Introduction
Asylum support has become a key concept in immigration governance and surveillance in the United Kingdom (UK), with important social, material and gendered effects. Whilst immigration status has long been used to restrict or formally exclude certain migrants from access to housing in the UK, successive legislation has removed access to all public funds and social housing for those seeking asylum. This means that families seeking asylum in the UK are not eligible for mainstream welfare benefits, have no recourse to public funds and as a general rule are not allowed to work. Under the requirements of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, Local Authorities no longer have a duty for meeting the financial support and accommodation needs of those people seeking asylum; this became the obligation of a number of different national government agencies, including the National Asylum Support Service, the Borders and Immigration Agency and more recently UK Visas and Immigration. In previous years, asylum support rates varied according to the asylum claimants’ age and the composition of the family and household; however, since 10 August 2015 a standard rate has applied to all adults and children, which has meant that families with children seeking asylum receive a lower amount of support than previously. Significantly, the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 also introduced the policy of compulsory ‘dispersal’ which meant that only those seeking asylum, who are both destitute and accept being dispersed on a no choice basis outside of London and the South East of England, would receive accommodation. This chapter brings to the centre of discussion the stories of women seeking asylum with their children who were living in asylum accommodation and in receipt of subsistence payments in the UK. The research that forms the basis of the chapter was commissioned by a charity that has pioneered women-centred, gender-specific work for more than three decades in the UK, and is funded by the Nationwide Children’s Research Centre, UK.
Focusing on the subjective and relational nature of stories and storytelling, in this chapter we adopt a feminist narrative approach to understand the way in which mothering identities are constructed through storytelling in the context of asylum. We pay particular attention to the role of asylum support in the stories and how this creates opportunities and challenges to the construction of the mothering role. Whilst the term ‘asylum support’ can encompass a variety of Home Office measures in the UK (such as healthcare, education), we specifically use the term ‘asylum support’ to refer to initial and dispersal asylum accommodation and financial subsistence payments from the UK Home Office that some families receive while waiting to receive a decision on their asylum claim.1 A key concept in immigration governance and surveillance, asylum support has important social, material and gendered effects on women seeking asylum with their children. All of the participants who took part in the research said that asylum support was, or had been, their only means of survival and many of them had spent several years in receipt of asylum support with their children in the UK.
We begin this chapter with an overview of available mothering narratives and the opportunities and challenges they pose for women seeking asylum. We go on to outline why and how stories of mothering are told in the context of asylum support. Centring on the stories of women seeking asylum with children in the UK, we identify two central narratives that shaped the women’s stories: first, narratives of ‘reworking good mothering’, which function to emphasise the mothers’ agency and capacity to make choices in the midst of the disruption, enabling women to speak of their children’s achievements and resilience. This narrative allowed women to construct a positive sense of being a mother and validate their mothering role. Second, narratives of ‘incapacitated mothering’, which serve as a form of protest against the constraints of asylum support. This narrative resists comforting conclusions, emphasising the threats to the mothering role. We finish this chapter by offering some concluding thoughts about the opportunities and challenges of stories of mothering in the context of asylum and of the importance of feminist narrative research.
Storying motherhood and mothering in the context of asylum
Storytelling can enable women to negotiate their roles as mothers (Lockwood, 2017; 2018). The ability to tell recognisable and acceptable mothering stories remains a central feature of motherhood (Miller, 2005; 2017). However, women are not free to tell any mothering story; the articulation of stories is both informed and constrained by the dominant narratives available at the time of telling. Storytellers draw on dominant narratives to tell and shape stories (Woodiwiss, Smith and Lockwood, 2017). These narratives do not simply reflect the world, but are constructed in particular social contexts at particular times. As such, dominant narratives inform both what can and cannot be told of motherhood and mothering (Miller, 2017), not only shaping the stories people tell, but also constraining and enabling certain stories to be told and heard. Serving as a powerful form of social control (Plummer, 2001; Smith, 2017), mothering narratives may be ascribed differently across and within different societies or cultures (Lockwood, Smith and Karpenko-Seccombe, 2019). However, there is a strong expectation to be a ‘good’ mother regardless of how those stories are told or understood (Pederson, 2016). Storytellers may sometimes protect the listener by mediating their story to accommodate what they think the listener can hear or call on the listener to bear witness to their pain and chaos in order to challenge and compel the listener to acknowledge the situations (Frank, 1995). Consequently, the meanings attached to motherhood and mothering are continuously being shaped and emerge within a complex set of hierarchical structural relations.
