Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System
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Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System

Victoria Canning

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Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System

Victoria Canning

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About This Book

Winner of the 2018 British Society of Criminology Book Prize

Britain is often heralded as a country in which the rights and welfare of survivors of conflict and persecution are well embedded, and where the standard of living conditions for those seeking asylum is relatively high. Drawing on a decade of activism and research in the North West of England, this book contends that, on the contrary, conditions are often structurally violent. For survivors of gendered violence, harm inflicted throughout the process of seeking asylum can be intersectional and compound the impacts of previous experiences of violent continuums. The everyday threat of detention and deportation; poor housing and inadequate welfare access; and systemic cuts to domestic and sexual violence support all contribute to a temporal limbo which limits women's personal autonomy and access to basic human rights.

By reflecting on evidence from interviews, focus groups, activist participation and oral history, Gendered Harm and Structural Violence provides a unique insight into the everyday impacts of policy and practice that arguably result in the infliction of further gendered harms on survivors of violence and persecution.

Of interest to students and scholars of criminology, zemiology, sociology, human rights, migration policy, state violence and gender, this book develops on and adds to the expanding literatures around immigration, crimmigration and asylum.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781317520597
Subtopic
Sociology
Edition
1

1 Asylum in Britain (an illusion of sanctuary?)

The aim is to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration.
Prime Minister Theresa May, then Home Secretary (2012, quoted in Kirkup and Winnett, 2012)

Introduction

Hostility towards illegal immigration is nothing new in Britain’s political landscape. The gradual increase in immigration to Britain – in net migration, asylum applications in the 1990s, and immigration from the EU – has firmly placed the ‘immigration debate’ centre stage in public consciousness. As we will see, these have most recently manifested in debates around the control of ‘our borders’ where the EU is concerned. However, illegal immigration seems akin to a heinous crime in contemporary Britain, with employers colluding with the Home Office to catch out ‘illegals’,1 a constant barrage of stories on illegal migration in daily news, and increasingly punitive sanctions for those who enter Britain ‘illegally’. However, as this chapter shows, and as Stumpf (2006) and Weber and Pickering (2011) have argued, migration is not inherently illegal. Instead aspects of mobility have been illegalised, bound within civil and criminal law and increasingly restrictive social policy. Importantly (for this book at least) the same agendas which illegalise migration have not only illegalised the movement of people fleeing poverty and destitution, but also for refugees and those seeking asylum (see Canning, 2016b).
As has been indicated, this book will begin by outlining the political and social context of seeking asylum in Britain. As a first step, this chapter will give an overview of the process of seeking asylum, simultaneously considering the flecks of problems that each step to gaining refugee status carries for those applying. To do this, it will contextualise the current challenges facing ‘Fortress Europe’ and outline Britain’s increasingly punitive approach to border controls. In all it aims to highlight some of the key legislations which have facilitated the limitation of access to the asylum system itself over a period of time.
In doing so, I am acutely aware that readers of this book will come from a spectrum of knowledge bases. Some will know the British asylum system inside-out, some will be vaguely familiar. As such, this chapter offers a broad overview of the asylum system, processes of illegalisation, relevant legislation and welfare considerations. Towards the end, it will set out key developments in responding to women seeking asylum, within both the British context and the wider European narrative. However, it also aims to avoid replicating the many intricate analyses of the social and legal contexts of seeking asylum which are well documented elsewhere and some of which form the basis of this chapter.2 What follows is an overview, before moving to the more empirical aspects of this book in the remaining chapters.

