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WATCH: What do Australian kids know about refugees?


The question was about where refugees come from. The answers?

“Papua New Guinea?”

“The South Pole?”

“The eastern suburbs.”

It turns out kids don’t know a huge amount about refugees. But what they do know is quite telling.

Three Sydney journalists spoke to 18 kids, aged six to 11, about asylum seekers — and caught it all on tape.

Think: Kids Say The Darnedest Things, but with a social conscience.

Seven-year-old Liam explained that refugees are people who “don’t have a house so they have to go on a boat house.”

Six-year-old Karmel, a Syrian refugee himself, preferred they are people who “run away from evil.”

Pretty spot on, we think.

(Shout out to the seven-year-old girl who managed to mention the Rohingya people.)

The video, created by Amy McNeilage, Heidi Pett and Eryk Bagshaw, is an effort to expand the conversation about refugee policy to the wider community — and what better way to grab attention that with a bunch of cute kids?

Watch the full clip below:

Find out more about the kids and the project at www.kidstalkrefugees.com.

Related content:

“Refugees are scum” social experiment is actually marvellous.

The school principal changing the lives of asylum seeker children.

Shameful: Australia is breaking the United Nations rules on torture.

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Top Comments

p 9 years ago

i note it's only australia that calls migrants 'asylum seekers', 'refugees' or worst, 'boat people.' the rest of the world just calls migrants, migrants. fear-mongering success, persistent international shame.

random dude 9 years ago

That is totally 100% false and incorrect on every level. Almost every nation use these terms as they are actually defined by the UNHCR.

The terms asylum seeker, irregular maritime arrival, economic migrants and refugees all have a very clear UNHCR definition. The UNHCR even have a section which describes how these classifications work if you care to look.

A migrant or immigrant is a totally separate even according to the UNHCR.