Feminist researchers and activists have long questioned the historical invisibility of women refugees in policy and research (Canning, 2011; Donato and Gabaccia, 2015; Gedalof, 2007; Hadjukowski-Ahmed, 2009; Holliday and Thibos, 2017; Hunt, 2008), as well as challenging stories of women’s passivity in migration processes and their presumed place in the private spaces of home (Boyd and Grieco, 2003). Scholarship about women who migrate without their children has facilitated diverse understandings of mothering and motherhood, as well as offering important understandings about the practices of caregiving and transnational mothering from a distance (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding, 2007; Bohr and Whitfield, 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 1997; Kofman, 2004). However, much less has been written about women who migrate with their children (Lockwood, Smith and Karpenko-Seccombe, 2019) and in particular, women who seek asylum with their children remain largely absent from much of the existing literature (Smith, 2017). This invisibility arises, in part, from the particularly problematic dominant narrative of the figure of the asylum seeker, which contains much discussion about the single, often young, male (Turner, 2015), whereby women and their children are largely overlooked. Deeply ingrained in the UK national consciousness, the figure of the asylum seeker has been long synonymised with the vagabond, bogus and criminal, as well as the more contemporary notion of terrorist (Nail, 2015; 2016). These stories have given rise to the widespread problematising and vilification of those seeking asylum, which has led to an expansion of border controls and an increasing use of criminal law measures and immigration policies that stigmatise and diminish the rights of those seeking asylum (Gedalof, 2007; Allsopp, Sigona and Phillimore, 2014; Smith and Waite, 2018).
The dominant public and political narrative not only stereotypes and criminalises, but diminishes the lives of those seeking asylum, including women and their children, who are at risk of social exclusion, subject to poor housing, deprivation, disadvantage and poverty in the UK (Hughes and Beirens, 2007; Reacroft, 2008; Smith and Lockwood, 2015).While people seeking asylum await a decision on their claim, they are separated from mainstream welfare provisions and provided with highly conditional and extremely limited support; this excludes most people from basic standards of living and is characterised by poverty, social exclusion and destitution (Gedalof, 2007; Allsopp, Sigona and Phillimore, 2014). Austerity measures in the UK and immigration regimes of regulation and security, along with the privatisation of asylum support, have had devastating social and material effects, particularly on women and their children (Grayson, 2017; Smith and Lockwood, 2015). As such, the construct of asylum and the role of UK policy operates to castigate asylum seekers and increasingly call into question the contemporary mobilities of women seeking asylum, whilst simultaneously marginalising their identities as women with children.
Where there are available narratives about women seeking asylum with their children, they are positioned as troublesome and risky mothers, through stories of their role in ‘backward practices’ (such as forced marriage, gender subordination and domestic violence), as well as being viewed as linguistically isolated, and assumed to have a limited awareness of cultural difference (Gedalof, 2007). Considered to be highly problematic in their struggle to integrate in the UK, women seeking asylum are characterised as finding themselves in situations that are not conducive to ‘fully integrate’ and subsequently being seen as unfit to prepare their children effectively for life in the UK (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2016). As such, women migrants are frequently viewed as mothers of problematic households and reproducers of problematic families. With responsibilities for the next generation of children living in the UK, Gedalof (2007) has noted there is a one-sided burden of integrating in Britain that is firmly placed on women asylum seekers (and other women migrants), with the associated emphasis of ensuring their children integrate too.
Further stories have been nurtured through ‘imperial-feminist’ narratives (Mohanty, 1991), that relocate women seeking asylum as vulnerable victims, predominantly casting women as feminised and infantilised subjects of charity (Freedman, 2008; Kapoor, 2004). These narratives provide explicit expectations that shape women’s roles and identities as mothers, excluding some women from what is considered ‘good’ or ‘normative’ mothering (Lockwood, 2017; 2018). For example, whilst the story of the vulnerable victim can be used to locate women as deserving beneficiaries of protection (Smith and Waite, 2018), some women who seek asylum with their children may find their very victimhood used to construct them as ‘risky’ mothers who are considered to be unable to support or protect their children, or potentially may abandon children they birth as a result of being raped (Mahmood, 2017; World Health Organization, 2000). Furthermore, the popular grouping of women and children together, as they seek asylum from ‘man-made’ abuses and persecutions (Carpenter, 2005; 2013; Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009), potentially reinforces normative mothering practices on women with children, obscuring any detailed understanding about the decisions women make about their children. Indeed, Shuman and Bohmer (2014) suggest that women’s asylum claims have been jeopardised by asylum judges who question women’s credibility on non-conformity to expectations about their children when seeking asylum. Marginalised women often have a belief system imposed upon them that constructs them as central to their child’s wellbeing yet simultaneously constructs them as inadequate for the role (McCormack, 2005). As such, dominant narratives simultaneously shape our understandings of the complex, multi-layered and gendered work of raising children and these narratives can place a heavy burden on those women...
