Women asylum seekers in UK suffer poverty, homelessness

from The Daily Times

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: Women who have fled torture, rape and oppression abroad to seek asylum in Britain often end up destitute and homeless as they struggle with a government system geared up to send them back, writes Louise France in the Guardian.

Salima Sekindi, 37, fled Uganda after she was raped and tortured in front of her children when her husband was arrested for suspected involvement in rebel groups. A business friend of her husband’s paid an agent to take her to Britain six years ago. Her asylum case was rejected, and three times she was taken to the airport to leave, only for the decision to be changed on appeal at the last minute each time. Her destitution in Britain has meant she has often been homeless and hungry, and been exploited again. A man who offered her a room took advantage of her situation and she was raped again. “I had no choice,” she says.

Ivy, 41, fled Malawi five years ago with her daughter following threats of forced marriage to her brother-in-law after the death of her husband. She and her 20-year-old daughter sleep in a friend’s living room, hiding Ivy’s AIDS medicine from the friend, and must survive on a weekly handout from the Red Cross: a kilo of rice, a kilo of semolina, two apples, two potatoes and one bag of sugar. Her application to stay was turned down in 2005.

France writes that while Britain is often portrayed as “deluged with migrants”, the number of people applying for asylum has dropped by 24 percent. Most, according to The Destitution Trap, a recent report by Refugee Action, “arrive here through chance, not choice, and most do not understand what seeking asylum means”. The vast majority of asylum seekers who apply to stay in Britain are rejected.

About a third of all asylum seekers are female, yet campaigners argue that the 1951UN Convention on Refugees does not take into account women’s experiences. It states that “a person may be recognised as a refugee owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. Crucially it misses out the word gender.

Deborah Singer, co-ordinator of the Refugee Women’s Resource Project at Asylum Aid, explains why this is significant: “The convention was written over 50 years ago, during the Cold War, when the classic image of a refugee was a white man crossing over to the west from behind the Iron Curtain. The idea that a refugee might be a black woman from Africa was unheard of.” Thus widely recognised forms of oppression such as rape, or forced marriage, or female genital mutilation are not strictly recognised by the guidelines.

“The sorts of persecution women are fleeing from are the kind a British woman would be protected from,” says Singer. “The criminal justice system has come a long way in treating victims of rape and domestic violence. But if you’re a female asylum seeker looking for the same kind of understanding, you won’t find it.” Many of the women are too scared or shy or traumatised to disclose crimes such as rape. “This is a recognised common pattern among British rape victims,” says Singer, “but these women are expected to talk to an official as soon as they arrive.”

According to Home Office statistics there is a maximum of 283,500 refused asylum seekers in Britain. Unofficial estimates from Amnesty International suggest the figure could be almost double. The New Asylum Model, introduced in April, aims to speed up the process of 90 per cent of applications to six months by 2011. However, there is a substantial backlog of cases and at the current rate of removal it will take at least 14 years to catch up, at a cost of £11,000 per person.

Prior to 2002, asylum seekers were usually barred from working for the first six months while their asylum application was being considered, but after that they could apply for the restriction to be lifted. This is no longer the case. Campaigners suspect that because the government cannot afford to remove all refused asylum seekers it is resorting to making them destitute to get rid of them.

In theory, some refused asylum seekers can obtain ‘Section 4’ shelter and £35 worth of weekly food vouchers - provided they sign up to returning to their countries of origin. In practice, many are not eligible and others choose not to apply for it, seeing it as a ploy to force them to return. Either way, say asylum seekers and charity workers, the support is meagre and hard to access.

Destitution means sleeping in telephone boxes, church porticos, on friends’ floors or on the back seat of the night bus, going hungry or relying on a weekly bag of provisions handed out by charities. Rejected asylum seekers have access to emergency healthcare only, despite the fact that many have illnesses as the result of torture. Some women are handed a bill after giving birth, a bill they have no hope of paying.