Setting the scene

The legislative regulation of immigration to and from the UK was arguably first established in the Aliens Act of 1905, which embedded border control powers into the Home Office and facilitated the detaining and deportation of immigrants who were not ‘self-sufficient’. Perhaps the first step in deterring poorer migrants and refugees from Britain, this aimed primarily at reducing the intake of poor Jews evading Russian pogroms from the late 1800s. This agenda continued, particularly in the lead up to the Second World War when further restrictions were placed on primary immigration and cases examined individually rather than by persecuted group (see Canning, 2016b).
It was (at least in part) the collective guilt of leading powers across international nations, which had inadequately intervened or appropriately responded to the massacre of Jewish and Roma people, people with disabilities, and Prisoners of War under Nazi occupation, that instigated the development of the International Declaration of Human Rights (1958) and the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The latter of these, termed the Refugee Convention, declared that:
As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
(United Nations, 1951, Article 1, Part 2, subsequent Protocols in 1967)
It is unlikely that this convention will be new to the reader, nor will the agenda of its implementation. The millions of lives lost in the years leading up to and including the Holocaust were hard felt by an international community that had arguably turned a blind eye to impending atrocities. Prevention through sanctuary would become paramount in future times of crisis. Despite this remorse, this would not be the last time that the inactions of many of the same countries – Britain included – would result in the same kinds of gaps of consciousness. If we step four decades forward, the consequences of non-intervention during the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 led to further collective guilt and promises of change. In the aftermath of a war leaving over 20,000 dead on Europe’s doorstep, and a genocide resulting in the deaths of around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, a plethora of United Nation Security Resolutions ensued. While there is no scope to delve into the politics of intervention here (so heavily discussed has it been in international politics) it is fair to say that inaction induced further political regret.
However, intervention in conflict, genocide and war is very different to actively, and legally, deterring the survivors of it. In considering the movement of refugees to safety, the significance of immigration law and border practices become more central to discussing the role of international actors in responding to women, men and children who are persecuted in conflict or under torturous regimes; to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people who are persecuted and face abuse or murder under oppressive governments; and to religious or political opponents who are actively targeted in regions across the world. As political events in the 1980s and 1990s unfolded in Rwanda, Romania, the Former Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Iraq – to name just a few – so too did the British governments’ objectives to reduce access to sanctuary in the UK by outsourcing visa checks, establishing carrier sanctions and introducing restrictions for non-European immigrants (Webber, 2012). By the mid-1990s, a climate of unity across Europe was being established through the introduction of a new and fresh European Union (in 1993), while freer movement for European citizens was being instigated in Luxembourg by the Schengen Agreement,3 through 28 countries. The United Kingdom and Ireland opted to stay out of the Schengen Agreement, instead choosing to regulate their own borders: perhaps a political omen of things to come, for this would not be the last political opt-out by the UK in the name of immigration.

