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Niki Adams, Legal Action for Women -- Speech at the Launch of the Self Help Guide We are very glad to be here. It’s always a breath of fresh air to come to Scotland because we feel like we learn a lot. People are more active and more determined up here and it’s encouraging to spend a bit of time here. Also I’m delighted to see our sisters from the All African Women’s Group who got dispersed up to Scotland. We are very glad to see you again. Legal Action for Women (LAW) is a free legal service. We combine legal advice with working with campaigning organisations. One of our first principals is we believe that what happens in court and what happens through the legal process is very much influenced by what’s happening outside the courts, and often in the course in fighting a legal case we also do it in conjunction with a public campaign, because that’s one of the most effective ways of wining. LAW
started in 1982. We give
legal advice and support to low income women and their families --
particularly women who are most likely to be up against the law, and most
likely to face discrimination in the course of trying to get justice. LAW
was started by the English Collective of Prostitutes, which is a
prostitute women’s organisation based at our centre and many of the
issues which we are now facing in relation to working with asylum seekers,
we cut our teeth on whilst working with prostitute women.
Both groups are often illegal, women can’t be public and face
enormous discrimination. Much
of the experience we gained over the years with sex workers has benefitted
the work we are now doing. We started as a self-help group by which we mean that women are always centrally involved in their own case. I want to say a word about this. I feel like I am talking to people who know a bit about this and are also constantly trying to work out what can be done and how to do it, so I want to speak on that basis. We concentrate on self-help because we have found that the first thing it does is that it establishes not only the working relationship we want, but also helps us avoid the working relationship that we do not want. It enables us to avoid racism and elitism of people who have passports and social power dictating to those that don’t. We want to avoid the relationship where on the one hand you have the do-gooders, and on the other hand, you have the poor victims. This is the basic problem we set ourselves to solve in the course of doing this work. We have also found that self-help has been the most precise and efficient way to do legal work. We
launched our Self Help Guide Against Detention and Deportation in June.
We started working with women seeking asylum about six or seven
years ago and we have done work fighting against deportation for many
years before that. We
work very closely with other groups at our Women’s Centre in particular
with the Black Women’s Rape Action Project and Women against Rape. We also work with men. BWRAP
and WAR do expert reports for women who report that they had been raped.
They assess the impact of rape on a woman and their expert reports
become part of a woman’s legal case.
We quickly found that women coming to report rape didn’t just
have one problem. Many were
often homeless, their lawyer would not be acting for them, they would be
ill and have all kinds of other troubles.
LAW got involved in providing other kinds of advice.
Three
years ago the All African Women’s Group formed and Sarah will speak more
about that and how that came into being.
One of the other principals that we try to promote is that women
should be able to speak for themselves.
That is often difficult because people don’t want their faces
public or they are fearful that they will be targeted as a result.
With AAWG we established that whilst it’s true that sometimes
sticking your head above the parapet can cause trouble, every woman has
the support of the organisation and people determined to defend you.
Going public can be a very important thing to. The fact that so many women have been ready to speak about
their experience has really changed the climate, because the usual view of
who an asylum seeker is which promoted by the racist media is single men
and scroungers. Putting
forward women as the primary carers for children, as rape survivors and as
those responsible for others in the community has changed people’s
views. What is rarely seen or
counted is the enormous efforts women make to even get to this country.
That is a impressive piece of organizing that gets lost especially
if people are presented only as victims.
We don’t see the full extent of the struggle that people have
already made, not only for survival and for change in Africa or whichever
country people came from, but also the organizing to save your own life
and the lives of other people by getting out and making your way to
another country. When
women first came to our Centre one of the issues we had to face was that
women had gone to a lot of other voluntary organisations for help and had
been turned away. I was often
told that if a woman hasn’t got a lawyer and she hasn’t got housing
then send her to the Refugee Council.
I know the sister from the Scottish Refugee Council is here, and I
don’t want to put you on the spot but that is the reality we are facing.
We were being told to send people to the Refugee Council and people
were getting absolutely no help. They were being turned out onto the
street. I see the sister here is nodding so you know what I am
talking about. One woman I
was helping was told to go and queue up at 3 o’clock in the morning at
the Refugee Council office in order to be seen and then she was turned
away with nothing. There was
so many women coming with this kind of story that we decided to call a
press conference. This was the beginning of us spelling out the relationship
between ourselves as a grassroots organization, completely unfunded in
fact and these voluntary organisations which are very well funded.
At that time the Refugee Council had a budget of £70 million and I
cannot even imagine what we could do with £70,000,000.
We were compelled to speak out because these organisations were
sucking resources and credibility away from the people who were actually
doing the work of helping asylum seekers.
