Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015)

This article was first published in 2015.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which is the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in the capital and includes their testimonies alongside my own account. The publisher's page is here and the Amazon UK page is here.

My latest essay on this issue is called Changing Tides and was published by Counterpoint Arts and English PEN. For Books' Sake have already given Asylum and Exile an attentive and very generous 5 star review which can be read here and there has also been some great press in Nose In A Book, a long interview in Asian Culture Vulture, another for The Festival of Ideas and another in The Heroine Collective. I've covered the project in a recent Guardian article headlined I want to give asylum seekers in Britain a chance to tell their own story; two essays for Wasafiri which can be read here and two essays for the Free Word's Briefing Notes series, called Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre and The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain. I've also discussed the issues in my introduction to Big Writing for A Small World (Scribd copy of English PEN publication) and the articles Rape, refusal, denial, detention: refugees dancing at the edge of the world and Asylum: no woman should be missed out. English PEN have written up the debate at one of my events on this issue in a wonderful piece here and The Nation have written an article on my work called 'I came to you for help and you treated me like a prisoner'.

Asylum and Exile follows the publication, in May 2012, of my fourth book Beyond the Wall. An extensive selection of 2012 and 2013 interviews and press can be found here and a March 2014 interview by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore can be found here. 

press release

I see books like Asylum and Exile as evidence of a deep seated refusal to tolerate the divisive politics that extend right across the political divide. Well done for speaking up and bearing witness. We must never stop telling the stories of those we consign to the margins.

Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council

It’s a little book, but in its pages it manages to be wide in scope yet intimate, funny, warm, sad and horrifying. ...Asylum and Exile is a 4 star read, with an additional star because it’s so fundamentally important. 

Jennie Gillions, For Books' Sake

The result of Bidisha’s outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers since 2012, Asylum and Exile goes behind the stereotypes and scare stories to reveal the humanity, tragedy and bravery – and frequently the humour – of the individuals who’ve left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence.

The men and women Bidisha worked with were of all ages from 19 to their late 60s. All had fled war, persecution, extreme poverty and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Some had been in the UK for months, others for more than a decade. All spoke at least two languages. Among them were mathematicians and criminologists, soldiers, students and teachers: the man who had lectured in Persian music at Tehran university and now works in the freezer room of a sandwich factory; the woman who had been a teacher but was asked, when she arrived in England, if she knew how to turn on a light switch; the woman who became a manager in an English company only to be pulled out by police in front of her colleagues and imprisoned, who loves her red dancing shoes above all her other possessions.

In England, with no money, no access to public funds and no papers authorising them to work they labour illegally as cleaners, factory workers, dishwashers, care assistants and in other unstable, unseen, underpaid and gruelling roles. Many have bounced between prison and detention centres. Their London life is one of trying to survive on five pounds a day, of interminable bus journeys across the capital, appointments with legal aid workers and reliance on near strangers to get a foothold on life in the city with little or no support. Despite this, their unerring vivacity, talent and will to survive are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. 

Asylum and Exile comes out at a time when immigration is one of the most passionately debated issues around, with a rise in anti-immigration, anti-asylum rhetoric both in the UK and elsewhere, particularly in western Europe and Australia. Asylum seekers and refugees are being argued over, demonised, scapegoated and disbelieved – or patronised and advocated for in heart-wrenching yet generalised terms – but are almost never given a chance to speak in their own words about their own lives. Bidisha gives space to their testimonies, which are by turns shocking, moving and hilarious. She gained rare access and was met with such trust and frankness that Asylum and Exile stands as a unique document|: an accessible, uplifting and humane book whose stories are as buoyant, noisy, confrontational and diverse as Bidisha’s classroom itself.

Poster greeting arrivals at Praxis

The outreach sessions were co-ordinated by the literary and human rights charity English PEN with the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria and Praxis in Bethnal Green. Asylum and Exile began in the unheated rooms of severely underfunded charities in London. Yet its narratives and characters cross the globe, reflecting the consequences of some of the world’s most violent conflicts and fragile states. Stereotypes and generalisations disintegrate and what emerge are the stoical spirits, vital personalities, inner strength and defiant intelligence of the individuals themselves. The book is not an academic tract or a fierce polemic but a humane account based on personal stories expressed in idiosyncratic voices, not clichés from a newspaper. Asylum and Exile is a tribute to the honesty of raw experience, the power of personal testimony and the ability of the spoken word of truth to transform both the teller and the listener.

