VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN | UNITED KINGDOM | ADVOCACY & POLICY
OpEd: Casual Racism, Migrant Women and Small Towns
WORDS BY SONA NIKOGHOSYAN | SONA@THEIWI.ORG | 29 OCTOBER 2024
In my small seaside hometown, the seagulls are up before anyone else and you can tell too from their screeches. The sea salt air hits your face and in the town centre, the vibe is bustling. You’ll walk up to the chip stalls and while you get your kiddy cone with ketchup please, the native next to you comments on the amount of foreigners we have these days!
When brainstorming what to write for this article, my best friend told me this anecdote. She was at the sweeties shop buying bonbons and little sugar stars for her kids, when the owner of the store exclaimed how grateful she was that “[they] didn’t come a couple days earlier because some G***y man and his kids came in and stuck their hand in the jar of sweets! I had to chuck them out cause you can never be too sure where they’ve been.” When she tells me this I’m not even mildly surprised, in fact, it was quite tame compared to the extent of racism I’d been privy to in this small town.
If you want to know the true extent of small town racism merely look at our new MP who has decided upon himself to film an expose on how bad migration is for the country. Shoving a camera in the faces of the factory workers waiting for their coach to take them to work, exclaiming “look, all they do is loiter and claim benefits”, as the migrants drive off to work. “This town has gone to shit because of them” exclaims the MP of a historical tourist town which is severely underfunded and overlooked constantly with multiple deprivation indices. I’m taking liberties here with the quotes as the film has not been released yet however, I can’t imagine someone who’s manifesto poster includes the phrase “I may get accused of being racist but quite simply, I don’t care” (appendix 1), is going to look nicely upon third country nationals.
Since the traditional seaside holiday decline during the 1980s, issues of high unemployment, below average salaries and a shockingly low qualification rate. Nested in the crest of the UK with subpar travel infrastructure, as one of the most deprived districts in England, is it any surprise to learn a decade of austerity has halved core spending power between 2010 and 2023. You would think a tourist town would be happy with foreigners coming, paying taxes… Besides, there’s 1001 papers on how immigrants help the economy, raise growth and fulfil gaps in particular sectors.
On Facebook, the new Brexit/Reform/UKIP/EDL MP states that he intends to “save British women from the migrant men”, it’s not a surprise that racism and women’s rights gets intertwined, especially in the face of fearmongering headlines like “Albanian gangs target UK mums-to-be”. This age old stereotype of migrant men coming over to rape women and impose their misogynistic cultures has long been a reason to tighten the leash on immigration policies in the UK. Particularly critiqued is ex-Home Secretary Priti Patel’s 2021 plan for Immigration that intended to detain “llegal immigrants, but of course, if you detain asylum seekers who have possibly fled rape, prostitution, trafficking, and FGM, you risk not only retraumatising them but also places them in environments which leads them vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse (Canning, 2014).
Additionally, it’s been researched that migrant women are more vulnerable to domestic abuse – particularly if they’re dependant on their abuser for their immigration status and women with insecure immigration status find it harder to access public funds and refuges to escape violence and abuse. Which begs the question – who are these anti-immigration policies protecting? Are we really protecting women by placing stricter immigration laws if every available study shows the opposite? We must consider that perhaps it was never about protecting women and maybe it’s always been about protecting our metaphorical “sweet shops” from the “dirty hands” of those we deem other.
Bibliography
Canning, V. (2014). Women, asylum and the harms of detention: Victoria Canning argues that our government’s treatment of survivors of torture, sexual violence, and persecution is too often degrading and dehumanising. Criminal Justice Matters, 98(1), 10–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/09627251.2014.984535
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