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Meet the social workers supporting refugees in Calais
A recent article (originally published) in Community Care about the brilliant things Social Workers Without Borders and Social Work First have been up to- we’ll be joining forces soon, which will strengthen our work (and spread the workload!) Our first joint national planning meeting is in London in September. If you want to know more about this project you can get in touch at [email protected].
By Lynn King and Kate Grant
The refugee crisis has divided opinion throughout Europe.
The Brexit debate showed that public sympathy for refugees, when aligned with individual experiences of economic strain, creates an uncomfortable conflict in people’s minds.
People don’t want to see refugees subject to the appalling circumstances revealed by the media, but our own fears for our socioeconomic conditions also need to be addressed.
The dominant political narrative in Europe has provided a convenient escape route for these contradictory views and the difficult feelings they induce. But as a consequence, refugees have been blamed. They are labelled ‘economic migrants’ – not desperate human beings in need of sanctuary. Yet again, the victims of society have been blamed for their victimisation.
Where does social work position itself in this narrative? Social workers live and work in communities where people’s fears are real and accord with many of our own concerns.
How does this then impact on our professional views and subsequent practice?
In a bid to respond to these challenges, two initiatives have returned to the heart of ethical social work practice; to be a challenging force against social injustice and to work in solidarity with refugees and those displaced by war and poverty.
Social Work First
By Lynn King
Social Work First was established by two social workers in Kent in March 2016. Our group currently comprises over 400 members and 80 social workers and social work student volunteers. This number grows each day.
We visit the Calais refugee camp, AKA the Jungle, on a weekly basis. The stories we’ve encountered are deeply shocking and upsetting. We recently conducted an assessment of two young unaccompanied children, aged just eight and 11-years-old.
With no parents to provide love and safety, the children relayed how they slept in a cold tent, were frightened of adults and the policy, and that there is not enough food. The French police confiscated free food in July 2016, citing it was not fit for consumption.
Needless to say, the authorities didn’t provide more food.
We also assessed the needs of two families in the camp. Both have young children who are unable to play outside, exhausted parents, and young mothers who are subject to sexual indignation and harassment. Their living conditions are a tiny caravan with no beds or toilets.
‘Challenging misconceptions’
Our work here has quickly developed into three distinctive strands: direct work with people living in the camp, social work education in the UK, and campaigning for the inhumanity suffered by adults and children to be exposed and challenged.
We are working with voluntary organisation Shelter Legal to do assessments of needs and best interests for unaccompanied children and vulnerable families, in order to support their legal claims to be reunited with family living in the UK.
We also liaise with other groups supporting people in the camp and one of our members is working with them to develop a project that sends social workers to the camp, so they can gain an understanding of the conditions people face and their reasons for being there.
This learning can then be used to challenge misconceptions held within current social work practice, particularly in relation to age assessments.
Social Workers Without Borders
By Kate Grant
This is a collective of social workers in the UK, formed in 2016 as a response to the deepening crisis of those without safe passage. We are partnered with the global Social Work Without Borders network, based in America, Norway and Sweden.
We are a grassroots movement of practitioners, students and individuals who have volunteered at refugee camps. We felt the need to come together and organise our profession in the face of the humanitarian crisis of our lifetime.
We believe that our social work skills and knowledge can be utilised to minimise risk and promote the rights and dignity of those affected by borders. We aim to use a strengths-based and structural model of social work to highlight and campaign on the political and social injustice that threatens people’s freedom to stay, and limits their freedom to move.
We see the ‘refugee crisis’ as a result of structural oppressions both here and overseas, and as a crisis of care; not a crisis caused by those who flee.
We also believe that everyone has a right to social care. We want to work with statutory and voluntary sector social care providers to ensure that the specific needs of those without regular immigration status are met by our services. Experience and research has highlighted a knowledge gap in some areas of social care when it comes to working with people who fall outside of mainstream welfare systems, or who do not have recourse to public funds.
Our message as a profession is clear: we should not be focusing on the securitisation of borders, but the safe passage of the most vulnerable in conjunction with the values and ethics attuned to social work. These two initiatives stand in solidarity with those whose lives are torn apart by war, poverty, oppression and hostile political responses.
We hope to use our voice and specialist knowledge to assist those seeking asylum, those without leave to remain, and without access to appropriate services and advice.
We invite you to get involved.
Volunteering in Greece showed me how vital social work is in this refugee crisis
*originally published by The Guardian Social Care network @ https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/social-life-blog/2016/mar/09/volunteering-greece-europe-vital-social-work-refugee-crisis
I am writing this reflection on my last month at the refugee camp in Leros, Greece from the back of a transit van on a narrow Italian lay-by. It’s hard not to draw contrasts between the ease of my own journey back through Europe, and the huge bureaucratic, geographic and climatic obstacles the people I have spent the last weeks with will face. My mind is in two places. As I make plans for my return home, my thoughts wander back to the women and girls I spent my last evening dancing with, a few minutes of normality before we embarked on the ferry to Athens, and to very different journeys ahead. Between writing, I’m reading about the bulldozing of the Calais refugee camp. Seven years ago I was in Calais as an undergraduate student and activist, opposing the destruction of the camps then. Fast-forward through the years and we have come full circle. This time around, as a newly-qualified social worker, I decided to take what I hoped would be applicable skills to the crisis unfolding on the European borders, and went as a volunteer to the camp on the tiny Greek island of Leros. My experience has confirmed there is a great need for social workers at the UK and EU borders.
