structural violence

Introducing Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System

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CanningIn today’s blog post, Victoria Canning introduces her new book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System.

Recognising structural violence is no easy feat. In his seminal essay, Violence, Peace and Peace Research, Johan Galtung argued that, ‘Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is’ (1969: 168). This sets up a tricky task as far as research goes: how can we practicably and empirically evidence the difference between the potential and the actual, if we can never know what the potential could have been?

This is precisely what the book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System has aimed to do. By drawing together analyses of policy with domestic and international legislation relating to refugee status and torture, alongside the lived experience of women seeking asylum, my research has addressed what is supposed to exist with regard to sanctuary and support, and what actually exists in reality. Using activist participation over a ten year period in the North West of England, alongside scores of interviews, multiple focus groups, and an oral history project, this book challenges the myth that Britain is a  broadly ‘friendly’ or supportive environment for people seeking asylum.

Using Social Harm as Social Evidence

As the title suggests, a central argument I am making is that the structural conditions set for people seeking asylum create a harmful environment, and this environment has gendered implications. Hillyard and Tombs argued social harm can be divided into a number of categories – physical harms, emotional harms and economic harms to name but three. As the book argues, these can come in many guises for people seeking asylum and range from a lack of medical or psychological support, specifically for survivors of violence or torture; extreme hunger or malnutrition; or illness induced from poor housing conditions. People seeking asylum receive around £36 per week to buy food, clothes, transport. Every week in a group I work with, women and children seem to arrive worse off – food prices have increased significantly in Britain due to inflation, but welfare allowance remains a pittance. Travel can be a no-go since a bus ticket eats around 2/3rds of the daily allowance, which affects women’s capacity to engage in sexual or domestic violence services. Women regularly walk miles to shop for groceries, prams and children in tow, to make sure their financial scraps can stretch to basics.

For people whose application has been refused and are submitting an appeal and do not receive Legal Aid, this is supposed to cover extortionate legal fees. The most recent quote I have seen for a solicitor to appeal a negative decision was £1600 – around 44 weeks of saving, if you opt out of eating altogether. Whilst this might seem an exaggerated comment to make, it is actually happening – I recently asked a woman awaiting an appeal how she planned to pay her legal fees. She told me, ‘you just eat less’. The alternative option is illegalised and precarious work (people seeking asylum have no right to employment, so are forcibly dependent on state welfare) which, for women, is often sexualised. Housing – one of the biggest problems people face – is usually in the poorest areas of the most deprived cities in the UK (as I have also argued elsewhere). As this book shows quite clearly, xenophobic and Islamophobic abuse is common place and housing conditions range from acceptable to dire, with heating problems, infestation (rats, slugs and cockroaches), and chronic damp being the most common problems research participants faced.

Autonomy harms, relational harms and temporal harms

Whilst these forms of harm are quite visible, they are not all necessarily experiences which are confined to life in asylum. Similar aspects have long been the staple diet of many of the poorest people in the poorest areas of the UK and as Cooper argues, the violent financial decisions taken in the aftermath of the so-called financial crisis have compounded many people’s experiences of hunger, destitution and housing. To consider the peculiarities of asylum, the book expands this lens to include three further harms: autonomy harm, relational harm (see Pemberton) and temporal harm.

Autonomy Harm

The first of these, autonomy harms, affect a person’s self-worth or esteem, and can result from role deprivation and the absence of available opportunities to engage in productive activities. People seeking asylum are structurally limited on what they can do with their lives for the period of time in which they seek asylum.  From the offset, people are dispersed to areas of the UK over which they have no choice. Working is legally prohibited, Higher Education is not affordable and the limitations on welfare allowance – half of that of Jobseekers Allowance – means options for most social activities are not actually an option. More insidiously, the threat of detention – a proliferating confinement estate in the UK – or further dispersal hang like a spectre of social control, increasing fear and anxiety amongst people at every Home Office signing.

