Last month I gave a workshop at the annual conference of the Rape Crisis Federation of England and Wales. It was amazing and inspiring to be among these women who dedicate their lives and free time to supporting women surviving experiences of violence – especially as they do it all on a shoestring.
The CSEL workshop aimed to introduce some facts about women seeking asylum in the UK and to get participants talking about how rape crisis centres can support women seeking asylum in the UK.
The Refugee Council has estimated that as many as 80% of women refugees in the UK have experienced sexual violence; and many women seek asylum in the UK having fled from countries where rape is commonly used as a weapon of war. Yet women find it very difficult to talk about experiences of sexual violence – as our own research has shown – as has research into this phenomenon amongst non-refugee women in the UK, and refugee women in other countries (Marion Tankink has written an excellent and really interesting paper on why women stay silent about these experiences). So you can imagine there’s quite a need amongst refugee women in the UK for the specialist services of organisations like rape crisis centres.
Yet many rape crisis centres and other sexual violence services report that they don’t see a lot of refugee women.
Some rape crisis centres have addressed this problem proactively: Bradford Rape Crisis has set up Project Jyoti, which is run by and for Black and ethnic minority women; Leicester Rape Crisis has changed its name to Jasmin House and recruited Muslim women to do outreach work with Muslim women’s groups in Leicester; and another project is planning to train refugee women as specialist councillors to work particularly with women seeking asylum.
See what I mean about inspiring?
Clare
