Abstract
This book situates Britain’s political approach to seeking asylum within a framework of intentional hostility. Although this is not a new claim in itself, the book makes a significant contribution focusing specifically on the structures of harm around asylum. Canning demonstrates how the British asylum system not only fails to protect people fleeing persecution, but actually exacerbates traumas many have experienced prior to arrival, and often debilitating individuals from making a successful asylum claim in the process. By highlighting the disproportionately high number of women affected by sexual and gendered violence throughout their lives in comparison to men, Canning reflects on how these practices impact the lives of women asylum seekers, an area of focus which she rightly suggests has been largely under-reported. Canning draws from a decade spent working and volunteering with vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees, mainly in England’s north-west. This includes ‘thousands of hours’ of activist participation with organizations and those seeking asylum (p. 4), 10 focus groups with women, some still ‘awaiting asylum outcomes’ (p. 4) as well as around 70 interviews with GPs, rape counsellors and psychologists supporting asylum seeking women through their encounters with violence.
The book covers an impressively wide range of themes and experiences within the asylum process, which are explored through utilizing Johan Galtung’s (1969) pioneering concept of structural violence. These experiences include the oft-named three Ds: destitution, detention and deportation, as well as asylum housing conditions, the role of private companies in both securitization and care-practices, access to healthcare and the often-challenging encounters with Home Office staff. Canning also devotes attention to how and when asylum seeking women experience forms of violence throughout the trajectory of their lives, including domestic violence, rape and torture. But she also highlights the more tacit forms of violence often experienced after their arrival in Britain. In so doing, she exposes the many guises of indirect structural consequences and the harmful effects of the asylum process itself, often encountered through the less visible structures of deterrence and securitization.
Given the complex and shifting position of Britain’s asylum policy, Chapter 1 draws a helpful chronology of Britain’s legislative stance towards immigration. It begins with the Aliens Act of 1905, and takes the reader through to post-Brexit Britain, foregrounding the 2015 so-called ‘refugee crisis’ as a marked shift both in terms of the rise in global crises and in the hostility shown towards the influx of migrants on Europe’s borders. Canning pays particular attention to Britain’s geospatial positionality, noting the relation between its distance from fleeing countries or ‘problem borders’ (p. 16) and the low number of asylum applications as significant when considering Scandinavian countries’ higher level of intake of asylum seekers—in particular, Sweden and Germany’s ‘open door’ approach (p. 16). Canning foregrounds the increasing politicization of border control and the advanced criminalization of irregular border-crossings, which she argues has never been more evident than in the run-up to the UK’s EU Referendum. Recognizing the complex structures and systems through which Britain’s asylum process operates, this chapter also comprises a detailed account of the asylum process itself, which she argues as appearing linear, yet is a system entangled and complex (p. 19). Besides her interview with a UK Border Agency (UKBA) director in Chapter 6 (notable given the notorious difficulty in gaining access to anyone working with the government’s Border Agency), one drawback here is the lack of voice given to Home Office staff and their perspectives on some of the increasingly Byzantine processes. But, this is an omission to which Canning admits in her introduction as she describes the challenges of gaining access (p. 7). As the Home Office has abandoned any pretence of working within a politically neutral system (Theresa May’s 2015 speech on creating a more ‘hostile environment’ confirmed this), and caseworkers are ultimately the ones who deal with asylum applications, their perspective would have been insightful for understanding the structural techniques used for rejecting an asylum claim and how individuals so easily fall between the cracks.
Chapter 2 conveys the complexities of gendered violence in relation to migration and asylum experiences, recognizing the role of non-state perpetrators of violence against women as a central factor for why women seek asylum in the first place (p. 30). Here Canning is careful to highlight the varying spatial and temporal ways in which women encounter forms of violence and how it becomes experienced through these violent continuums. In this chapter Canning emphasizes the prevalence of violence against women while at the same time seeking to centralize acts of survival (p. 27). However, I feel that more could have been done here in drawing out and theorizing these aspects of survival, which are certainly evident in the data yet not explored in any notable depth.
