The Daily Mail and General Trust's publication New Scientist has a report in it, here, that the Home Office has commissioned a report on supposed scientific methods to determine someone's age. The "someones" in question are those who come to UK seeking asylum. The UK government has come up with a high-profile scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda while their claims are being dealt with, despite being technically competent to look after people and process their asylum claims in the UK.
One sticking point with the process is that children are not supposed to be sent to Rwanda, but the exact ages of asylum seekers (who are quite possibly without documents) can't be verified by the government, who may doubt the claim of someone to be still a child. Their bright idea, then, is to find ways of accurately determining age, and so a report has been commissioned.
According to the New Scientist story, which includes some details of the yet-unpublished report, one of the methods is in the use of dental X-rays. I'm not qualified to comment on whether any of the physiological measures of age are reliable (but it strongly looks like not) but the idea of giving someone ionizing radiation for a non-therapeutic purpose is totally immoral. Ionising radiation is damaging. It carries a risk of causing damage to the body, which could result in cancer. The effect is small, but giving X-rays is a calculated risk if there is a medical reason for it. In this case, there is no medical reason, simply a political one, and there can be no justification for it at all.
I hope when the report appears that it is not implemented, and that if there is an attempt to implement it, no medical practitioner would agree to do it, but it's bad enough that it's even being thought about.
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