. Identification re ention and reduction o state essness rather than in a hospital, thereby complicating access to birth registration. Even those who were able to acquire nationality as adults continued to pay a psychological toll as a result of their stateless childhoods. Being a child: In addition to denying children their right to education and health, statelessness also threatened the freedom of many to feel secure, to play, to explore – to simply be children. Labelled as outsiders in what they saw as their own country, many had to deal with discrimination from an early age. Some had already lived through experiences that had forced them to grow up far too quickly, such as working from a young age, living in insecure housing arrangements or suffering harassment by the authorities. In more extreme cases, stateless girls and boys were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Employment: Left unresolved, statelessness created new and insurmountable roadblocks for many of the young people moving from adolescence to adulthood. The single most-cited frustration of the young stateless women and men consulted for this report was the lack of jobs that matched their abilities, ambitions and potential. Barriers to education and freedom of movement played a major role in limiting job opportunities and denied many the chance to break previous cycles of poverty and marginalization – the impacts of statelessness being passed from one generation to the next. All the young stateless adults consulted had settled for a life that allowed them to meet their basic needs but fell far short of the future they had imagined for themselves. See UNHCR, I Am Here I Belong, The Urgent Need to End Childhood Statelessness, November 2015, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/wp-content/ uploads/2015-10-StatelessReport_ENG16.pdf 75