This is followed by Chapter 3, ‘Structural violence in the British asylum system’, in which one might expect to find the core theoretical substance of the book. It begins with a somewhat concise conceptual framing of structural violence, drawn specifically from Johan Galtung’s landmark essay ‘Violence, peace and peace research’ (1969) to define structural violence as ‘the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is’ (Galtung, 1969: 168). Here, Canning discusses the structural ways—specifying legislative and policy decisions—in which Britain’s immigration system is deliberately designed to reduce asylum applications and intakes. She demonstrates how policies directed at asylum seekers, such as the £36.95 weekly allowance, substandard housing and the detention especially of women, exacerbate previous harms experienced prior to arrival; perhaps most notable is the increased risk of destitution. For Canning, such policies enact Galtung’s definition of structural violence, for Britain is economically capable yet unwilling to offer sanctuary to those fleeing persecution. Though it is often indirect, and therefore concealed, this form of structural violence constitutes a broad system of deterrence which intentionally causes human suffering ‘in ways that are not necessary’ (p. 65), she writes. This has the potential to be a powerful argument, however given the extensive literature since Galtung’s publication in developing and scrutinizing the concept and the varying ways in which structural violence has been understood to operate, specifically within feminist definitions (see, for instance, Confortini, 2006), a more detailed and critical theorization would have been appropriate. This is an especially obvious omission when considering the centrality the concept is emphasised, both in the book’s title and in this chapter, as well as Canning’s desire to engage with feminist discourse. While she uses structural violence as a constructive analytical concept for elucidating our understanding of the broader mechanisms at play within the asylum process in Britain, a more substantive review of this approach (which incorporated, for instance, notions of fear and the ever-present threat of violence in the asylum process) would have enriched the discussion and formed a more in-depth exploration into structural violence more consonant with the feminist tradition (see Graeber, 2012).
Chapter 4 draws out the processes of violence experienced by women seeking asylum by honing in on the everyday impact of macro-level political decision making. Canning outlines how they become manifest through focusing on Merseyside, UK, as a case study and draws links between the criminalization and deterrence agendas of the government with what she defines as social, emotional, physical, autonomy and relational harms. The content is largely based on Canning’s numerous encounters with women who experience such cumulative harms, and while the actual narratives are occluded due to ethical concerns around confidentiality, the stories themselves are powerful at demonstrating the multifarious and often silently crushing effects of seeking asylum in Britain. Again, a more rigorous theoretical exploration of structural violence might have enriched the discussion here, and perhaps evinced feminist theories linking everyday violence with fear (see Pain and Smith, 2008). Also, presumably based on Canning’s choice to largely occlude the actual stories of individuals in this chapter, this results in her deferring to a more approximate lexicon, often resorting to phrases such as ‘survivors of torture may experience flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety’ (p. 68, emphasis added), which at times feels like a compromise in building her argument.
Chapter 5 introduces Hawwi, an asylum seeking woman Canning encountered during her research and who is situated as a living exemplar of the book’s analytical arguments. Hawwi’s life experiences, described using oral history, are a stark representation of the continuum of violence that Canning describes in previous chapters. Her story, beginning in her country of origin and ending with her (finally) obtaining refugee status, is wrought with a spectrum of devastating encounters with violence. As well as growing up in a country experiencing ongoing conflict and poverty, she is subjected to domestic violence and abuse by her family, followed by state-perpetrated torture and beatings for her work as a journalist, to then being raped by a smuggler on her journey to a neighbouring country, an ordeal which leads to her contracting HIV. On seeking asylum in the UK, Hawwi is faced with excessive periods of waiting, misinformation, malpractice and an initial refusal from the Home Office—which she must then appeal. Given the lack of any comprehensive narrative up to this point, it is both a welcome yet heart-breaking inclusion to the book and lays bare how the asylum system fails Hawwi—and other women—at numerous levels. Canning skilfully demonstrates how a continuum of violence and abuse intersect with processes of silencing and denial throughout her life course. However, what is equally clear is Hawwi’s immense resilience and strength, therefore it is surprising that this chapter—given its title ‘Violence, resistance, survival’—does not reflect on this more. Despite immense adversity and her declining mental and physical health, Hawwi manages to persevere through her circumstances and eventually obtains leave to remain; a feat not to be underestimated particularly given the aforementioned strategies through which the Home Office seeks to prevent such an occurrence.
Chapters 6 and 7 further explore the themes of everyday violence through considering how its impact is exacerbated when seeking asylum, and Canning turns to Mathiesen’s (2004) concept of silencing and Cohen’s (2001) notions of denial to examine how harm is inflicted and concealed through encounters with gendered violence. A major strength of this chapter is Canning’s attention to how the Home Office deals with negative reports and criticism—particularly around the conditions of immigration detention. The Home Office responds by consistently deferring to individualize problems, whereby serious incidents become framed as one-offs and dealt with by removing one or two staff members. This manner of individualizing problems she argues, ‘deflects from the exploration of a true alternative and provides superficial endorsement’ (p. 146), a fact that has largely gone undocumented.
Taken as a whole, this book is well written, extremely thorough and provides an uncomfortable but much-needed stark critique of Britain’s asylum policy and its gender-specific impact on women. Many scholars have sought to highlight and make sense of the various institutional harms caused by the asylum process and by theorizing these experiences through a concept of structural violence. In this way, Canning offers a rigorous framework which draws attention to the implicit yet intentional ways in which individuals are excluded and harmed through the asylum process. Its limitations are that in not expounding structural violence as a theoretical tool, there is the sense of a missed opportunity. This results in much of the book’s extensive insight lacking theoretical enrichment such an inclusion might have afforded.