential and factual/institutional versions of “the truth”.

However, guardians – as opposed to lawyers, for instance – are only ill-acquainted with the specialised strategies to uncover and negotiate past experiences, and may not always stress their institutional role in these interactions. More research is therefore needed to gain insight into how clashes between institutional and experiential truth are managed in such less formal, semi-institutional environments where participants’ institutional identities are not as clear cut.

3 Interpreter mediation in asylum contexts

Given that institutional encounters with migrants and refugees are almost inherently multilingual, interpreting in asylum contexts has received considerable attention in research. These studies on interpreting typically centre around two main areas of focus, both of which have been inspired at least to some extent by Wadensjö’s (1998/2014) groundbreaking work on interpreting-as-interaction. Through her interactional data, Wadensjö was among the first to demonstrate that interpreters, far from being the invisible translation machines they are typically expected to be, are instead heavily involved in both coordination and sensemaking in interaction (1998/2014).

On the one hand, research has looked into the interpreter’s agency in the asylum interview (Barsky 1994; Inghilleri and Maryns 2019; Pöllabauer 2004; Rycroft 2005; Tipton 2008). As such, studies have shown how interpreters take on an active role by filtering and coordinating talk, but also by asking additional questions and, at times, even taking over the officer’s interviewing role (Pöllabauer 2004, 2015). In this way, interpreters attempt to contribute to the efficiency of the encounter, while also anticipating the (institutional) expectations of the interviewer. Given the – at times high – involvement of the interpreter in eliciting and rendering the applicant’s asylum narrative, this branch of research also emphasises the problematic practice of assigning sole authorship to the asylum seeker (Pöllabauer 2015; Smith-Khan 2019; Vogl 2024).

On the other hand, research on interpreting in the asylum procedure has focused on issues of quality. Pöllabauer (2015) problematises the lack of quality assurance in mediated interviews, highlighting “translation errors, distortions, and inappropriate and non-professional behaviour of interpreters” in asylum contexts (206). Issues of quality are typically associated with the limited – if at all – training required of asylum interpreters; due to the low capacity for languages of lesser diffusion, interviewers often have no choice but to rely on untrained interpreters (Pöllabauer 2015).

The visibility of interpreters in the asylum interview has also been investigated specifically in the context of unaccompanied minors; in line with studies on adult asylum interviews, Keselman has shown how children in the Swedish asylum procedure may lose their voice and authenticity through interpreters who distort, discredit or guide minors’ stories in an attempt to “steer their responses in accordance with their own understanding of institutional demands of consistency and logics” (Keselman 2009: 36).

Finally, a growing body of research has started directing its attention to interpreting in asylum contexts beyond the actual interview. That is, scholars are increasingly focusing on the preparatory interactions between applicants and their lawyers and/or guardians (Jacobs and Maryns 2023; Killman 2020; Remue et al. 2024; Xu 2021). Although these studies draw attention to a number of issues similar to those occurring in the asylum interview, such as interfering, steering, filtering or taking on the role of ‘co-interviewer’ (Jacobs and Maryns 2023; Remue et al. 2024), they also shed light on the additional roles interpreters take on that aim to support lawyers and guardians in their tasks (Killman 2020; Remue et al. 2024; Xu 2021). Specifically, these studies show how interpreters can become collaborative partners, or even “buddies” (Remue et al. 2024: 2409), and contribute to the establishment of trust (Killman 2020; Remue et al. 2024).

4 Methods

This article draws on ethnographic data collected as part of a research project examining the multilingual interaction between unaccompanied minors and their legal guardians. The researcher obtained free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of all participants to make audio-recordings and take fieldnotes during her participatory observations.

Although scholars have emphasised the manifest benefits of video recordings in analysing interaction, this approach was deemed inappropriate in the intimate setting of guardian-minor interaction. Video data indeed allow a thorough and contextualised analysis that takes into account how visual cues such as gaze, gesture and other bodily conduct contribute to talk-in-interaction (Heath and Hindmarsh 2002). However, given the sensitive topics discussed in these encounters, and the general vulnerability of unaccompanied children in the asylum procedure, we decided that these benefits do not outweigh the disproportionately intrusive nature of video recordings. This is especially the case since some participants have voiced concerns of information being sent to their country of origin. Although inevitably less detailed, fieldnotes taken during participatory observation did enable the researcher to document salient features of embodied interaction, which were integrated in the transcript of the interaction (Dutch-Kurmanji).^[2]

