‘Passport-style photos are not reliable way to validate kids’ identity at border control’

Passport style photographs are not a reliable way to validate a kid's identity at border control, according to a study which shows that it may be easy for child traffickers to forge documents of infants.

Psychologists presented research participants with pairs of photos, some showing only infant faces and some showing both an infant and an older child's face, and asked them to determine whether the image pair showed the same child or two different children.

For the images of children who were less than a year old, half of the pairs showed the same child while half showed different children. Results demonstrated that, on average, participants made mistakes on 28 per cent of pairs.

"The results of our experiments provide evidence that child facial photographs are ineffective for use in real-world identification situations such as border control or issues of child protection," said Robin Kramer, from University of Lincoln in the UK.

"Our findings suggest that alternative methods of identification should be considered," said Kramer. "While these experiments have demonstrated that, on the whole, it is more difficult to match identities using infant faces rather than adult faces, the next step is to investigate why this is the case and how we might attempt to improve performance for real-world practitioners," he said. Researchers also presented participants with photo pairs where an infant photo was shown with a photo of a child aged between four and five years old.

Half of the pairs showed pictures of the same child while half showed different children. Participants found this task more difficult, getting it wrong on 36 per cent of pairs.