Dr. Angie Skuce

Yeah, I do know.

And yeah, we've come across many of these, what they call AIDS-disputed minors over the years.

And we've done a lot of research into it.

And there is no way to determine somebody's exact age.

The definition of an adult is a legal definition of somebody who turns 18.

And we know that people don't suddenly mature on their 18th birthday.

So there's no physical exam or investigation that you can do that can tell how old somebody is.

People talk about things like dental examinations and x-rays of bone age, but that will give you somebody's age to within about five years.

So it's wildly inaccurate.

People also talk about psychological assessments, but a psychological assessment will give you an idea of how mature somebody is, which often is quite different to their age.

And I think anybody who has looked at a classroom, a six year classroom of children who might be 16, 17 or 18,

There's a huge disparity between the most mature and the most immature.

So there is absolutely no way of telling how old somebody is.

And in my experience, I think Tusla's approach has been the right one.

The figures I would be more interested to hear are not the number of adults were mistakenly accommodating as children,

Because they could be all people who turn out to be 18 years and one month as opposed to 17 years and 11 months.

I'd be much more interested to know how many children we have mistakenly accommodated as adults because they're the most vulnerable and even one of those a year would be too many.

That is happening, but thankfully much less than it used to.

We used to come across it really quite often and it was a very distressing situation for our GPs and nurses to see somebody who to us seemed to be a young person, a minor,

with possibly chronic medical problems, severe psychological distress, and accommodated somewhere with adults, doesn't speak the language, with no supports.