Safety4Sisters says vulnerable migrant women are being denied their right to safety
The Manchester-based feminist campaign group Safety4Sisters has released a report on migrant women's right to safety.
The 56-page report is available here on the website of the Southall Black Sisters.
Safety4Sisters was established to address the problem of women with no recourse to public funds and their consequent exclusion from the most basic rights of safety and protection. The group set up a Migrant Women's Right to Safety pilot project last year and the report examines the experiences of 61 women helped in the 10 months of the pilot project.
In its report, Safety4Sisters says that the increasingly hostile environment for migrants in the UK means that women who are subject to immigration control and who are also experiencing violence are "penalised, criminalised and framed largely outside of the acknowledged best practice standards for dealing with violence against women and girls and the scope of human rights."
Women with insecure immigration status are said to be "excluded, disadvantaged, and increasingly unpopular," with their existence in society "considered illegitimate, and accordingly the violence against them has been disregarded and their access to justice and safety denied."
The report says the situation is exacerbated by the "decimation" of the specialist women's refuge, and the "ruthless erosion and dismantling" of the legal aid sector, both of which disproportionately affect black and minority ethnic (BME) women.
The report states: "Due to the spectrum and continuum of violence suffered (sometimes in both country of origin, as part of the migrant journey and in the UK), women arrived at our offices in severe distress and intensely fearful. Invariably women had been isolated and socially excluded from support networks, friends and family and crucially from safety and domestic/sexual abuse support organisations. Many women did not speak English and had little knowledge of UK state, legal and community based functions. Some of the women had been trafficked by prostitution gangs with domestic and transnational networks, other as domestic slaves."
Safety4Sisters found that fear of immigration control and the Home Office was a major form of control and coercion that abusers used to continue subjecting migrant women to gender based violence: "Women were mostly terrified of seeking help from authorities for fear of not being believed, being returned to abuse, or of facing destitution or deportation. In many cases women had been told by perpetrators and their extended families that they are not entitled to police protection, access to justice and other emergency services. Many women who had been subject to police violence or indifference in their countries of origin were already fearful of their involvement in their lives. Perpetrators routinely used the woman's insecure immigration status as part of the abuse tactics as a means to prevent them from leaving the abuse, creating a climate of fear and ultimately locking women into the violence. These tactics were not just employed within the UK context but, terrifyingly, had an international reach."
Having no recourse to public funds was found to significantly curtail the women's ability to seeks safety and protection and "heightened the existing sense of terror and fear."
When women did seek help, Safety4Sisters says a recurrent issue that women raised time and again was the impact of not being believed by agencies, particularly by the immigration authorities, a situation that created immense distress and frustration: "It caused considerable psychological distress and women spoke about feeling powerless to influence the might of the Home Office."
"This powerlessness echoed and intensified their experiences of gender based violence. It reiterated the messages employed by violent partners/ families of women; particularly those who had experienced violence in the UK – that no one would believe them, that they had no rights, that no-one cared and that if they spoke about the abuse the state would deport/remove them from the UK," the report continued.
Page 26 of the report looks at access to justice and notes: "Many of the women in the group spoke about their frustration about their cases, legal matters that had not been addressed, partially addressed or poorly dealt with. Due to language issues, lack of knowledge about state and judiciary functions and systems in the UK, trauma and mental health issues, women had often been unable to access legally aid solicitors or they had seen unscrupulous and expensive private solicitors. This created additional poverty and often resulted in poor casework."
In concluding, the report recommends that all agencies, service providers and practitioners who come into contact with migrant women should put the safety and rights of women ahead of immigration enforcement and ensure that insecure immigration status does not bar women from protections and justice.
Safety4Sisters also calls for the reinstatement of legal aid for all victims of domestic abuse.