The excerpts discussed in this paper are selected from the third in a series of five interactions observed by the researcher between the same minor and guardian. The choice for this case derives precisely from the researcher’s ability to follow the minor and guardian over the course of several months, as a trusting relationship developed between the researcher and the participants, opening the door to a wealth of contextual information (including information on the guardian’s and interpreter’s background, e-mail communication with the lawyer, and comments of the minor on the trust relationship with his guardian). I agree here with Van de Putte, who, in drawing on Blommaert’s notion of “non-text”, argues that “not everything that is to be known will transpire from the transcript” (Van de Putte 2022: 756). Indeed, however accurate the transcription, it is having access to ethnographic detail which allows a contextualised understanding of what is transpiring in interaction. The remainder of this section therefore provides a summary of ethnographically obtained detail that serves as the background against which the excerpts should be read.

The excerpts featured in this paper are drawn from a 1 hour 24 minutes conversation between an unaccompanied minor (M, “Soran”) and his legal guardian (G, “Monique”), mediated by an interpreter (I) and attended by the minor’s social assistant. The transcript uses pseudonyms when participants are explicitly addressed. The interaction takes place at the reception centre where the minor is staying, and aims to prepare him for his second interview with the asylum authorities. This interview takes place at the Commissioner-General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS) and serves to assess the grounds of the asylum claim. This as opposed to the first interview at the Immigration Office (DVZ), which examines the admissibility of the case.

Monique has been active as a volunteer guardian since 2016, and was assigned five guardianships at the time of the observations. She is bilingual (Dutch-French) and communicates with Soran through a certified interpreter (Kurmanji-Dutch) who was initially contacted through a PSI^[3] provider, and has since been appealed to for all communication with him. This conversation is mediated over the phone, and is marked by frequent background noise from the interpreter’s children. The minor’s social assistant remains mostly silent, but is present to stay up to date on the case.

The interaction builds on a meeting which was held one week earlier (also attended by the researcher), but which was not sufficient to go over Soran’s entire migration journey. That is, the guardian wants to have a clear overview of the minor’s itinerary and the hardships he endured along the way before he meets one final time with his lawyer in preparation for the asylum interview. This to save time and to make the most of the lawyer’s expertise.

As a way of further contextualising the data, and to improve the clarity of the excerpts, I first provide a brief, chronological overview of the events which were already established prior to this encounter:

1. Soran leaves home together with his father. His mother is no longer alive.

2. They meet up with smugglers, who make them enter separate lorries for adults and children.

3. The lorry with adults disappears from the radar. Soran has not seen his dad since.

4. The lorry with children is halted in Bulgaria, and everyone is arrested. Smugglers tell the children to provide false information (age, name, origin) so they are not sent to a closed centre for minors.

5. After an incarceration of 21 days, Soran is sent to an open camp. After 9 days, he is able to leave and continue his journey.

The current meeting centres mainly around what transpired between Soran’s arrest and him leaving Bulgaria.

5 Case study analysis

This first excerpt marks the beginning of a fairly long conversation between Soran (M) and Monique (G). Both are seated in a meeting room in the reception centre where Soran is staying and are waiting for the social assistant to join when Monique takes out several sheets of paper related to his health insurance:

This small piece of interaction already gives a first idea of the setting and the course of the conversation. It highlights the absence of a physical interpreter, who has to rely on metalinguistic cues to make sense of the situation on the other side of the phone (turn 4). Throughout the conversation, this phone is positioned on the table in between guardian and minor. Despite its black screen, both talk directly to the phone and rarely lift their gaze towards the other, so that eye-contact is lacking during most of the interaction.

The exchange starts with the guardian, Monique, wanting to dispose of some practicalities. She presents the minor, Soran, with several documents concerning his health insurance while briefing the interpreter on what she should tell him (turn 1). Despite his affirmative “okay” (turn 3), Soran looks lost when he is handed a pen. Turn 6 confirms that he is unfamiliar with the document or the implications of his signature, but he signs nevertheless. Though seemingly trivial, this short snippet of interaction will prove important later on in the conversation.