In January, the Taskforce on Children on the Move highlighted that the EU is failing to safeguard children from the risks of exploitation, trafficking and abuse. Disturbing reports from Athens indicate the risk of child sexual exploitation in the city’s crowded transit camps. Similarly the Women’s Refugee Commission highlighted that we are failing to safeguard refugee women in Europe.
Knowledge of adult and child safeguarding is crucial in these vulnerable environments.Inspired by refugee women speaking about the risks they face as they make their journey through Europe, I spent my last week creating a quiet space for women in the camp by converting a storage room into a small lounge. My observation is that it provided a release for women and girls whose presence is often overshadowed in the busy camps. By bringing refugee women together with female volunteers we created an environment in which safeguarding issues relating to these women could be identified, recorded and responded to.
Social workers are not immigration officers or resource managers, we are advocates with a duty of care. Sadly, this project could be rapidly halted as my last days in Leros also saw the opening of the new, fully militarised facility on the island that will replace the existing camp. It visually and functionally resembles a prison. The future for the vast infrastructure and resources set up by locals, non-governmental organisations and independent volunteers is uncertain. In my view, the military hotspot is a further step towards the securitisation and militarising of a political and humanitarian crisis. Our fear on the ground is that as the focus shifts to management of this crisis the humanity is lost.
This is where I see the second role of social workers: to challenge the reduction of the European refugee story to one of management and security. This narrative has direct implications for the reception of vulnerable people in Europe. Social workers can challenge the idea that this is a crisis of refugees. This is a crisis in international relations. As social workers we don’t have to become complicit in the question of what to do about refugees, but can focus on the question of why people become refugees in the first place. When the EU puts forward a story of economic migrants to be controlled, or victims to be relocated, we can put forward the more nuanced stories of people and their environments. People who, like the inhabitants of Kobani, Syria, are fighting discrimination and organising collectively to free themselves from a future of political and economic repression.
As social workers we don’t treat people as embodiments of their problems; we root out the causes and work alongside them to find solutions. As I make my slow departure from Leros, I am also taking away important lessons for my social work practice. The volunteers I have worked with do an awful lot of excellent, lay social work: fundraising, allocating resources, ensuring children are clothes and fed, befriending, assessing and advocating. As volunteers, accountable only to the people in front of us, we are responsive to need, and can respond dynamically to people’s situations. We are not tied up in bureaucratic strangleholds and the results are incredibly impressive.I’m not suggesting that everyone jumps on the next plane to Calais or Leros.
But the security agenda creeping on to this island exists in our workplaces. We can play an important role in resisting this at home by ensuring our assessments and care plans reflect need (regardless of age, nationality, immigration status) and not what someone else has decided is available. This must be what Munro meant when she advocated for social workers to be driven by professional wisdom, not procedures. We are not immigration officers or resource managers, we are advocates with a duty of care. When we tap into our professional or experiential wisdom, we are tapping into our value base, to the fire in our belly that led us to social work, to the lessons we learned in our training, from each other, and from the people who use our services.
Social workers have a duty to speak up about the humanitarian crisis in Calais
*originally published by The Guardian Social Care Network @ https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/2015/aug/04/social-workers-humanitarian-crisis-calais Contrary to what it would be easy to believe in light of the government and media response to the situation in Calais, we have a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep. Last week David Cameron came under fire from the Refugee Council for describing the people in Calais as a “swarm”; dehumanising language that is typical in inflammatory arguments (rhetorical traditions I examined in my own doctoral research). Swarms, migrants, boat people; the function of this language is to naturalise the situation of the men and women who are risking their lives to come to the UK. Swarms are managed, migrants are controlled, boat people drown.
But, beneath this loaded language, are the lives of real men and women, who have families, who have left jobs, who have made plans and paid money to come to the UK, and who are losing their lives in the most desperate of circumstances. And among them are children and young people too. Kent county council spoke out to say social services are under “enormous strain” due to the unprecedented number of unaccompanied asylum seeking and migrant children entering the area. We have a statutory duty outlined in the Children Act 2004 to care for these girls, boys, and young men and women. The act reminds us that the welfare of children and young people up to the age of 18 is paramount, and that “safeguarding children is everyone’s responsibility”. It is right then, that Paul Carter, leader of Kent county council, is calling for the Home Office and children’s services across England to assist in the delivery of care to these young people. But what about the 18-year-olds?
This question is frequently asked by social workers who see time and time again the rapid withdrawal of services from teens as they transition to adulthood. The 20-year-old who has left their family, for the first time, not to go to university, or start their first job, but to travel thousands of miles across several continents with strangers, in the most unimaginable conditions? The 27-year-old who has left behind an impoverished family to seek work in the UK so their kids can go to school? The terrified 30-year-old who has fled Syria for fear of being caught up in the country’s violent conflict? What about these people? I’m sure struggling councils breathe a sigh of relief that they don’t, in the main, have to fork out for people with “irregular” immigration status, that no recourse to public funds teams work closely with the Home Office to report those here without status, and that the funding offered is minimal and time limited.