Relational harm

The second example, relational harms, include enforced exclusion from social relationships, and harms of misrecognition (such as misrepresentations of particular social groups in society, as Pemberton also showed). When women, men or unaccompanied minors leave their countries of origin, many of their relationships and friendships are affected or dissolved completely. Other relational harms are, however, directly the result of policy and practice. Within Britain and the UK more generally, the impact of spatialised controls outlined above is perhaps the most obvious form of relational harm, since the climate of such controls has the capacity to limit an individual’s relationships, friendships or support networks outside of their immediate living vicinity. Relational harms are also strongly connected to emotional harms: support networks, friendships and activist involvement are impeded by some of the many barriers women seeking asylum face and yet each of these can be particularly important for women’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Deportation – a unique aspect of life for immigrants, and one which is central to the control of people seeking asylum – is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of relational harm, holding the potential to pull people from families, networks and communities on a permanent basis.

Temporal Harm

The final focus relates to the impacts of control over time. Applying for asylum the UK can be an incredibly complex and daunting process. At a port or airport, it is deciding to who or where to tell a uniformed guard that you require refugee status, or – if you are in the country already – knowing where to even go. For survivors of sexual or domestic abuse or torture – disproportionality women – add to that the requirement to disclose instances of abuse. To a stranger. The odds can be stacked from the offset. As the diagram below shows (please click on the image to download a larger, clearer file), it can also be an incredibly long process, regularly taking years:

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To give an idea of just how long this can take, in one focus group with five women from four countries in 2014, I asked how long each had been awaiting a final asylum decision. One had been in the asylum system since 2013, one since 2012, one since 2009, one since 2010 and one since 2002. That is an accumulation of 24 years of waiting in only one small group.

It is perhaps then the issue of time which is most difficult for people seeking asylum. Years of life can go by – as one woman told me, ‘the best years of my life are gone’ – and what sits in place of autonomy and rights is restriction and unknowing. The terms ‘languish’ and ‘limbo’ can seem over-used in this context, but the fact is that this is how asylum is experienced. Whilst emotional and physical harms might be experienced by broader groups in society, temporal harm can compound such problems for people in the asylum process: physical and mental illnesses are exacerbated by the constant sense of unknowing, and the multiple structural conditions which limit people’s quality of life can also increase feelings of isolation, fear and even suicidality.

It is between the structural conditions of asylum and the lived realities of those facing it that structural violence and social harm therefore join. To draw from the books’ preface by Mary Bosworth, Current policies are not inevitable, nor are they just.  They are instead political choices that could be made otherwise. 

Victoria Canning is a Lecturer in Criminology at The Open University. At present she is leading an ESRC Future Research Leaders project examining harmful social practices in asylum processes in Britain, Denmark and Sweden. She is an activist in Merseyside, and is also currently working with Migrant Artists Mutual Aid to develop a collaboratively produced book (with women seeking asylum) relating to mutual aid and resistance.

Her new book Gendered Harm and Structural Violence in the British Asylum System, (2017) published by Routledge is available to buy in Hardback or ebook: https://www.routledge.com/Gendered-Harm-and-Structural-Violence-in-the-British-Asylum-System/Canning/p/book/9781138854659

Preview available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Gendered-Structural-Violence-Routledge-Citizenship/1138854654/ref=sr_1_2/261-3207680-5391316?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1491289959&sr=1-2

Austerity and Human Rights in Leicester

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Following the UN’s condemnation of UK austerity policies, Adrian Bua reports on the impact of that these are having in Leicester, based on exploratory research carried out as part of the collaborative governance under austerity project.

A recent report by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has argued that the UK government may be failing to meet its international human rights obligations.  A range of concerns were raised, ranging from the limits imposed by the Trade Union Act (2016) on industrial action to lack of corporate regulation. However, notably for us, most of the challenges levelled at the UK government pivoted around austerity policies, and their disproportionate and discriminatory impact on the most disadvantaged. Specifically,  the UN investigative committee is expressed serious concern “about the disproportionate adverse impact that austerity measures, introduced since 2010, are having on the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights by disadvantaged and marginalised individuals and groups” and reminded the UK government that austerity measures “must be temporary, necessary, proportionate, and not discriminatory.”

The UN is especially concerned about changes to the welfare system and the possible violation of social rights through cuts introduced by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. This is a topic we researched in Leicester as part of the exploratory phase of our project ‘collaborative governance under austerity’. The report highlights a series of issues that resonate with our analysis in Leicester.