What follows are two examples of misunderstandings which illustrate the difficulty of ‘truth’ negotiation between minor and guardian. Despite the linguistic aid, the minor’s answers – and more specifically, his perspective on the events – seem to pass by the guardian, who obstinately holds on to her version of the facts.

Excerpt 2 takes place about 22 minutes into the conversation. Prior to this stretch of talk, the guardian has asked the minor to describe his hometown (restaurants, parks, schools, mosques, etc.), comparing his answers against Google Maps visuals. When she feels his account is sufficiently detailed, she announces that they can now continue where they left off the week before (viz. the minor’s time in Turkey and Bulgaria):

Throughout the conversation, the guardian tries to make sense of some issues that remain unclear. Her first question (turn 1) tackles two of those issues at once; a) was Soran aware that he applied for asylum? And b) was he aware that this happened in Bulgaria? The question is ambiguous in that it is not clear which issue she is actually enquiring about, so Soran provides an answer to both (turn 3–5); he gave his fingerprints somewhere, but at the time there was no way for him to identify that country as Bulgaria. Although the latter answer appears satisfactory to settle issue b, the former becomes one of the points of contention that will dominate the rest of the conversation, and remains unresolved until the end.

In her rendition of Monique’s question, the interpreter refers to the asylum request as giving basmat (turn 2), a loan word from Arabic meaning fingerprint. Soran seems to recognise the word, as he recycles it in his subsequent answers (turn 3, 7, 9), eventually turning to the Kurmanji word for finger (tiliya) (turn 15) when the question keeps being reiterated. Minor and interpreter, however, initially seem to attach different connotations to the word basmat. The fact that the interpreter considers it synonymous to applying for asylum suggests that she strongly links the act of giving fingerprints to its implications (i.e. requesting asylum). Throughout the conversation it becomes clear, however, that for Soran the word means nothing more than the act itself. In turn 9 already, he explicitly states that – at least at the time of his arrest – he did not know what it implied.

Most striking in this excerpt is the guardian’s insistence on whether the minor gave his fingerprints. Despite Soran confirming he did so multiple times, Monique seems to imply that his answers do not tally with statements he made during his interview at DVZ (Immigration Office) (turn 17). And although what she describes in turn 17 (Soran confirmed that he gave his fingerprints somewhere) is actually in line with the minor’s current narrative, the source of her apparent disbelief becomes clear shortly after. That is, similar to the interpreter’s interpretation of the word basmat, Monique believes the act of giving fingerprints to be identical to applying for asylum, and assumes Soran knew this, too (turn 18). In doing so, however, she does not distinguish between the minor’s understanding now versus at the time of the events, and struggles to acknowledge that he is relating his account from an experiential point of view.

To gain more insight into what underlies these opposing perspectives, we will analyse the misunderstanding through a ‘chronotopic’ lens. Bakhtin (1981) uses chronotope (literally time-space) to denote the intertwinement of temporal and spatial relationships. Originally used to analyse literary narrative, the concept has been modified to study oral narrative, and is especially useful in exploring the interplay between the “here-and-now” of the storytelling event and the “then-and-there” of the story itself (Perrino 2011, 2015). Chronotopes can be of particular interest in stories of disagreement or mutual incomprehension (Lawson 2011), as they show there is not necessarily one truth to a story. That is, parties can have different experiences of the same reality, and chronotopes represent those individual understandings (Lawson 2011).

As such, chronotopes here constitute a source of contention because the interlocutors speak and reason from different chronotopic perspectives. While the minor attempts to narrate his story based on how he experienced the events “there-and-then”, the guardian interprets his account against the facts that are available in the “here-and-now” (i.e. the interview report), as evidenced in the next excerpt:

As the conversation proceeds, it thus becomes more and more clear that the guardian’s idea of what ‘truly’ transpired, ensues from the notes she obtained from the minor’s first interview at the Immigration Office (DVZ) (i.e. a summary of the answers he provided). That is, the report states that Soran applied for asylum in Bulgaria as an adult by giving false information. The smugglers urged him to do so to avoid going to a closed centre, which would have prevented them from continuing the journey to Belgium. It is unclear who, during the interview, interpreted giving fingerprints as applying for asylum – it may have been the interpreter, but also the officer – but sure is that the words are now attributed to Soran, who claims to never have uttered them. Although both formulations indexically refer to the same action, the two perspectives seem irreconcilable to the guardian.