The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain

This essay was first published by the Free Word for its Briefing Notes series, pegged to my book Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London. 

Bodies in boats. Grateful, half-drowned people wrapped in blankets. Women dying of suffocation under plastic packages in long distance goods lorries while traffickers pocket their savings. Gangs of organised criminals terrorising Britain. Impoverished, illiterate moochers living off the state, filling up hospitals. Detainees being abused horribly by staff in UK detention centres like Yarl’s Wood.

Those are the images and horror stories that stifle any meaningful investigation into what it’s like as a human being with a name and a face, a life and a past, trying to survive as an asylum seeker in Britain. Some of the stories invite our pity, others are designed to attract our hatred and suspicion. None of them represent asylum seekers as complex, distinct individuals. The nastiest clichés are promulgated by some of the most powerful and pervasive forces in society — the media and politicians of all stripes — against those who have the least power and visibility and are concerned more with basic survival than gaining votes or readers.

Politicians both marginal and mainstream hustle for public support by fear-mongering and fudging, making sweeping statements about foreigners who they say are criminals, advantage-takers, callous and opportunistic illegals, troublemakers who do not know how to behave, who import regressive values, who refuse to learn new languages and muck up residential streets with their garbage. The stereotypes go unchallenged because those with the loudest voices and the greatest number of vested interests are shouting above (and about) those who have no public voice. The clichés pander to pre-existing prejudices about foreigners, incomers, the dangerous and malign ‘other’ who will take and sully. Nobody bothers to try and get to the truth because, at the end of the day, the people being slandered are largely invisible to them, being bounced between detention and prison, living near-destitute or with the meagre support of charities or working off the books in factories, building sites or cleaning firms.

An asylum seeker is an individual who is petitioning to be formally recognised as a refugee. Once recognised, refugees gain certain very basic and minimal rights to protection and support by the state, but that is only the beginning of a long journey towards starting a full and dignified life and establishing a support network, stable housing, employment or education in a completely new country. At the moment the situation, as described to me by the CEO of a major refugees’ charity, is “Fortress Europe”: there is a culture of systematic rejection of asylum seekers, of denial and disbelief of their stories (particularly women asylum seekers who have survived rape and other sexual torture), of brutally enforced deportation or detention in hellish incarceration complexes where detainees have even fewer rights than convicted prisoners. The most sinister place I’ve ever visited was a UK detention centre, which had more rolls of barbed wire around it than any prison and whose staff were universally angry and hostile.

Meanwhile, myths about asylum abound, the most pernicious one being that the number of asylum seekers is intolerably high, that most asylum claims are false and that the country is ‘full’ and can’t take any more. In continental western Europe boats have been refused permission to dock. Australia actually seems proud to advertise its antipathy towards asylum seekers, warning that anyone who tries to enter by sea and runs into difficulties will not be saved. I am shocked, as ever, by the sheer cruelty, the inability to see asylum seekers as human beings, the indifference about whether they live or die and the failure to imagine what these people must have experienced in their home countries, what they lived through which made them think that anything — even the prospect of drowning in a dinghy in a foreign sea — was better than that.

Three years ago, enabled by English PEN, I began doing outreach work in the form of writing workshops with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants from all over the world from Syria and Iran to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Malawi and Uganda. These experiences inspired my latest book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London, which features my students’ testimonies. I came to the conclusion that all the tabloid journalists, pundits and political bigmouths who rage against asylum seekers must never have met one. As I listened to my students’ experiences, read their writing and let myself be teased, mocked and berated by them it struck me that here were the warmest, funniest, most interesting people in the world, who had gone through unimaginable things: a man in Timbuktu witnessing a neighbour being disembowelled by an armed rebel as a warning to the other villagers; a woman who had been raped by rebels and then thrown out by her family because of it. “Please believe us,” said one woman to me, “if we go back to our countries they will rape us and kill us. Our leaders don’t care anything about us, only oil and minerals and power and money.” There was Claude, from the Congo, who had a degree in criminology and was forever ingratiating himself with the ladies — “Hello auntie, you know I am always pleased to see you. Can I get you some tea?” There was Manny, formerly a composer and professor of classical Persian music at Tehran University, who does odd days in a sandwich factory, in the freezer room, where people constantly fall ill from the cold but will be replaced if they miss a day of work. And there was Beatrice, who wants to be a writer and who described to me how, in England, it was assumed by many that she didn’t know how to read or write, turn on a light switch or wash her hands after using the bathroom. “I don’t say anything,” she said, “because I don’t want to offend them.”