First, it highlights sanctions in relation to benefit fraud with the absence of due process. National changes to welfare have bought in a regime that regulates, disciplines and punishes – what academics call “workfare”.  We know anecdotally that sanctions are leading some people to fall “off grid” and disappear from official records. Agencies agencies from the statutory and voluntary sectors aim to pick up the pieces, but their capacity to do so is being decimated by austerity.

Second, the report highlights employment practices including a rise in zero hour contracts and precarious employment. In terms of employment, our research and review of case literature suggests that poor working conditions have increased in the textile trade [link to report] and especially the hidden and ‘informal’ economy. However, some respondents argued that the local authority was hesitant to do anything about this because it might put off investors – a key way in which Leicester aims to overcome austerity. If the issue as to be highlighted, Leicester might be tainted by association with the “sweatshop economy”.

Third, changes to social benefits including the reduction of the household benefit cap, the four-year freeze on certain benefits and the reduction in child tax credits are also criticised. In Leicester housing was an important issue, where the council used a strategy of amelioration through using discretionary funds to ensure that those most at risk maintained a roof over their heads.

Dr Adrian Bua is Research Assistant at the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity, and Researcher at the New Economics Foundation

Austerity Urbanism – Scotland Style?

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In today’s post Annette Hastings discusses ‘austerity urbanism’ in the Scottish context.

It’s hard to counter the view that contemporary austerity is being realised to a large extent in and through what is happening in cities. Jamie Peck developed the ‘austerity urbanism’ thesis to explain the dimensions and significance of austerity in US cities. He argued – in a nutshell – that in the US some of the worst impacts of austerity were targeted on city governments and that, by targeting cities, austerity was effectively being targeted on the most vulnerable. Recent research suggests that the thesis developed for the US, holds for England. It confirms that the unprecedented cuts to local government budgets have impacted most heavily on poor cities. It also suggests that despite the intention of many city governments to shelter the poor and marginalised from the worst effects of austerity cuts, that cuts were beginning to harm the services relied on these groups – such as housing, social care, social work and advice services. The work also showed that it was poorer people and places that suffered more when cuts were made to the ‘universal’ services used by the broader population such as libraries, leisure centres and street cleansing.

But does austerity urbanism hold in Scotland? To the same degree? In the same kind of ways? Anti-austerity rhetoric and a sense of resistance is palpable in Scotland. It comes from politicians, from urban managers, from the mainstream media and from citizens and civil society. But does this lead to a distinctive austerity urbanism – Scotland style?  Some differences do stand out.

The Scottish Government has had less of a tendency than its Westminster counterpart to try to protect some public services while sacrificing others to the worst of austerity cuts. So whereas in England, local government has been subjected to much higher rates of cut than some other services such as Health, giving flesh to the austerity urbanism thesis, in Scotland cuts have been shared more equally across public services. While Scottish councils have experienced  big reductions in what they have to spend on key services – an 11% real terms reduction between 2011 and 2015  (which equates to about £100 per head of population) –  this is not as severe a picture as in England, where the reduction was on average about twice as big. However, this sense of protection in Scottish local government relative to England has now come to an end, with a much more severe local government settlement in place for the current financial year – with Glasgow City Council, for example,  facing a real terms cut of over £63million, and Edinburgh and other urban councils implementing cuts of £30million and more.

The targeting of poor cities for grant cuts has not been as stark in Scotland as in England either. Poorer councils have lost a little bit more than better off ones and, like England, there is a post-industrial and urban skew to cuts, but in Scotland these patterns are more to do with population loss than the policy design. It is important to note though that historically in Scotland, the deprivation premium built into the local government finance system to compensate more disadvantaged councils for higher levels of need was historically less generous in Scotland than in England. That situation has been reversed since the onset of austerity.