At this point in the conversation, it also becomes increasingly clear that the guardian is not necessarily seeking new information, but rather attempts to steer the minor’s answers in a way that fits the first interview’s report. In this way, the preparation for the second – “big” – interview starts to show a number of similarities with what David et al. (2018) call “the interrogation game”. Departing from police interrogations, they describe the interview setting as an unlevel playing field in which the rules of the game (the interactional expectations) are controlled by the police. Interviewees, on the other hand, are described as unexperienced players (institutionally marginalised). Although interviewees are free to relate their version of the story, police officers are in a position to reject their claims when this does not match the ‘established facts’, or what they believe ‘logically’ happened (David et al. 2018). In both contexts (police and asylum), interviewees are thus ostensibly granted the role of storyteller, but in the end are deprived of any narrative ownership.

Although Monique’s take on the interrogation game is coming from a place of guidance, this remains rather implicit, and difficult for the minor to recognise. When expressing doubt or authority, for instance, she makes little to no mention of the asylum officer or the report, but instead refers to herself (turn 13). Once more, chronotopes can be understood here as a source of misunderstanding, as the guardian is employing the here-and-now to simulate the (future) there-and-then of the actual interview, mimicking the volley of accusatory questions Soran will likely be subjected to. The absence of meta-communication about this approach, however, denies the minor any insight into its purpose (i.e. making his story fit the normative, institutional criteria of the asylum system). In other words, instead of de-constructing and explaining the authorities’ expectations, the guardian is replicating their confrontational style, in this way stirring up potential feelings of distrust and hostility.

The confrontational style becomes especially apparent in turn 7, where the guardian implies that Soran must have been aware of the asylum request, because one simply cannot forget the act of giving fingerprints. To substantiate her point – and perhaps to show a certain degree of frustration – she mimics pushing her thumbs down on the table, emphasising just how recognisable the action is. Remarkably, she does this while addressing the interpreter (he must know, he recognises), who, over the phone, has no access to her gestures. Perhaps more strikingly, however, this statement also draws attention to the guardian’s superficial knowledge of the process, as fingerprints are taken from index fingers. The interpreter, however, seems to pick up on the inaccuracy and adjusts the message in her translation (turn 8–10).

In fact, a closer look at the interpreter’s renditions in excerpt 3 draws attention to two important points regarding her role. First, turns 8–12 highlight the mediating role she takes on in the interaction. Not only does the interpreter bypass the guardian’s imprecision (turn 7), her translation also reduces the adversarial undertone. Instead of providing a literal interpretation, and asking the minor the same question once again, she acknowledges the story he has been telling all along (turn 8), and reformulates his answer to fit the guardian’s question (turn 12). Recognising the growing frustration between the minor and guardian, she thus uses the interactional organisation of mediated talk (viz. accusations and denials are not adjacent, but addressed to a third party) (Garcia 1991) to perform relational work.

Secondly, excerpt 3 shows how the interactional confusion in this encounter cannot be reduced to a translation error. Despite their initial conceptual difference of ‘giving fingerprints’, turns 4–6 clearly demonstrate that the interpreter has become aware of the minor’s view, and attempts to anticipate the guardian’s follow-up questions by making this explicit (turn 6). The fact that this is unsuccessful (see also further), hints that other issues must be underlying the guardian’s and minor’s conflicting views. That is, even without access to the backtranslations, the interpreter’s renditions at the time of the interaction should have been sufficient for the guardian to make sense of the minor’s point of view.^[4]

Eventually, sensing that Soran is unlikely to abandon his version of the story, Monique decides to address a final question:

The guardian signals that her initial question of whether Soran was forced to sign remains unresolved (turn 10). In the turns that follow, the tension becomes visible between Monique’s expectation of a binary answer and the way Soran actually lived the situation (turn 12–16). To him, the distinction voluntary/forced does not make sense; he was told to sign and he did (turn 12, 16). He is unable to fit his experience into either of the normative categories. In turn 19, the interpreter picks up on the guardian’s apparent dissatisfaction (turn 18), and attempts to provide a suitable answer to the binary question. Monique, however, still comes across as frustrated. Despite claiming it’s alright (turn 20), her response sounds dismissive, insinuating that she does not find the minor’s answers satisfactory.

