ARE WOMEN BEING BETRAYED IN PRITI PATEL'S OVERHAUL OF THE ASYLUM SYSTEM?
29TH March 2021
Women have been in the news recently due to all the wrong reasons. Murder, rape culture at school, a rise in domestic homicides and now reports that in a bid to overhaul the asylum system, vulnerable women will yet again be the victims.
There have been many articles about this penned in recent days. The one that really moved me was a piece in The Guardian by Natasha Walter (founder of the charity Women for Refugee Women and the author of Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism) headlined "So, Priti Patel, your asylum plans will help women? Let me introduce you to Gloria." It's a deeply moving account of a woman called Gloria from the Democratic Republic of Congo who was gang raped and imprisoned in her home country and upon fleeing with a man she thought she could trust, ended up in London trapped in a flat and forced to have sex with other men.
The immigration debate is loaded, and this article isn't about the rights and wrongs of the government's latest plans to establish formal "routes" into the country; what most concerns me is the setback it presents to vulnerable women who risk facing more time in detention centres and/or not being able to qualify for refugee status if they were trafficked into the country.
This is a horrifying turn of events if these centres do open in the Autumn, as reports have claimed. Most of the women who have been in immigration detention centres are survivors of sexual violence and torture and so locking them up will have a devastating effect on their mental health. A recent statistic I saw from Red Flag Online reported that one in five women reported having tried to kill themselves in detention and 40% reported having self-harmed.
The horrible irony of all of is that the ink is barely dry on the paper when the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, during the Windrush Scandal, said:
“My ambition is to build a fairer, more compassionate Home Office that puts people first and sees the ‘face behind the case’”
I do worry that lessons have not been learnt and whilst many of us can appreciate that the asylum system does require sensible reforms to stop the obvious creaking and illegality, introducing sweeping measures that will spit out tons of (likely female) casualties further down the line, just doesn't seem like the responsible thing to do - even if it means the Home Secretary can tick the box and say job done.
These are women we are talking about who have already been dealt a tough hand and risk mental illness (or worse) through associated physical cues of a life they tried to leave behind.
Could easily have been one of us.