Meanwhile, the country is being run by a club of white men who went to posh school and posh university and have experienced nothing of the real world: its diversity, its hardships, its chaos and violence. They decide on domestic and foreign policy, wars and aid money, arms deals and the euphemistic ‘austerity’ measures which have cut legal aid, public services, social services and charities’ budgets at the knees and directly imperilled so many people’s wellbeing including that of my students. They sit in their heated rooms in their expensive clothes, eating good food and drinking good coffee (all things which are out of the reach of my students), as they decide these things. They do not live with the physical consequences of their own policies, only the political consequences which affect their careers.

As the months progressed I felt ever more strongly the irony of being in a country where the most interesting people are the least heard, while those who are the most ignorant speak with the greatest volume and entitlement, making decisions in the full confidence that they will never have to experience the results.

Not every asylum seeker arrives dumped on a shoreline, barefoot, penniless and wrapped in a foil blanket. All my students arrived by plane. They fled international and civil war, fragile states in which law and order had broken down, extreme poverty and political persecution. Many of my students had been bounced between detention and prison or left in limbo for years between being refused leave to remain — that wonderfully Alice in Wonderland phrase which would grant them the right to stay in the UK — and receiving the final letter ordering them to get on the next plane.

One woman told me that she spoke such good English because her parents, who had been political figures, were repeatedly exiled abroad due to their work. All my students spoke at least two languages fluently and, like all people of a migrant background including myself, learnt new ones quickly. All were educated to last-year-of-school level and the overwhelming majority were educated to college level and beyond. Every single one wanted to work because while not all work gives dignity or an identity to be proud of, it gives a little money, it takes up time, it uses up energy, it involves other people, it gives a shape to the day. But asylum seekers have no right to any public money or services, no right to be housed or to work. So they labour as cleaners, packers, building site hands, relying on this shady, unreliable and exploited labour in which (one building site worker told me) a boss can promise money and then withhold it for days, or renege on an agreement and under-pay.

There is a crisis in the issue of asylum because there has been a crisis in world governance, war and conflict, poverty and inequality, which is not some accident but is the fault of violent perpetrators (whether renegade militia or rebels or national armies), selfish rulers, uncaring commercial interests, greedy power-holders and opportunistic political players. It is not the fault of the millions of asylum seekers and refugees who are fleeing the consequences of such parties’ actions. It is the nastiest kind of cynicism to scapegoat asylum seekers by saying that their testimonies are lies (or, to quote what the Home Office staff said to several of my students, “This is all just a fairytale you’ve made up,”) and that they have left everything behind, their identity, their life, their family, to take advantage of a foreign country.

Every asylum seeker I worked with was desperate to contribute, to feel like a part of society, to be seen as a person with something to offer, to not be invisible. Politicians at all points on the spectrum exploit the electorate’s fear, racism, insularity or simple lack of knowledge about the reality of asylum and there is no politician of any party who has dared to stand up and set the record straight about the numbers of asylum seekers in the UK, what they left behind and how they are treated here. It is as though asylum seekers’ stories begin the moment they arrive in a country and nobody bothers to ask what they have escaped.

Every human being has a personality, a social context and a past which make them who they are; but asylum seekers are not seen as human beings, so nobody is interested in those things. This is a failure, not of policy, but of common decency: the inability to see others as people just like ourselves. All it would take for prejudices to be broken down would be for politicians, the media and the public to stop shouting in fear and start listening with respect.

Asylum: no woman should be missed out

A few weeks ago I wrote a long feature entitled Rape, refusal, destitution, denial: dancing at the edges of the world, about my experience working with asylum seekers' and refugees' centres in London and describing some of the incredible work of Natasha Walter's charity Women For Refugee Women. In particular, WFRW highlighted the experiences of rape and other forms of gendered violence survived by a number of female asylum seekers who had been refused asylum in the UK. You can read the full feature here.

I have now been contacted by another amazing and important charity, Asylum Aid, whose new campaign No Woman Should Be Missed Out calls for far more detailed commitments to protect the safety of women seeking asylum in the UK. The following text is from their press release.

