On International Women’s Day, I want to reflect on the particular experiences of women who are subjected to destitution and detention by our hostile immigration and asylum system. Some of the challenges they face are specific to seeking safety. Further, as women seeking asylum battle an unjust system, patriarchy and sexism compound and interact with this.
First, the asylum decision-making process that is warped by a hermeneutic of suspicion. At JRS UK, we work with many people refused asylum and made destitute, only for it to eventually be recognised – years and years later – that they are refugees after all. Many women seeking asylum have experienced gender-based violence and sexual violence, and survivors of this kind of violence are especially impacted by a relentless focus on credibility – that is, a process in which someone is always suspicious that you are lying. In asylum interviews, they can be interrogated as they recount experiences of rape and domestic abuse. The Nationality and Borders Act has raised the standard of proof specifically for deciding whether someone is telling the truth. Among so many problems with this, it has a hugely negative and probably disproportionate impact on women seeking safety from this kind of violence.
If a claim is refused by the Home Office and the courts, all support is cut off and claimants are evicted from asylum accommodation. This is terrifying. One woman told us: “when you are refused asylum, you have nowhere to go, no family. When it happened to me, I slept on the streets.” People refused asylum often live in destitution for years, either sleeping rough perpetually, or couch-surfing in precarious and unsafe scenarios. Malnutrition and food insecurity are prolific, and people suffer long-term damage to mental and physical health. Women forced into destitution are made especially vulnerable. Many have explained to us that abuse is so common when they’re sleeping rough they have just come to expect it as a matter of routine. And then, in a context of couch-surfing, where you are forced to make impossible choices, women are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. As part of recent research, a woman who asked to be known as Joyce explained to us: “For women, it can be even worse because some men take advantage of them because they are vulnerable. They sometimes end up forcing themselves into relationships they don’t want to be in so they have a roof over their heads.”
Many women refused asylum are also detained. Most often, people are detained when routinely reporting to the Home Office. They are given no notice, and this makes the whole experience of reporting terrifying. Most women seeking asylum held in detention are survivors of rape or other kinds of sexual and gender based violence. Detention is hugely damaging to mental health for anyone. It is especially horrendous for people who have undergone previous trauma like this. The system for assessing vulnerability in detention is completely broken. It weighs evidence of vulnerability against evidence of so-called immigration factors, and immigration factors nearly always win. Survivors of gender-based violence, who have already been interrogated in the asylum system, are faced with having to evidence their experience again. Then they remain in detention anyway. Women we work with who have been detained years, even decades, ago talk about how it is still affecting them, it will affect them forever.
Many of the women we work with are eventually recognised as refugees – having gone through all of this. I am struck by their resilience, their courage, and the hope with which they again rebuild their lives. They should not need resilience in a country that is supposed to protect them.