The sceptical undertone, however, does not go unnoticed by Soran either, who becomes visibly frustrated. Understanding that his previous attempts at conveying his reality were fruitless, he then chooses to adapt his narrative strategy to convey his story. Instead of explaining how he experienced the conditions of his incarceration at the time of his arrest, he skilfully brings the issue to the present by referring to the beginning of the interaction (turn 21). More specifically, he alludes to the guardian’s request to sign some documents, and in this way creates a parallel between the two situations; he does/did not know what the documents say and is/was unfamiliar with the language and therefore unable to read. He was neither forced nor free to sign, he just did because he was told to. It is in projecting his past experience onto the present that Soran hopes to put across how he lived those moments.

More specifically, and returning one final time to the concept of chronotopes, Soran can be seen to blur the boundaries between the there-and-then and here-and-now by moving his guardian into the story (turn 21). This form of cross-chronotope alignment has previously been described as “participant transposition” (Perrino 2011, 2015). However, whereas Perrino’s data show the interlocutor being recruited as a “witness” (Perrino 2011: 98), the guardian in this case study almost becomes an accomplice. This performative way of aligning the guardian’s and police officer’s behaviour is yet another illustration of the considerable effort needed to create a shared point of view.

6 Discussion

The communicative challenges in this interaction can be situated at three (interrelated) levels: semantic, chronotopic, and normative. Essentially, all three factors represent a form of non-understanding related to different perspectives on truth. In the final sections of this paper, I discuss how such contrasting perspectives can have a profound impact on the Hearability (how does perception correspond to the intended meaning) and Sayability (how does communicative competence affect the ability to convey) of a story (Blommaert et al. 2006), and may eventually harm interpersonal relationships between interlocutors.

The first communicative challenge is situated at a semantic level. That is, at first sight, a lexical issue seems to be the source of confusion, as the minor and interpreter have different conceptualisations of the word basmat/fingerprints. This practice of attributing different meanings – social or referential – to the same words or things is also referred to as a pretextual gap or difference (Maryns and Blommaert 2002). Pretextual gaps between interlocutors may concern different ideas of particular concepts (e.g. giving fingerprints), but can also, more generally, apply to different views on what counts as a true narrative.

Indeed, as the conversation proceeds, it becomes clear that the communicative issue is more deeply rooted than a lexical misinterpretation. Even after the minor and the interpreter have tried time and again to clarify that the former’s understanding of requesting asylum/giving fingerprints now differs from how he experienced the situation at the time, the guardian still struggles to accommodate his perspective. I link this to the second level of communicative challenge: chronotopes.

Chronotopes in this case affect the Hearability/Sayability of the story in two ways. On the one hand, they are a complicating factor in conveying the account. The story’s layeredness in time and place makes it difficult for the guardian to understand how the “here-and-now” of the storytelling relates to, but also differs from the “then-and-there” experience of the events. In other words, it is challenging to comprehend the spatio-temporal truth (Lawson 2011) of the minor’s story; although the minor now recognises the implications of giving fingerprints, this is not acknowledged in his story because it did not hold true at the time. The guardian, however, interprets the claim that he did not know he was requesting asylum as a denial that he ever gave fingerprints, as she struggles to recognise the act and implications of giving fingerprints as two separate experiences at the time of the events.

On the other hand, chronotopes are used as a tool to enable storytelling. I agree here with Lawson, who argues that “some truths are only available through narrative” (2011: 392). Chronotopes, as he sees them, are bridges engaging past and present because they offer unique – experiential – ways of understanding narrative. Indeed, the minor seems to engage in similar strategies; when all else fails, he plays with chronotopes to project his past experience onto the current situation. More specifically, he blurs the boundaries of different chronotopes by adroitly moving his guardian into the story. This narrative strategy can also be understood in relation to the aforementioned pretextual gaps. That is, Maryns (2006) hypothesises that greater pretextual difference will require more perfomance to reach concensus. Indeed, after persisting misunderstandings, drawing the guardian into the story can be seen as the minor narratively performing the context in which his claims should be understood. In aligning the different chronotopes, he is essentially trying to create a shared point of view.

Finally, I believe the tension between these chronotopic perspectives and the struggle to reconcile them ensue from a third communicative challenge that is situated at a normative level, which fosters different ideas of what constitutes a true narrative. Whereas the guardian expects a well-defined account that offers sound and closing answers to institionally-relevant questions, the minor relates his experiences how he lived them, even if this includes imprecisions or contradicts what are now considered “facts”.