No Woman Should Be Missed Out is particularly timely given that in November the government is due to report on the progress of its Strategy to End Violence Against Women and Girls. The strategy was published shortly after the coalition came to power and promised work across government departments to address the causes and consequences of violence against women, providing “cohesive and comprehensive” action in the UK and overseas. Asylum Aid say it "dedicates just one, heavily-qualified sentence to the needs of women seeking asylum."

Debora Singer, Policy and Research Manager at Asylum Aid, said:

The government’s Violence Against Women and Girls strategy provides a vision of how women’s basic rights should be protected in modern Britain and around the world. So it is absurd that thousands of women each year on our doorstep are largely missed out.

Documents like this one help decide policy priorities and how to allocate funds. We see women who have fled from rape and sexual violence overseas and claimed asylum, yet end up destitute on our streets and in danger of yet more abuse.

We aren’t asking for special treatment – just the same rights as everyone else. These women cannot be missed out from government thinking.

 

NOTES:

• Asylum Aid is a registered charity that provides free legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and campaigns for their fair treatment in the UK. The Women’s Project at Asylum Aid provides legal advice specifically for women asylum seekers, backed up by a programme of research, advocacy, outreach and training.
• You can read more about Missed Out here.
• The Charter of Rights of Women Seeking Asylum is co-ordinated by Asylum Aid, and has been endorsed by more than 300 organisations including Oxfam, Liberty and Amnesty International. The previous campaign launched under the Charter was Every Single Woman in 2009.
• The government’s Call to End Violence Against Women and Girls was published in November 2010, and can be downloaded here.

Rape, refusal, destitution, denial: refugees dancing at the edge of the world

Earlier this year I spent several months doing outreach work in migrants’, refugees’ and asylum seekers’ centres in London, in association with English PEN. My students were male and female, aged from twenty to over sixty, from Uganda, Cameroon, Iran, the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and beyond. I have never met such garrulous, anarchic people. They introduced me to the useful concept of ‘international time’: lateness of anything up to 45 minutes is permissible and any chagrin on the part of the teacher is caused by grave cultural misunderstandings relating to unnecessarily rigid Anglo Saxon scheduling methods – although once, when I myself was late to turn up, I was collared by a student (literally) and dragged ruefully up the stairs into the room while the student declared with great glee, “I found Teacher on the street! And she was running!”  The class teased, argued, encouraged, remonstrated and back-slapped, trading jokes across the classroom. I taught them little but laughed a lot, in between being jovially bullied, teased and exhorted to talk about something useful, explain why ‘Van Gogh’ and ‘cough’ were pronounced similarly but ‘cough’, ‘through’, ‘rough’ and ‘slough’ were all pronounced differently from each other, intercede with various authorities on their behalf and contact the Home Office with a testimony of their ardent desire to be granted leave to stay, to work, to learn, to teach, to participate fairly and equally in British society and to help others in a similar position navigate life in a new, uncomprehending and sometimes incomprehensible country.

Yet close beneath the students’ good humour were countless experiences of brutality, which their high-spirited conversation and patient writing exercises occasionally hinted at. I had been counselled in advance not to use any journalistic cunning to coerce these women and men for their ‘stories’. The students were there for writing and composition classes. They were not to be used to elicit exciting narratives, unlocked through guile or coercion under the pretence of rightful concern, then enjoyed for the vicarious, exotic thrill they provided. They warned me themselves that if I were to ask what brought them to the UK, “You will have nightmares.” They did not want to talk about the persecution, civil and cross-border wars, terrorisation, corruption and violence that caused them to risk everything, yield all that was familiar and beloved and leave their lives and identities behind: homes, jobs, histories, studies, parents and siblings, children.

Despite their determination to focus on survival in the present, hints about their previous lives crept through as the sessions continued. As we gained each other’s trust, I learned more about the many places in the world that are unstable with violence, poisoned by corruption, soaked in spilt blood, tormented by trauma, betrayed and exploited (or split into warring factions) by their own rulers, intimidated by aggressors and divided by countless inequalities and abuses. I saw the effect on ordinary people, not rulers, not activists, certainly not the high elite or the privileged, and the way environments of extreme danger and violence had forced each of these people to act with unimaginable bravery in leaving. They had to change their lives in every way, in an attempt to save their lives. I have written an account of those revealing and transformative months, composed with my students’ blessing and featuring some of their own testimonies, and it will be published in a forthcoming book, to be announced next year.