We could not tolerate that situation because if we wanted to be
effective, we have to deal with this major obstacle that was in our way. One victory is that the emergency housing that the Refugee Council was running which was really dirty, dangerous slum housing was closed. I don’t know if it is the same here, but voluntary organisations like the RC, founded to defend asylum seekers rights, had accepted government contacts to run asylum services, to be part of the privatisation of these services and worse still they had signed contracts with caveats which said that the organization had to cooperate with the deportation process. As a result of these protests, the RC withdrew from the emergency housing contracts and the hostels closed. Back to our Self-Help Guide which we are launching today in Scotland. In the course of doing the work that Robina describes of fighting against deportation we worked out a set of procedures on what to do, in which order, who to contact, etc. We became very accomplished at stopping deportations. We won every single case and we never lost one woman. But it really took a lot of our time and there’s not many of us. We estimated that it would take three or four days concentrated work to save one person from deportation and we couldn’t do that for ever. We also had people calling us saying my friend is in detention and we’ll be making suggestions over the phone, over and over again. In the end, thankfully, we had the good idea to put it on paper. The first draft of the Guide was presented at our National Gathering in July 2003 and it went down very well. We launched it in June of this year and immediately it started to circulate by people giving copies to other people they knew. We haven’t done anything to distribute it formally yet, because as soon as we sent out one email telling people about it, we got inundated by calls. Two sets of people called; firstly women in detention. Since June we had eighty women call us mainly from Yarl’s Wood Removal Centre and about fifteen or twenty men. We couldn’t manage that many calls so we wrote a letter asking for help to tell people what’s going on -- you should have a look at it because it really documents what we did and how we did it. The second set of people who contacted us were individuals and people from organizations, often small organizations, from around the country. Of course some of the big asylum charities have also been in touch but most of the calls were from small community based organisations for example church groups, conversations groups, people who in some way were coming into contact with asylum seekers and were deeply upset by the injustices they witnessed against others who had become their friends. A group would start off providing clothing or food for people who were destitute especially at the time of Section 55. Then they ended up getting involved in someone’s legal case even though they didn’t know anything about the law or what to do. People would write and say that our Guide was a God send because it helped them work out what to do to help. What we found out from this is that there really is a national movement against in support of asylum seekers. You don’t often hear about it but there is a national movement of people who absolutely reject the line that’s promoted by the government that most of the population is hostile to asylum seekers. When people are directly in touch with asylum seekers they can overcome the racism in how asylum seekers have been presented and that tendency when times are hard (and they are hard for all of us a lot of the time) to turn on each other and to blame people who have even less for the fact you have not much as all. So we were sending a Guide to every women that called and often going through the Guide on the phone with them highlighting different sections which would particularly help them. Then as we got more calls we often just sent the Guide and what we found was that the Guide spurred a set of collective activity inside detention. Women who had a bit more English were helping women who didn’t; women who had the Guide were showing it round to other women. They were then calling us for more copies, faxing us information about their case which we were then passing on to their supporters. It all happened very fast. Then 30 Ugandan women went on hunger strike initially to protest about being sent back. We knew from what they said about the conditions in detention, and we suggested that they add that to the press information that we were putting out for them. We got a lot of publicity, women were interviewed on the radio including on Woman’s Hour. The woman interviewed was initially targeted by the authorities inside Yarl’s Wood for speaking out but with our help she was released shortly after and is now volunteering at our Centre and helping other women. This work once again transformed the relationship between ourselves and the All African Women’s Group. Some of us planned to go away in August. We try and take a break in August, because otherwise we don’t get a break at all. But we obviously couldn’t go away so many women were calling us from detention. So women from the All African Women’s Group rose to the occasion. They came in every day over that period. Some of the men from Payday Men’s Network who weren’t away and who had a bit more experience came in and opened the Centre and were able to help out. Women’s calls were answered, Guides were sent out but most importantly we now discuss legal cases even more collectively in our meetings and many women are trained to know what do suggest in each situation. We found out that of the women calling us from detention about eighty percent were rape survivors, something that has not been public. All were African women, not that all the women in detention were African women but all the women that contacted us were. About eighty percent did not have a lawyer or had lawyers who were not doing anything on their case. I am sure you know that women in detention are particularly vulnerable to bad legal presentation because lawyers will promise anything in the knowledge that you may be deported so nobody will hold them to account. And they take money for doing nothing. We went to the Refugee Legal Centre and the Immigration Advisory Service who are always promoted by the government as the two organisations which justify the legal aid cuts, because according to the government people could always go to these two organisations for free legal advise. The Refugee Legal Centre said they have a very narrow remit for which cases they will take on and the Immigration Advisory Service took on the cases and dropped them. We are still pursuing those two organizations on their treatment of a number of women’s cases. The other thing that we had to deal with is racism. I’m sure you know that the racism that asylum seekers face is absolutely horrendous, in general in society but also in dealing with anybody in authority. When women from the All African Women’s Group were doing some of that work, we would face situations where they would call Yarl’s Wood and asked to be put through to a woman and be fobbed off, or be told that the woman is no longer there. Somebody with an English accent would call back and would be put straight through. You have to really watch yourself when that’s happening. On the one hand, it’s a problem you had to deal with, but on the other hand there are always the danger then with the people with the English accent are just going to take over. There are going to think, look I could just do this you know am the one that obviously going to get the thing done. We did address it and it wasn’t difficult because people were very committed to doing the right thing. When people are committed you can overcome all kinds of problems. We have found that collective working helps in many ways. Firstly it helps with the overwhelming burden of knowing that people face deportation back to torture or even death. That’s a very big thing to carry and we never want to carry it on our own. The other advantage of collective working is that there is no room for ego trips and ego mania. I am sure this is something you also have experienced. Talented people who may often be dedicated can quickly become a special case and others put up with the egomania that results as the necessary price to pay for their success. People don’t protest because they can’t see that there is any other way of getting things done. But egomania results in people become more and more detached from reality. Crucially others don’t get trained because they think ‘I could never be as good as that’. We don’t want one woman and her supporters, we want a team because that’s the most effective way of working. Finally, our other principle is that there is always something that can be done. No case is hopeless. We refuse to allow an increasingly brutal government to set the standard of what is just or not, what is reasonable or not, what is compassionate and what is not. Our Guide is an anti-sexist, anti-racist tool. It help us maintain our sense of outrage at the injustice we see by giving us the means to be effective against it. |