Self-help against detention and deportation
Globally 60 million people are displaced from their home countries – 80% are women and children. People are forced to emigrate to survive extreme poverty and devastation created by wars, the arms trade and globalization. Many flee persecution and torture by brutal regimes put in place or backed by Western governments and multinationals, which profit while populations starve.
Those who seek asylum in western countries face racism, destitution, detention and deportation. Governments encourage people to blame immigrants and asylum seekers for whatever scarcity of healthcare, education, housing, unemployment they suffer, when it’s military budgets that create asylum seekers and steal resources from us all. The Strike demands freedom of movement. Capital travels freely, why not people?
Over 50% of women seeking asylum have been raped. But the UN Convention on Refugees does not recognize the specific torture women face. Survivors find it hard to speak about sexual violence; when they do they are disbelieved or their rape is dismissed as “sexual lust”. Even those who escape after being trafficked are thrown into prison and deported. Many are detained for months, some with children conceived as a result of rape.
In London, a number of organizations at the Crossroads Women’s Centre have been defending the rights of asylum seekers, pressing for rape to be recognized as torture and therefore grounds for asylum, for justice for rape survivors and an end to detention. We refuse to be divided from one another. With the support of Legal Action for Women (LAW), the Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women Against Rape, asylum seekers have formed a self-help group. The All African Women’s Group, provides daily support to women in detention and fight for each to win the right to stay.
“In Africa we struggled for survival and change. Some of us were in prison for years because of our political activity. Many of us have been raped by soldiers or forced to sell our bodies in exchange for being released.
“We need food, housing, medicine. These are political demands, and what we all need, because if women are safe, the whole world is safe. Is politics not about changing the world so that we all get what we need? We women are not less political, but our politics are often more practical and concrete. We don’t like abstractions, we like words and actions that speak about our situation and struggle for survival and justice. We are tired of men living off our hard work and then telling us that they are more political than we are.”
NGOs created to defend human rights are now funded by the Home Office, and collaborating with detention and deportation. Lawyers are profiteering, and hospitals refusing treatment.
In July 2005, LAW produced A Self-Help Guide against Detention and Deportation. Calls from detention flooded in, including from women on hunger strike. Some church people and professionals (doctors, lawyers, social workers) are backing asylum seekers and reporting the horrendous conditions in detention – sexual intimidation from guards, lack of health care, inedible food. Through hard work, many have won the right to stay, and some are now helping others.