Holding hands in the dark
Protests outside asylum hotels; calls in the national media to “stop the boats”; a polarisation of national discourse, headlines sometimes more for clickbait than facts. What is the real story of refugees and asylum seekers in our county? We asked Sushila Dhall of local charity Refugee Resource to tell us more.
Imagine if you unexpectedly, today, had to leave home and this country, and all your loved ones.
Bear in mind that this means also losing access to healthcare, your qualifications, language, mealtimes and familiar foods, work or study routine, clothing, comforts and familiarity in all its forms. Imagine if you did not know where you are going and have to seek safety in a foreign country, but also have to prove that you were not safe in your country.
This is what is required of each of the 250 or so people in Oxford’s asylum hotels. Sometimes people are in this situation because they spoke up against an oppressive regime, sometimes because they accepted or distributed a leaflet, sometimes because they are part of an ethnic or religious minority group, or are gay or trans or under threat of FGM. Sometimes societies collapse or become toxic, or civil war erupts, or war with another country starts. Some people are members of a persecuted minority group in their country.
Nobody leaves everything that is familiar because they want to live in poverty, on benefits in a country that is cold and wet, and where they may not be allowed to put down roots. The asylum seekers who have been placed in Oxfordshire’s hotels by the Home Office are all legally here – it is not illegal to apply for asylum in the UK. They make up just 0.06% of the county's population. To hear the rhetoric from the far right you would think there were many more asylum seekers than this, all of them criminals and none wanting to work. The reality is completely different.
Who are Refugee Resource?
Refugee Resource is a therapeutic charity to which people come, often having been referred by the NHS, to be supported to regain a sense of themselves after losing everything.
Our team of highly trained therapists and frontline workers see people who very much want to work but are not allowed to, and who therefore live in dire poverty and without any choice about where or how to live. We see mothers, fathers, sons and daughters torn from their nearest and dearest and ill with fear, traumatisation, and anxiety about the future and the safety of loved ones. We see them learn to speak good English within a few months, and taking on voluntary work as they are not allowed to do paid work. Asylum seekers are not allowed to claim benefits and those in hotels are given £9 per week to live on, barely enough for bus fares or sanitary towels.
To help people feel human again we need to bear with them the experiences they have undergone. People get traumatised in their countries of origin, on the long and uncertain journeys to the UK, and in the UK itself. So many people suffer multiple traumas, and now have to live with severe anxiety and uncertainty, for their own futures and for the lives of loved ones in other places. I call this work “holding hands in the dark” because that is what helps people to heal. People do not heal through trying to be positive, or not thinking about terrible aspects of their lives – that approach only leads to symptoms such as being unable to sleep or eat, unable to trust people or go out, and reliving terrible events repeatedly.
Ultimately, our work is to help people process the extreme loss and traumatisation they have endured, and to support them in building new lives in the UK. This work is not easy. The things we hear, the atrocities which are committed by people towards fellow humans, leave us changed forever.
This difficult work is further undermined by people who target asylum seekers. When aggressive people chant outside asylum seekers’ accommodation, this triggers traumatic memories of being targeted in their country of origin and makes suicide far more likely. Our staff has been threatened by the far right with being killed for the work that we do. Imagine getting an email like that in your inbox at work. Yet we cannot stop our work in the face of this because what we do is urgent and vital.
Legal limbo, and a culture of denial
With the severe reduction in Legal Aid over 14 years of Conservative rule, many asylum seekers cannot get legal help with their applications – though this type of help is crucial in these cases. When people go through very traumatic loss it makes them extremely ill, which means that when they are quizzed about details of what happened in court, they fall apart and cannot give a coherent account of what happened. This is very human; we would all be like this in similar circumstances.
The Hostile Environment policy in the Home Office, set in place by Theresa May in 2012 when she was Home Secretary, has created a ‘culture of denial’ where people have to prove that (for example) they are gay, or were raped and tortured, or family members were hanged. If they cannot prove what they are saying, their asylum claims are easily denied on grounds of “lacking credibility”. We have indeed seen claims being refused because a person did not know how long she lay unmoving under the dead bodies of her close family members, or because dislocated fingers, caused by torture, “could have been caused by heavy sports activities”.
Once a person’s claim has failed, they can often appeal. But appeals can take years and even decades to be resolved, during which time an applicant is unable to work. Under this stress, many become suicidal. There is no time limit for the resolution of asylum claims in the Home Office.
Another manifestation of the hostile environment is age assessments. Young people are routinely ‘age assessed’. At Refugee Resource we have frequently seen traumatised children, aged 15 or 16, told they are anything between 19 and 35 – because they look old and exhausted, and do not behave like most British children (that is, playfully and naively). Assessing a person as being over 18 years of age means they have no right to care, protection, or education.
Inequality
Let’s take a step back for a moment.
There are undoubtedly serious issues of inequality in the UK. Many people are living homeless or insecurely housed, in damp, exploitative or substandard accommodation. Many people have no job security, or are too ill to work, or are exploited in zero-hour contractual work. UK benefits systems can also suffer this ‘culture of denial’, and too often people are made to do without meeting their basic needs due to this overly punitive culture.
When people are deprived and feel powerless to change anything, it can be a relief to be told that a more vulnerable group is to blame and are the enemy, that it is ok to be angry and even violent towards them. This is an old trick – turn deprived people against one another, rather than allow them to focus on society’s severe inequalities. Asylum seekers are easily demonised as they already have few rights, cannot always understand what they are being accused of, and many are already traumatised and ill. All asylum seekers are very vulnerable because of their circumstances.
We are all human
Ultimately though, the UK is stronger for being diverse and mixed. The NHS could not function without overseas workers. Our films, music, foods, and language are enriched by this diversity. Many of our clients go on to work in care or healthcare because when people have deeply suffered, it makes the suffering more meaningful if that suffering is allowed to become empathy, and work can be done to alleviate or prevent suffering in others. We all have a need for our lives to make sense in some way.
We are all human, and have much more in common than divides us. We need to stand together, wherever we are from, and face the threats of inequality and climate change that threaten all of us, and not allow ourselves to be divided by people who would make us think the problems and the solutions are simply a matter of getting rid of people with darker skins who flee to the UK hoping for justice. We have to be better than this and need to stand together, and not allow ourselves to be divided.
Although we have been doing our work in Oxford for 27 years, and are supported by some public grants, like all charities we constantly face an uncertain future, as grants from public bodies are subject to shifts over time and the vagaries of political will. We need to fundraise to protect our services. To support the work of Refugee Resource, please consider donating by going to our website – all donations are very gratefully received.