But despite these differences, it is also clear is that austerity in Scotland has been harsher than it needed to be. Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has had the power to vary the rate of income tax by 3p in the pound – a power which has never been used despite the anti-austerity rhetoric of successive Scottish Governments. Moreover, a new Scottish Rate of Income Tax has been in place since April 2016, giving the Scottish Parliament even more capacity to vary levels of income tax. In early 2016, the SNP Government proposed (and had agreed) a Budget in which a clear commitment not to vary income tax levels was made, a position maintained in their Party’s manifesto in the recent May 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.  And the ‘winners’ of these elections, the SNP alongside a resurgent Scottish Conservative Party, stood alone amongst mainstream parties during the election campaign in that they did not argue for increased personal tax rates to ‘pay for public services’ . This would suggest that it is not only in Scottish polity that the desire to counter austerity agendas with increased taxation is controversial, but that this agenda is also controversial with the Scottish public.

So yes, we can perhaps detect some ‘Scottish style’ aspects of austerity urbanism, but the extent to which these differences are durable and more than rhetorical is debatable.

Annette Hastings is Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow

The austerity-security symbiosis

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There are different ways in which austerity and security come hand in hand in contemporary political affairs. Three examples include Greece’s financial crisis and the socio-economic and political insecurity generated from the ideological disputes on whether to carry on with neoliberal driven polices promoted by the Troika; the British austerity narrative promoted by the Conservatives alongside policies and bills preventing terrorism (i.e. Government’s Draft Investigatory Power Bill) and narratives of human rights which, while aiming to provide an environment of welfare and wellbeing for all, tend to be driven by mechanisms that authorise state actors to use force and repression (i.e. housing eviction officers) on the one hand, and to facilitate (or control) citizen participation initiatives (i.e. neighbourhood renewal partnerships in the UK and the US or citizen security programmes across Latin America where police are a key partner on the other.

I argue that security and austerity are two different narratives whose convergence has consolidated in the 21st century.  Their symbiosis cuts across different dimensions of analysis: from the macro to the micro level and from the remote sphere of the global financial system to the concrete sphere of people’s daily lives. We cannot assert that one depends on the other in a unidirectional way. Instead, they feed into one another and they reinforce and benefit from one another. Three premises help me to explain this symbiosis.

I will borrow the phrase by Owen Worth to explain the first premise: austerity as a defence of neoliberalism. This premise sets the foundation of power differences between the powerful (protector) and vulnerable (in need of protection), which are implicit in the relationships developed behind any understanding of security.  This premise has been helpful to insert fear of the social instability that a fiscal/financial crisis may bring about, especially if irresponsible public or private debt is not restrained. The 2015 elections in Greece to stay in or out of the European Union or the Cameron-Osborne decision to incur in policies of fiscal austerity (low taxation and budget cuts, followed by an accentuated retreat of state services) are good examples that portray that if austerity is not pursued chaos, collapse and disorder will rule society instead. Therefore, austerity becomes a weapon to defend the middle and lower-income groups of the population from the undesired consequences of a fiscal/financial crisis that if untackled, in a later stage, contributes to political and social anxiety -as people begin to fear losing their jobs, savings, and welfare support (which they lose anyway)- while encountering protests and social revolts that increase perceptions of insecurity.

The second premise states that ‘austerity needs of security’; it derives from debates on the legacies of authoritarianism co-existing alongside neoliberalisation. The Latin American case is a good example to develop this point. In the 1980s, after neoliberal economic reforms were introduced in the region (characterised initially by a long-term fiscal austerity period), several governments began losing legitimacy as the safety nets that the state provided to specific sections of the population (i.e. trade unions or peasant confederations) began to withdraw. As a result, protests, dissident groups and social mobilisations emerged throughout the region. The governments, who introduced neoliberal economic reforms, responded through violence and repression by using tactics of the authoritarian past to maintain social control and national security. Thirty years afterwards, the term ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ has cropped up to describe the political state of affairs of two of the region’s economic powers – Brazil and Mexico: nepotism and impunity, collusion with transnational corporations and violation of human rights by state armed forces and police (in many cases these abuses are carried out in the name of security over the fight against drug-trafficking).  To this scenario, a new wave of fiscal austerity hitting the region since autumn 2015 has to be factored in. It is too early to tell the extent to which security tactics will fare, but it is indeed an arena that deserves attention. Its contrast with Europe is of equal interest given that governments have tended to enhance repressive and invasive strategies as austerity becomes normalised.