In fact, the guardian’s approach is reflective of the confrontational style typically employed by protection officers or police interviewers (Benneworth-Gray 2015; David et al. 2018; Van Buggenhout 2024); questions are framed as an opportunity for the minor to tell his version of the events, but actually serve to check his story against its “former” version recorded in the notes of his previous asylum interview. This prioritisation of written information prevents the guardian from hearing the minor’s authentic, oral narrative, which seems to contradict his earlier statements. That these statements have been bureaucratically filtered and are generally stripped of nuance (Jacobs and Maryns 2023; Maryns 2006), however, is not taken account of. This influence of the written report has already been documented in consultations between applicants and their lawyers, who risk “privileging the institutional voice over the one of the applicant” (Jacobs 2022a: 187).

The fact that guardians employ similar – at times adversarial – techniques can be traced back to what I have previously referred to as the ‘intuitive approach’. Lacking concrete tools to uncover or “reorient” minors’ stories (Jacobs and Maryns 2022), guardians intuitively fall back on officers’ interrogatory strategies which they witnessed in previous interviews. As the case study demonstrates, however, inadequate contextualisation of such thorough probing might actually harm their relationship of trust (Van Buggenhout 2024), as minors may feel as if their story is drawn into question.

7 Conclusions

Multiple scholars have already called out the problematic credibility assessment of asylum claims and the rigid ‘truth’ framework stories are held against (Kagan 2002; Maryns 2006; Smith-Khan 2019; Vogl 2024), demonstrating that institutional criteria such as coherence, autobiographical detail and chronology are “absurd proxies for truth” (Vogl 2024: 10). Although in no way contradicting these claims, I do want to add that, rather than problematising the criteria, it might be worthwhile to steer the discussion towards challenging the idea of ‘truth’ itself.

That is, this paper provides a clear example of how different truths can co-exist at the same time. Although the guardian and the minor have diverging perspectives on what happened, neither perspective can objectively be classified as a lie or ‘untruth’. Still, different truths are clearly attributed different statuses (Benneworth-Gray 2015), and without high levels of narrative skill, it can be nearly impossible to convey the value of non-normative – or ‘marginalised’ – truths. Even though the experientiality inherent to these alternative truths contributes to the ‘genuine’ refugee account that authorities allegedly expect, the actual prioritisation of factual detail creates an environment in which only the truth is accepted, thus depriving applicants of ownership over their own narratives.

This paper also demonstrates, however, that this bureaucratic ideology also permeates the backstage spheres of guardian-minor interactions. As a result, clashes between experiential and factual/institutional versions of the truth are not exclusive to formal interview settings, but also occur in contexts where trust is supposed to be central (Dienst Voogdij 2022). Although the responsibility of determining whether or not a minor’s story is true does not actually lie with the guardian,^[5] the high stakes of interview preparation almost inevitably pervade their supportive, informal encounters with institutional concern, urging guardians to take on the role of ‘truth-finder’ (Van Buggenhout 2024) nevertheless.

Still, reproducing bureaucratic ideologies in what are supposed to be trusting encounters is not without risk. After all, besides primary care figures, guardians are also brokers between minors and the (asylum) system, which inevitably entails certain power dynamics. In classifying certain truths as either valid or invalid, guardians reinforce this position of power as they become the judge of what stories are valued, deciding what stories should or should not be told. In fact, by adopting the perspective of the authorities and confronting children with ‘untruths’ – even if it happens under the pretext of playing the devil’s advocate – guardians are reproducing the culture of disbelief associated with the asylum system. However well the intentions, persistently probing for more detail or justification can create an atmosphere of suspicion. Children and adolescents may become more withdrawn, whereas a guardian would ideally put them at ease and stimulate an open environment.

This is not to say that there is no room for pursuing factual/institutional truth or addressing contradictions, but I do believe it would be beneficial to raise awareness about the multifaceted nature of truth (as opposed to the truth ) in guardian training. That is, in familiarising guardians with the idea that multiple truths can co-exist, and handing them the tools to explore – and reconcile – the different sides to a story, they may feel better equipped to manage clashes between experiential and factual truth, and merge them into an institutionally valid account without overly harming the relationship of trust with the minors they support.