I also learned about strength, survival and resistance from the asylum seekers, refugees, displaced and undocumented people I worked with. In many cases, their treatment in the UK matched their mistreatment in their home countries, with the cruel addition that their testimonies were dismissed as lies. The majority of my students had not been granted indefinite leave to stay, permission to work or study, the provision of stable housing or any sustainable means of support. Some were caught in a years-long limbo, awaiting a final decision on their status from the Home Office. Others were or had been homeless. Many had been refused permission to stay and were awaiting deportation. Many were living on the kindness of friends and near-strangers, walking for miles (or taking interminable bus journeys) from the further parts of Greater London to reach my classes, living on five pounds or less a day. Many were working illegally and in exploitative, sometimes dangerous, unstable and heavily underpaid conditions as factory labourers, unskilled building site workers, cleaners and casual help. Many had been persecuted, prosecuted, incarcerated in prisons and detention centres, bullied and harassed by officials of various kinds. All were intelligent, politicised, professional, multi-lingual. Many were educated to college or university level. All wanted to work legitimately – in fact, they were desperate to do so. All were affected mentally and physically by the small, crushing humiliations, degradations, frustrations and limitations of daily life in a society that did not see them, help them, acknowledge them, respect them, listen to them or believe them. The class of twenty roared with laughter and recognition when one man described his Home Office interview, when his account of what he had witnessed and experienced in the Congo was met the with words, “Everything you’re telling me is [….the whole class chimed in…] a story you’ve just made up.”

While all spoke about the violence they had witnessed, many of the women approached me during breaks in my teaching sessions and talked specifically about the additional issue of gendered brutality. “If we go back they will take us and rape us and kill us. Please believe me, I am telling the truth,” said one.

I did believe her. I do believe her, as I believe all survivors of sexual violence, violation and abuse. But so often the Home Office does not. The disbelieving of survivors of gendered brutality is endemic all over the world, in all societies in all hemispheres, in peacetime and wartime, crossing cultures, languages, religions and regimes. The denial of victims’ testimonies is as ubiquitous as the violence itself, and is part of it and reinforces and redoubles it. To deny victims is to support perpetrators, to aid perpetrators and to tacitly promise all perpetrators that they can continue to rape and abuse women with impunity.

Now the charity Women for Refugee Women has released Refused, a major research project which uncovers extremely disturbing evidence about the treatment of women seeking asylum in the UK and the gendered violence they have been subjected to before their arrival here. It casts a critical light on the Home Office’s treatment of these women, which represents in intensified and concentrated form the attitudes always brought to bear upon sexual violence survivors in all contexts. The consequences of victim-denying in this specific case, however, are even more severe than is usual.

The following factual material is taken from Women for Refugee Women’s full report, Refused, and from the report summary. The research was carried out by Women for Refugee Women, Women Asylum Seekers Together (WAST) London, WAST Manchester, Women Seeking Sanctuary Advocacy Group Cardiff, Embrace in Stoke on Trent, Bradford Refugee & Asylum Seeker Stories, the Women’s Group at the Young Asylum Seeker Support Service in Newport and the Refugee Women’s Strategy Group in Glasgow.

Along with other countries, the UK has made a commitment to give asylum to those fleeing persecution if their own state cannot protect them. Refused explores the experiences of 72 women who have sought asylum in the UK.

• 49% had experienced arrest or imprisonment as part of the experiences they were fleeing
• 66% had experienced gender-related persecution, including sexual violence, forced marriage, and female genital mutilation.
• 52% had experienced violence from soldiers, police or prison guards
• 32% had been raped by soldiers, police or prison guards
• 21% had been raped by their husband, family member or someone else
• Others were fleeing forced marriage, forced prostitution and female genital mutilation
• Altogether, 66% had experienced some kind of gender-related persecution and 48% had experienced rape

Almost all these women (67 out of 72) had been refused asylum.

• Of these, 75% said that they had not been believed
• 67% had then been made destitute (left without any means of support or accommodation)
• 25% had then been detained.
• Not a single woman felt able to contemplate returning to their country of origin.