But, as a profession, our duty to stand up for the most vulnerable should not only be dictated by government legislation. Social work is an autonomous and international profession whose duty, at times, is to challenge oppressive practices by the very governments that mandate for our work. As the International Federation of Social Workers reminds us: The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance wellbeing. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work. By this standard we have a duty to promote the rights of those people who find themselves at the Calais border, and those who make it into the UK. As social workers, we should be promoting a position on Calais that holds to account the social systems – historical (colonialism) and present (capitalism) – that have brought these people to the UK border in search of better lives, and a taste of the wealth that Britain has built on the back of their families, national resources and economies. As a profession, we should interject into dehumanising and discriminatory discourses that present vulnerable people as “swarms” and as a problem to be solved (or removed).
This is one of the most significant humanitarian crises to come to our borders. I think it’s more important now, than ever, as the identity of UK social work is in flux again, to remind ourselves that social work transcends local authority guidelines and government legislation; that we are an international profession that stands for social justice for people within and outside of the UK.AdvertisementWe can do this by introducing new norms and expectations into our workplaces, by challenging colleagues and managers, by reminding ourselves, and others, that thresholds are for resource distribution and management, they are not an indicator of need. Through our assessments, our conversations with our colleagues and service users, we can hold to account the language that takes away humanity and rights from migrants –regardless of their age.
Using the word “person” instead of “migrant” is a simple way to do this, or by adopting the method of non-compliance with Home Office immigration surveillance as academic institutions did in 2014. From my personal experience, working with people who have irregular immigration status in the UK, and spending time in the streets and “jungles” in Calais, treating someone as a human being in the most degrading of circumstances is a powerful act of kindness. As a profession we need to stand up and speak out to challenge the language of the debate.Migrants are people; people have rights and their lives are valuable, regardless of borders. As a profession it is our duty to uphold and protect these rights
Off to assist Babs at her @botanicalinks natural dye workshop 🍇🍒🍁🌺 at Soho Works #Naturaldyes #Soho #Shoreditch #plantbaseddye
// WOMEN REFUGEES // Fourth week at the refugee camp. As a final project before leaving we’ve set up a women’s social space at the camp.
UNHCR records indicate female refugees made up 11% of the refugee population entering Europe, it is now 20%. This Al Jazeera article exposes the risks women in particular face:
“ We have to take care of the children. That's a never-ending task. It's easier for men. They only have to worry about themselves." “In the Amnesty report, women described the lengths that they go to to minimise the risk: many did not eat or drink so that they would not have to use the toilet; some left the camps to sleep in the open because they felt safer there”.
The Women Refugee Commission highlights that “at every point where risk could be mitigated, the opportunity to do so is squandered” http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/02/life-female-refugee-don-trust-160210092005932.html2 Women Refugee Commission (2016) , No Safety for Refugee Women on the European Route
Reason #1: It is a movie whose plot hinges on the very real dangers of illegal abortion.
I KNEW IT.
I am in love with Bari! I just got lost (literally, not emotionally, cringe) in the narrow streets filled with kitsch religious art trying to find the Basilica San Nicola, a pilgrimage sight for Eastern European Christians. 👣💒 Now I've accidently ordered a ridiculous meal which looks like a bowl of fennel and a side plate of hot crisps...hmm...must work on my Italian. #bari #basilicasannicola #lost #religiousart #kitsch #womenonthemove
// FUNNY BONE // Bari, Italy. 6 cities in 4 days. #bari #italy #earlymorning #womenonthemove #womentravellers
Good morning Milan! Caffè, ordered in French, in some kind of pseudo Italian accent. Fuzzy, like my head feels after 14 hours on a bus, 42 hours on the road. #Milan #womentravellers #goodmorning #coffee
A little stop off in Paris 🗼 Stretched my legs along the steps to the Biblioteque Nationale and wined (well diet coked) and dined myself in a little Indian restaurant whilst putting the world to rights with the waiter. Next stop Milan! #paris #milan #travel #adventure #womentravellers #womenonthemove #wineanddineyourself
There's something quite relaxing about watching lorries fly by on long stretches of French motorway... #artofslowliving #slowtravel #ontheroad
Bus No.2 on my 5 day over-land travel to Greece. London to Milan! Blue skies in London this morning 👍 #travel #london #milan #ontheroad
Stop-off No.1 on my 5 day, overland trip to Greece: Lots of giggles and gasps listening to @lucieloves recent adventures! 🙊 Thanks for the book share Lu. Yes to being a free range human! #london #travel #greece #freerangehuman #adventure #bestfriends #bookstagram
Sweet treats to take to the picket lines tomorrow morning! #veganbaking #notsafenotfair #supportthestrikers #supportjuniordoctors
// RIP DAVID BOWIE // Stay weird my friends ⚡ 💋 Be however many whoevers you want to be. Don't stop.