Vast number of refugee women sexually abused while awaiting UK asylum

A shocking new report from Women for Refugee Women, a UK-based nonprofit, says one-third of women they interviewed who had been raped or sexually assaulted in their home countries have faced further rape or sexual abuse while destitute in the UK.

While it has long been known that women fleeing war and violence throughout the world have faced extraordinarily difficult circumstances upon arrival in the EU, this study is one of the first to quantify the sexualized violence women are facing. Of 106 participants, 78 percent said they had experienced sexualized violence in their home countries. Now, trapped in horrific conditions in the UK, 96 percent of the women said they are depressed, and one-third have tried to kill themselves.

With the most restrictive waiting period in the entire EU, Britain forbids asylum-seekers from working until a year has gone by while waiting for a ruling on their claim. Instead, they must rely on the government for assistance, but that help is often delayed or miniscule. Impoverishment then pushes women onto the streets and into dangerous situations in which men prey upon them. Beyond that, it appears that women are generally not given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the violence they suffered before their arrival in the UK, thus allowing the government to pretend there is no basis to their asylum claims—further cornering them into destitution. Women are thus trapped in a “cycle of violence” while being retraumatized, Priscilla Dudhia, a policy and research coordinator at Women for Refugee Women, told Newsweek.

The UK Home Office “really puts the high onus on the person seeking asylum to prove that they deserve refuge, imposing unrealistically high levels of credibility, consistency, and coherence on their stories,” Dudhia said. She added that there also seems to be “insufficient awareness amongst some Home Office decision-makers” about the realities of gender-based violence—that women who reported having been raped (often by authorities in their home states, thereby making repatriation extremely dangerous), “hadn’t been believed,” despite the fact that the Refugee Convention requires that a person in this position is given “the benefit of the doubt.”

“I used to go to the park all the time when I was homeless, because there no one looks at you,” an asylum seeker initialed K.M. told Women for Refugee Women. “I would go in the day, the night is not safe. I had no friend, so I sat and talked to the trees. They were my witnesses. I told them my story and my dreams.”

In 2015, the Women’s Media Center reported from Italy on the plight of refugee women landing in boats and herded into indefinite wait in detention centers. It found that many of the women had faced sexualized violence in three phases: first in their country of origin, then along their dangerous journeys (often through war-torn Libya) with smugglers, and then finally upon their arrival in the EU. Nigerian women in particular were facing a trafficking nightmare. Having used smugglers to reach Italy, many were then forced into prostitution to pay off some previously unknown debt to the men who helped them reach EU shores.

Women for Refugee Women reports that 79 percent of women in their study who said they experienced some form of violence or crime in Britain did not report the incident to the authorities, “chiefly due to fears of detention and deportation.” So not only is the problem likely even worse than the study shows but it is clear that “enforced destitution creates the perfect conditions for slavery to thrive.”

“I was traumatized by this asylum system,” a woman with the pseudonym Josephine told the organization. “I don’t think my mental state will ever be the same again.”