The challenge to fortress Europe

If we step forward again, this time by over two decades to 2017, the shift from positivity and unity to fear and control in Europe has been quite astounding. The death of 2977 civilians in four attacks across the United States on 11 September 2001 gained unprecedented international condemnation and military response. Only now, over 15 years later, are the impacts of 9/11 and the subsequent occupation of Iraq (2003–2011) and the War in Afghanistan (2011–2014) truly visible. Economic destabilisation in parts of the Middle East, infrastructural destruction and political radicalisation are a few of the outcomes of conflict within the countries themselves. Like countries which neighboured Rwanda, the regional implications of conflict have been devastating and include increased unrest, the development of an international Islamic State terror network, and further justifications for countries in the West to inflict airstrikes, drone surveillance and the militarisation of countries in the region. Perhaps most notably, these countries include Syria, a country that has now been in armed conflict since 2011 and holds a death toll of around 250,000, and where almost five million people have been forced to flee.4
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Syria’s conflict stems heavily from autonomous resistance and revolution from within: generations of people who came together to challenge a repressive political system under President Bashar Hafez al-Assad’s dictatorship, in what contributed to the Arab Spring of 2011. However, alongside airstrikes from Assad’s military, the USA, Russia, the UK and France, has been the growth of Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or Da’esh). As this continues to ensue, questions are increasingly raised about the role of Western superpowers in its development, and the role they take to ensure the safety of refugees who flee violence from the region. Consider, for example, that former Prime Minister Tony Blair recently admitted that the occupation of Iraq contributed to the formation of IS. When asked if the Iraq War was ‘the principal cause’ of the rise of Islamic State, he replied that ‘I think there are elements of truth in that’ (in Osley, 2015). Britain – manipulated by Blair’s alliance with George Bush and the Bush administration (see The Iraq Inquiry, 2016) – has arguably played its role in perpetrating violences that have facilitated further violence in regions from which hundreds of thousands of people have now fled.
Drawing this back to Europe, and to echo the sentiments of Michalowski:
National leaders in these countries [in US, European Union and Australia] condemn genocide and war crimes in poor nations while simultaneously deploying strategies of border militarization and internal immigration enforcement that results in deaths, injuries, and dehumanisation for millions of immigrants seeking to escape the ‘severe breakdowns of economic, political and social structures’ resulting from the neoliberal global economic policies of the very nations to which displaced people are now fleeing.
(Michalowski, 2013: 218)
The past five years have seen a movement of people that is akin to numbers mobilising up to and throughout the Second World War. At the time of writing, the surge of refugee numbers into Europe had peaked at around 1,000,573 in 2015 (UNHCR, 2015) and sea arrivals sat at over 204,000 for the first six months of 2016 (IOM, 2016). It has perhaps only been since 2015 that the term ‘refugee crisis’ has been common in public discourse and yet, as border research undertaken by Ruben Andersson (2014), Matthew Carr (2012) and Leanne Weber and Sharon Pickering (2011) all show, the militarisation of ‘Fortress Europe’5 has long been in train. The hopes of fluid borders set out in 1993 have been gradually eroded by increased (and increasingly militant) borders guards, displacement camps, detention centres and wire fencing. Importantly, this was not only started in the aftermath of refugee movements from Syria, as contemporary media commonly suggests.
It is true that there has been significant intensifications of control as numbers increase, and that these are regularly more akin to violence than protection, but the legal narratives and modes to control non-European Union (predominantly non-White) citizens are much more engrained. These have included internal controls to act as deterrents to would-be asylum applicants across Europe. As Weber and Pickering argued before the term ‘refugee crisis’ even took hold:
Across the Global North, governments are increasingly engaged in efforts to reduce the access of illegalized migrants to public services and regulated labour markets. In Europe, Australia and North America, eligibility restrictions on the provision of essential housing, health and education services, and legal sanctions on employers who hire undocumented workers, are being systematically introduced.
(Weber and Pickering, 2011: 112)
Corroborating this from a criminalisation agenda, Dauvergne also points out:
Criminalisation of asylum seeking has been in train since the 1990s and is apparent in provisions such as safe third country agreements, carrier sanctions, visa requirements, safe country of origin requirements, restricted access to welfare benefits, and the imposition of ‘eligibility’ provisions as a precondition of access to domestic asylum systems.
(2013: 76)
At a time when mobility has been made easier than ever for people from rich Northern nations, for poorer demographics, particularly people from the Global South, migration has become increasingly restrictive and significantly more dangerous. Due in part to inequalities in the global distribution of wealth, fewer people are able to travel for leisure, and substantial working restrictions are in place in countries such as the UK, US and Australia. For people from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and South America, travel is further restricted by visa stipulations. Henley and Partners – the self-defined global leaders in residence and citizenship planning – have developed a ‘Visa Restriction Index’ which indicates how many countries citizens can visit without a visa. They found that those from Germany, Finland, Sweden, the USA and the UK are able to travel freely to 174 countries without needing to obtain a visa before entry, whereby citizens from Afghanistan, for example, can only travel to 28 countries visa-free (Pemberton, 2015).

The invisible border

As we will see, controls through legislation and social policy have been more insidious and less visible than the physical barriers set against those fleeing persecution, conflict and poverty. These have included the Dublin, Dublin II and Dublin III Regulations,6 which requires the first country that a person arrives in to take responsibility for their claim for refugee status, meaning they should not attempt to claim in a second country and may be returned to the first European country they arrived in if they do so. Since many people move overland from Middle Eastern or North African regions, this can mean that countries such as Italy and Greece are held responsible for a high number of applicants. Many Northern states have therefore increased restrictions on obtaining a visa, including requiring travellers or migrants to have visas processed prior to entering the country.
This is inevitably very difficult for migrants such as asylum seekers, who may not be able to apply in advance due to circumstances relating to state persecution or conflict. The alternative to legal travel becomes illegalised migration, and the increased criminalisation of immigrants in criminal justice systems. According to Aas and Bosworth (2013: vii), in Europe alone:
rapidly growing foreign populations represent on average 20 per cent of prison inmates, reaching extraordinary highs in countries such as Switzerland (71.4 per cent), Luxembourg (68.8 per cent), Cyprus (58.9 per cent), Greece (57.1 per cent) and Belgium (44.2 per cent).
Importantly, many of those are imprisoned based on immigration policy or legislation violations rather than for violent crimes or other offences.
Table 1.1 Border-related deaths,...

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