The consequences for these women were severe:

• Of those who had been made destitute, 96% relied on charities for food and 56% had been forced to sleep outside.
• 16% had been subjected to sexual violence while destitute and a similar number had worked unpaid for food or shelter.
• One woman said, “I was forced to sleep with men for me to have accommodation and food. I was forced to go and be a prostitute for me to survive.”
• When asked what they felt about being refused asylum, 97% said they were
• Depressed, 93% were scared and 63% said they had thought about killing themselves.

One woman said, “They kill me already. I feel like the walking dead.”

The director of Women for Refugee Women, writer Natasha Walter, highlights the failure of the government to respond to the needs of survivors of gender-based violence "who have survived rape and abuse [and] are refused asylum and experience destitution, detention and despair in this country.”

Debora Singer, Policy and Research Manager at Asylum Aid, said: “The harrowing stories told in Refused are a crucial reminder of how often women are failed by our asylum system. These are women fleeing unspeakable violence, yet they are routinely let down when they turn to the UK for help.” She added, “Women are routinely, arbitrarily disbelieved by officials when they explain what has happened to them. We know that women are more likely than men to see asylum decisions overturned on appeal, so woeful is Home Office decision-making. And we know that the government hasn’t honoured its promise to introduce meaningful gender-sensitive reforms. As a result, women are left destitute on our streets, exposed to exploitation and abuse. The whole system desperately needs reform, and it needs it now.”


The reform of the asylum process and the issues it raises must not be hijacked by the tabloid press, by fear, by racism and xenophobia, by reductive thinking, by generalisation, by meaningless rhetoric or by ignorance. In order to create a progressive, just and peaceful world society campaigners, politicians and leaders must publicly challenge the poisonous myths (about sexual violence, about race and culture and about immigration) which keep inequality in place and support abusive, cruel and inhumane practices.

The report advocates several measures including ministerial leadership and influence in challenging the Home Office culture of disbelief; improvements in the quality of asylum decision-making by everyone up to judge level, through training, guidance and consciousness raising about the nature and impact of gender-related persecution; access to free quality legal advice and representation for all asylum seekers; a ceasing of the destitution of those refused asylum; granting asylum seekers permission to work if their case has not been resolved within six months or they have been refused but temporarily cannot be returned through no fault of their own; welfare support for all asylum seekers who need it, until the point of return or integration.

The report states:

The numbers of people entering the UK to claim asylum are not large. Many of the women who come here to seek refuge have fled persecution that we would struggle to imagine, and are desperate to find safety. It is time that we built a just and humane asylum process, in order to give every woman who comes to this country fleeing persecution a fair hearing and a chance to rebuild her life.

Women for Women International, in association with many other groups focused on the rights and welfare of asylum seekers, asks the government to heed the findings in Refused, note the upsurge in campaigning and concern around the issue and reform the asylum process in such a way that women are respectfully heard, understood by informed and enlightened listeners, believed and then treated with humanity and dignity. These women (and also their brothers, fathers, sons) are victims, not perpetrators; survivors, not criminals; refugees and escapees, not parasites and exploiters.

A criticism of asylum seekers is that they want something for free. I agree with that. They demand an awful lot which is free: kindness, basic humanity, faith and trust. And they deserve to be given it.

Notes and links:

• Women for Women International have produced a short film which summarises the issues in Refused. Click here to view it.
• The foreword to Refused has been written by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC and the report launch was hosted by Baroness Joan Bakewell at the House of Lords late last month.
• Novelist Esther Freud has written an interview with a refugee woman for Refused, while Livia Firth, Mariella Frostrup, Oona King and Juliet Stevenson have recorded filmed messages of support.
• The Times featured the story of Saron, a refugee from Ethiopia who had been imprisoned, raped and tortured in her home country, but who was refused asylum in the UK
• Natasha Walter spoke on Woman's Hour on Radio 4 with a woman who fled Ethiopia after she was imprisoned and beaten.
• Comedian and campaigner Kate Smurthwaite wrote about the issue in The Independent.
• There was further coverage by Sky News, MSN, The Scotsman, ITV, The Huffington Post, Belfast Telegraph and Mumsnet.
• Women for Refugee Women enables women refugees themselves to speak out. Find out about Journeys, which tells the story of Saron and Alicia, who were refused asylum, detained and threatened with deportation; Motherland, which tells the stories of women and children detained at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre; and the Break the Silence event which showcased Lydia Besong’s play How I Became an Asylum Seeker.
• Finally let me express my admiration for Natasha Walter, who not only talks the talk and writes the rights, she also rights the wrongs and walks the walk.