Finally, the third premise contends that the ‘development of security narratives need their austerity counterpart’. It derives from the academic work by Bourdieusian scholars who argue that neoliberal policies do not only repress, but also recreate repression through mundane, daily living practices carried out by both governmental and non-governmental actors. Applied to contexts in western Europe and the Americas, narratives of security are formed by a continuous investment (or co-investment with businesses) in penalisation (i.e. respect of the rule of law, development of penitentiary-probation systems and of armed forces and police), while traditional welfare policies retreat and new ones contribute to deepening flexibility and individual responsibility across the population, in particular addressing the poor. Through the promotion of different forms of work (in the formal or informal economy; as an employee or self-employed) citizens have to learn to provide for themselves (housing, education, leisure). This gradual self-provision requires security measures to ensure that social order is maintained. Security takes a multi-varied form that may range from omnipresent surveillance systems to the management of unintended effects of individualisation and privatisation, such as vigilante groups (which state actors either aim to supress or reintegrate into the system to regain social control).

Dr Valeria Guarneros-Meza is a core member of the CURA team as well as Lecturer in Public Policy at the Department of Politics and Public Policy at DMU.

CURA’s Launch Conference: some reflections

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Valeria Guarneros-Meza and Adrian Bua report on CURA’s inaugural conference

Last week we held our two day launch conference. Throughout the four panels there were significant discussions that we need to consider in developing our understanding and study of austerity. Many of these ideas were circulated via twitter (@CURA2015) but we think it is worth expanding on 140 character-selling headlines. The points listed below are not exhaustive; they are our impressions of issues that drew people’s attention and therefore worth considering in developing CURA’s future events and research agenda.

Austerity and Urban Boosterism

Urban infrastructures such as Heathrow’s proposed third runway (addressed by papers delivered by David Howarth and Steven Griggs), nuclear plants (Francis Chateauraynaud), HS2 in London (Daniel Durrant) and Medellin’s Teleferico and Reyes de España Library (Kate Maclean) were the examples addressed by the speakers. In the case of London it is striking to see estate development and the type of urban infrastructures mentioned above while the great majority of the city’s population are struggling to make ends meet. In Medellin the concept of ‘social urbanism’ was developed in an era of financial extravagance. Extra spending was targeting national and foreign investment into the city while addressing  basic service needs (access to water and electricity) that marginalised neighbourhoods required. Kate Maclean argued that although the approach had succeeded in attracting investment, upgrading urban space and integrating some marginalised neighbourhoods, urban boosterism has not been enough to tackle levels of crime and violence (measured by homicide rates) in particular pockets of the city. Moreover, it also been argued, in other work by Abello-Colak and Guarneros-Meza, that  the reintegration and disarmament programmes targeting the youth tend to favour those groups that belong to gangs as opposed to building a universal and comprehensive approach to youth development.  In other words, what Medellin’s example is showing is that social urbanism, at its best, or urban boosterism, at its worst, may help the city overcome visible spatial austerity but it will not be enough to tackle the social degradation that austerity of public welfare has caused.

Getting away with it: the socialisation of risk through technical obfuscation

This topic was raised in presentations by Daniel Durrant on HS2 in London and on the political economy of adult social care provision in the UK, by Karel Williams. Daniel’s analysis was based on the balance sheets of the HS2 corporation. He demonstrated that accounts show that cost calculations are based on the benefits for business infrastructure investment and potential business travellers, while wiping out any social costs that are related to the impact that the construction of the railway has on the destruction of community life, schools and other spill overs. Karel’s work on adult social care critiqued the financialisation of care provision by private providers. He argued that optimum returns on property speculation assured by a standardised kind of adult care home (60-80 capacity) with minimum wages and a casualised workforce with high levels of staff turnover. The requirements of quality care provision, and attention to the social and health needs of residents,  takes second place to debt and management strategies that split property ownership on the one hand and home management and operation on the other. These financial innovations provide parent corporations to extract any gain from subsidiaries passing all debt responsibility to the latter; what he called ‘malign performativity’. These two examples show the ability that corporations have in covering and disguising cost-benefit analysis by using sophisticated technicisms that reduce the ability of citizens to understand the model and ability to perceive these techniques as ‘daylight robbery’.

