Caring at the margins: exploring informal care practices for unaccompanied minors in the Dutch asylum system

For unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Europe, the formal care they are offered can be rigid and bureaucratic, lacking the flexibility necessary to adapt the care to their needs. Researchers have documented how some caregivers do 'extra,' self-funded voluntary work, which we call informal care. However, much remains unknown about this informal care happening at the system's margins, what it consists of, and how it is performed. We develop a typology of informal care based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork among 50 caregivers and 22 North African unaccompanied minors in the Netherlands. We describe caring interactions and categorize different caregiving patterns that aim to create trust between caregivers and care receivers (i.e. the minors), helping the youth to regain their dignity. The article demonstrates how informal care fills gaps left by the formal care system and contributes to explaining the diverging outcomes of care for unaccompanied minors.