A similar point was made with nuclear plants in France and England (Francis Chateauraynaud), where the scientific and technical discourse of the environmental impact that these generate lead to the production of confusing and competing set of facts and narratives that disempower citizens and politicians (see also Xavier Auyero’s work).

Austerity invites ‘structural violence’

Annette Hastings’ presentation on the socioeconomic costs of local government cuts in England and Scotland argued that they constituted a clear case of ‘structural violence’ – because they put those individuals less able to exercise political agency in harm’s way, and accentuate their marginalisation in public service provision.  Drawing on findings from a recent report, Annette demonstrated the cuts to tax benefits addressing housing and social care have promoted local authorities to change their administrative processes to cope with impacts of the cuts on staff salaries and dismissals.  These practices are structural because they form part of the system that puts order and discipline to the way local authorities are organised and the relationships they build with citizen-users.

The concept of structural violence is relevant to other presentations: such as Robin Smith’s work on the role of ‘street outreach workers’ in tackling with the ambivalent pressures of caring but eradicating  homeless in cities such as Cardiff and New York, where urban boosterism is undoubtedly present as ways of ensuring urban competitiveness; and Robert Ogman’s talk on social impact bonds – another financial innovation that promote structural violence while helping local governments cope with the destabilisation of social and welfare initiatives produced by public fiscal austerity. These three presentations addressed Anglo-American cases, but it is equally interesting to see how structural violence can be found in contexts of crime and physical insecurity in cities in the United States and across different cities in Latin America (see Auyero et al ‘Violence at the Urban Margins’), whose national contexts deepen the complexity of the meaning of structural violence when enmeshed with broader debates on security and urban securitisation.  In cities, both in the north and south, the role of frontline bureaucrats was mentioned as agents caught in the cross road of the ambivalence of everyday governance practice.

Resisting and countering austerity

Both keynotes – Erik Swyngedouw and Karel Williams – addressed the need of agency by academics, insurgent social movements and organic intellectuals to enhance and speed up social innovation in the UK. Erik called for system de-stabilization through insurgency whereas Karel drew upon the concept of social innovation as a potential source of alternatives. These strategies differ in so far as one aims to engender rupture through direct confrontation, and the other pursues an agenda of interstitial change. The modality of the former is agonistic, the latter more collaborative. However, these modalities are by no means mutually exclusive. Paraphrasing Romand Coles critical social theorists should focus on the mutually enabling relationship between agonistic and collaborative forms of participation. Absent agonism, collaboration is in danger of governmentality. This much is evident, we think, in the co-optation and trivialisation of the concept by neoliberalism, resulting in constant innovation without change. On the other hand, absent collaboration, agonistic ruptures can fail to sustain the change that, in Ricardo Blaug’s words, a ‘democratic moment’ opens up opportunity for. In sum, both modalities are necessary to achieve a transformative environment. CURA has a good opportunity to start building on this through its association with the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Rachel Laurence (from the New Economies in Practice team at NEF) and Adrian Bua (NEF and CURA) explained NEF ambitions to sustain and expand activities that make the foundation a hub for research and action that delivers socio-economic change. They also highlighted some areas where CURA and NEF could join forces to shape such an agenda. This could, for example, be around current policies such as devolution and regional economic development. This is also an area which, as Matt Dykes of the Trade Unions Congress explained, is being targeted by organised Labour movements for its potential to create new government tiers that are more amenable to trade union influence. It will be important to bring in other social movements into this agenda also.

It is perhaps it is worth considering how doctoral students can become a generation of organic intellectuals as a strategy to help them find employment that academia seems increasingly incapable to provide. Building professional links between CURA and progressive policy and advocacy organisations such as NEF might be one way to proceed. This could go some way towards breaking down barriers between policy research that seeks political influence, and academic research focussed on making contributions to knowledge.

Valeria Guarneros-Meza is Lecturer in Public Policy at the Deparment of Politics and Public Policy; Adrian Bua is Research Assistant the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity