Encounters with kindness: everyday and extraordinary kind interventions in the lives of forced migrant survivors of SGBV

ABSTRACT

While much attention is given to understanding the nature of the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) encountered by forced migrants, far less focus is placed on the actions and experiences that enable them to cope with violence. In this paper, we adopt a novel perspective examining forced migrants’ accounts of kind encounters with strangers who are not obligated to offer assistance. We draw on 166 semi-structured interviews with forced migrant SGBV survivors to examine the nature of kind encounters, the contexts in which they occur, and their reported outcomes. Our analysis reveals that kind encounters manifest across forced migration journeys and range from the extraordinary to the everyday. Kind encounters offer vital help and support and can connect people across cleavages while fostering resistance against degrading heteropatriarchal and bordering practices. The significance that respondents attach to such encounters underscores gaps in humanitarian protection and the normalization of cruelty towards forced migrants. We argue that kind encounters are inherently micropolitical, influencing social relations, and confronting gendered and racialized hierarchies. By uncovering the importance of kind encounters, we present a fresh perspective on the experiences of SGBV in forced migration with much potential in the study of migration.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced migration
• sexual and gender-based violence
• kind encounters
• micropolitics

Introduction

The number of forcibly displaced people reached an all-time high in 2022 of over one-hundred million (UNHCR 2023) with populations increasingly feminised (UNHCR 2022). While the largest proportion of forced migrants are internally displaced or reside in adjacent countries, some fourteen per cent end up in countries of the Global North as refugees, or seeking refugee status (UNHCR 2021). Forced migrants often experience a continuum of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), over time and place, involving multiple perpetrators (Hourani et al. 2021; Krause 2015; Papoutsi et al. 2022). Female forced migrants in particular often experience multiple incidents of SGBV comprising interpersonal, symbolic and structural violence (Calderón-Jaramillo et al. 2020). Attention has been paid to the nature of such violence with the main focus on experiences at particular points on the continuum such as during conflict, through to internal displacement, and in camps (Hourani et al. 2021). Far less attention has been paid to the actions and experiences that enable people to survive and cope in the face of multiple forms of violence (Hourani et al. 2021).

Our earlier work, building on that of others (Canning 2017; Freedman 2016), has described the suffering, harm and trauma caused by SGBV and the lack of resources available to aid recovery (Bradby et al. 2023) and support long-term integration (Phillimore et al. 2023). In this paper, we report on data recounting the importance of kind encounters for forced migrant victims/survivors of SGBV. We ask what types of kind encounters SGBV survivors experience, in what contexts and with what outcomes. We focus on acts of kindness offered by strangers who are not obliged to provide victims/survivors with assistance. We show that such encounters occur at different points in forced migration journeys. They can be extraordinary or banal but offer vital help and support and the potential to connect people across social cleavages and foster both some resilience to the degrading practices embedded within heteropatriarchy and cruel bordering systems. We contend that the importance respondents placed on kind encounters highlights gaps in humanitarian protection and the normativity of cruelty towards forced migrants. The adoption of a kindness lens uncovers the importance of kind encounters and offers a novel perspective on the experiences of SGBV in forced migration while emphasising the importance of researching kindness in relation to the sociology of supportive relations (Brownlie and Anderson 2017).

Forced migration, SGBV, bordering and kindness

Forced migrants acquire different labels according to context, but share experiences as persons subject, for whatever reason, to coerced migratory movement (IOM 2011). The term includes all who have been forced to migrate, those categorised as refugees, individuals whose status is being determined, failed asylum seekers, and those who have not yet claimed asylum. Levels of SGBV amongst forced migrants are unknown because data collection is poor and stigma discourages reporting (Papoutsi et al. 2022) but estimates suggest up to 69.3% of female forced migrants have been victimised (Keygnaert, Vettenburg, and Temmerman 2012). There is no single definition of SGBV. Herein we use a definition commonly adopted internationally:

Any harmful act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and that is based on socially ascribed (i.e. gender) differences between males and females. It includes acts that inflict physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty. These acts can occur in public or in private. (Interagency Standing Committee 2015, 5).

This definition is broad but like considerations of SGBV (and interchangeable terms GBV and VAW) its use of the term ‘act’ under-emphasises the often continued and dynamic nature of SGBV experiences. Those forced to migrate to escape poverty, conflict, persecution and environmental crises are frequently compelled to cross borders clandestinely. They are often framed as ‘illegal’ and outside the protection of the states through which they transit and where they seek refuge with no state or institution having responsibility for their welfare. Forced migration is a major risk factor shaping vulnerability to SGBV especially for women and girls. They are subject to multiple experiences of SGBV at the hands of multiple perpetrators in what has become known as the continuum of SGBV (Krause 2015; Papoutsi et al. 2022). We show elsewhere that these risks continue into refuge and that victims/survivors have extremely limited access to protection and support across all points in the continuum (Hourani et al. 2021; Papoutsi et al. 2022).

Scholars have highlighted the ways in which bordering practices intentionally make vulnerable those forced to migrate. The concept of bordering moves beyond understanding borders as fixed boundaries and pinpoints the practices that enforce them (Jones and Johnson 2014; Perkins and Chris 2013; Vaughan-Williams 2008). Scholars view borders as expressions of a regime (Vickers 2018), enacted and performed everyday (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2017), by multiple actors and through multiple practices (bureaucracy, asylum interviews, etc.). Borders are politics aimed at categorising people through the regulation of legal status and rights, placing individuals in new kinds of power relations (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2011). Bordering takes place at multiple levels: from the human body, which has a bearing on an individuals’ sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2017), to different localities and spaces that govern migrant mobility1969). Bordering is a form of structural violence because borders are structures of inequality inflicting avoidable harms wherein violence is committed not by an individual, but results from inequalities built into social structures (Galtung ). Bordering practices have resulted in, and are driven by, the migration industrial complex wherein vast sums of money are spent on infrastructure and systems that line the pockets of capitalists while enacting the border (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2013; Uhde 2020). For forced migrants, bordering is the outcome of encounters within asylum and immigration regimes, which inflict intersectional harms, including SGBV (Canning 2017; Pertek et al. 2022).

Heteropatriarchy expresses the ways in which male dominance is at the core of all aspects of society and is embedded in structures such as immigration policy. Heteropatriarchy constructs women’s role as subservient and household based and allows punishment of individuals who do not conform to expected norms (Everett et al. 2022), such as failing to remain within their home in their country of origin. Heteropatriarchy is also connected to bordering practices since it is ‘the building block of nation state governance’ (Smith 2015, 71). Forced migrants face multiple and well-documented cruelties through interacting and reinforcing heteropatriarchal and bordering systems (Papoutsi et al. 2022; Canning 2017; Krause 2015) yet somehow many survive despite lack of protection and care. Much scholarship has documented the horrific cruelties that forced migrant SGBV survivors face but surprisingly little has looked at the mechanisms that enable survival, coping and hope. In our project, we wanted to understand the nature of services survivors might access by asking individuals residing in five countries about the help they received. To our surprise, a quarter of them recounted encounters with kindness as a source of help, often following abandonment by states and the humanitarian sector.

Kindness is seen as having potential sociologically to understand supportive relations but has received scant scholarly attention. Kindness is an emotion, a behaviour and a constituent part of the human condition. Kindness has its origins in kin, and kindred, suggesting the importance of human encounters and associations (Magnet and Trevenen 2014). It goes beyond empathy, to action, and involves identifying with, and addressing, the concerns of others (Clegg and Rowland 2010). Habibis, Hookway, and Vreugdenhil (2016) argue that kindness sits somewhere between altruism and its expectation of prioritising the good of others (Dean 2023), and everyday civility. Brownlie and Anderson (2017) see kindness as operating at a lower intensity than solidarity and altruism, with the emotional undertones of kindness perhaps where the difference lies. Kindness is ‘the ability to bear the vulnerability of others’ (Phillips and Taylor cited in Magnet and Trevenen 2014, 8). It is an action rooted in compassion, that is feeling for others, and, to some degree, sharing their suffering (Malti 2021).

While kindness might be considered a trait or a value, it is also tangible, because it constitutes an act that people do for another in moments of need (Brownlie and Anderson 2017). Following ethnographic work in Scotland, Brownlie and Anderson (2017) identified four features of kindness. Kindness constitutes an offer of small-scale practical help, it involves recognising and voluntarily responding to need, and it can have emotional consequences for the helper and/or the helped. It is also interpersonal and has the potential to challenge social categories or generate solidarity. Thus, kindness is an unobligated action that may have affective, material, and/or social consequences.

To date, kindness has received little attention in sociology, gender or migration studies (Habibis, Hookway, and Vreugdenhil 2016). Although interest in kindness is growing, we could identify no published academic studies on kindness in the context of SGBV and migration scholarship, where attention has justifiably fallen on violence and trauma. Acts of kindness may be extraordinary but more often they are unremarkable and even banal (Ware and Ware 2022). Kindness can be beneficial for the wellbeing of the recipient and the actor (Curry et al. 2018; Post 2005). Recipients may experience kindness as dignifying (Gallagher 2012). Kindness can enable the building of coalitions across differences, reshape power relations and has been described as a mechanism for social transformation (Magnet and Trevenen 2014, 8) or ‘a light infrastructure of sociality’ (Thrift 2005 in Brownlie and Anderson 2017, 1225). It is capable of making other things happen from the practical to the solidaristic (Anderson and Brownlee 2019). Being the recipient of kindness(es) may protect forced migrants or support SGBV survivors with recovery.

The interpersonal nature of kindness means it inevitably results from an encounter, an unexpected meeting or an experience involving at least two persons (Goffman 1961). Considerable attention has been given to encounters in both sociology and anthropology. Goffman’s (1961) work on the mechanisms that shape participants’ interactions to produce a satisfactory encounter is perhaps most the influential, but Goffman’s main focus is on performance. Encounters are frequently characterised by resource exchange. Simmel (in Komter 2007) suggests that reciprocity through exchange is the basis of network formation. The exchange involves an initial sacrifice: parting with something of value, but also the risk of a gift spurned (Möllering 2001). Komter (2007) argues that resource exchange supports the development of mutual loyalty and has the potential to connect people across social cleavages. Resource exchange is generally considered to involve material goods. But other kinds of exchange have been identified. Wise (2005) highlights the exchange of cultural knowledge in cosmopolitan encounters while others have focused on convivial encounters wherein friendships result from patterns of mutuality realised during routine encounters between people from different backgrounds (Wessendorf 2014). Phillimore, Humphris, and Khan (2018) show, in relation to migrant newcomers, encounters can involve the exchange of information. Such encounters may not always follow patterns of norm-based reciprocity with some individuals under-reciprocating as they lack resources to repay their part of the exchange contract. Elsewhere scholars have looked at the encounters that occur within the humanitarian border-work of volunteers working in the Refugees Welcome movement and how these have the potential to transform or reproduce hierarchies and power relations (Monforte and Maestri 2022). Kind encounters, wherein one party performs some act of kindness for another, are a form of exchange that does not follow reciprocity norms because the gift of kindness is not inevitably reciprocated. In this paper, we ask what are the effects of such kind encounters on forced migrant SGBV survivors?

Methods

This article offers an original analysis of data collected in the SEREDA project focusing on the experiences of forced migrant victims/survivors of SGBV. The data used herein was collected in England, Sweden, Australia, Turkey and Tunisia, with these countries selected based on their different immigration, protection, asylum and resettlement regimes. In brief, Australia largely receives resettlement refugees and those joining on a spousal visa and has a particularly hostile asylum policy. Sweden received large numbers of asylum seekers in the 2015 Refugee Emergency, subsequently hardening its asylum and family reunion policies. Turkey is a country of transit, as well as settlement, where access to asylum is highly restricted. The category of Temporary Protection was introduced following the arrival of individuals displaced from Syria. Tunisia does not have an asylum system and its policies reflect the country’s transit function. Finally, most forced migrants arrive in England as asylum seekers with a shift to increasingly hostile policies and ‘managed migration’ via resettlement schemes (see Supplementary Materials for more details).

In each country, researchers partnered with NGOs to design research tools and recruit survivors to participate in the study on a voluntary basis. Contact was also made through snowballing sampling techniques with respondents, a social media campaign, and our own networks. We sought respondents from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (N = 128) or Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (N = 38) as NGO partners reported individuals from these countries represented the largest groups of survivors. Respondents faced different journeys, along different routes and over different periods of time as well as receiving different kinds of support but they shared the commonalities of forced migration and SGBV experiences. We undertook 166 interviews with interviewees varying by immigration status with the majority female cis-women aged from early twenties to seventy years old. Interviews were semi-structured, lasting between 30 and 90 minutes and conducted in the respondents’ chosen language aided by a trusted interpreter or by multi-lingual researchers. Most interviews were digitally recorded, with notes made where recording was not possible. Audio files were transcribed, anonymised, and translated into English. The transcriptions and notes were coded in NVivo, with codes developed collaboratively across the team and Phillimore checking validity.

To understand the mechanisms that supported survivors we asked them about the type of help received since being forced to migrate. Phillimore, Project Lead, on reading transcripts noticed that several respondents spontaneously shared stories about helpful acts of kindness. Having established kindness as a recurring inductive theme, Hourani and Pertek undertook further data analysis identifying 39 respondents volunteering information about encounters with kindness (see Table 1). We then analysed when and where the kindness took place, the circumstances in which it occurred, the nature of the actor and the kindness, and its outcome. Other respondents did not discuss kindness, some referred to services that had supported them, while others said they received no help. For the purpose of identification, we defined kindness as per Brownlie and Anderson (2017) as actions intended to help and offered without obligation. Thus, the data analysed reflects Brownlie and Anderson’s understanding of the nature of kindness rather than respondents’ accounts of what kindness looked like.

Table 1. Survivor sample summary (bracketed numbers are the whole sample).

Region of origin		Australia	Sweden	Turkey	UK	Tunisia	Total
	MENA	6 (15)	8 (29)	7 (37)	4 (32)	9 (15)	35 (128)
	Sub-Saharan Africa	(1)	(1)		4 (36)		4 (38)
Gender	cis-woman	6 (16)	5 (17)	6 (27)	8 (54)	9 (15)	35 (129)
	cis-man		2 (12)	(8)	(13)		2 (33)
	Trans woman		1 (1)		(1)		1 (2)
	Trans man (born intersex)			1 (2)			1 (2)
Sexuality	Heterosexual	6 (16)	1 (28)	6 (32)	6 (41)	8 (14)	34 (131)
	Gay		1 (2)	1 (5)	(2)		2 (9)
	Lesbian				(2)	1 (1)	1 (3)
	Not known				2 (23)		2 (23)
Age	18–20s	0	3 (9)	2 (13)	(14)	2 (4)	7 (40)
	30s	2 (8)	4 (12)	2 (14)	6 (24)	6 (7)	20 (65)
	40s	3 (7)	1 (5)	2 (7)	(5)	1 (4)	8 (28)
	50s	1 (1)	(4)	1 (3)	(2)		2 (10)
	70s				(1)		(1)
	Not known				2 (22)		2 (22)
Migration status	Asylum seeker (AS)		(9)		5 (27)	(5)	5 (41)
	Refused AS/Undocumented		(1)		1 (9)	7 (7)	8 (16)
	Refugee (permanent)	6 (11)	6 (17)	3	2 (21)	2 (3)	19 (52)
	Refugee (temporary)			5 (16)			5 (16)
	Spousal visas	(2)	1 (1)		(7)		1 (21)
	Citizen/permanent resident	(3)	1		(4)		1 (7)
Marital status	Single	0	2 (13)	2 (8)	6 (29)	5 (5)	16 (55)
	Married	2 (7)	3 (9)	1 (14)	1 (17)	1 (6)	8 (53)
	Divorced	3 (4)	3 (6)	3 (6)	1 (9)	(1)	10 (26)
	Co-habit					1	1 (5)
	Separated	1 (4)		1 (7)	(5)	2 (2)	4 (18)
	Widower	(1)	(2)	(2)			(5)
	Not Known				(4)		(4)

The accounts offer an indication of the significance of such kindnesses to the respondents who elected to discuss them. Given that these were volunteered in response to questions about help, kind encounters may also have been experienced but not raised by other respondents.

Ethical approval was gained from relevant authorities in the respective countries. Interviewers first explained to potential participants the topics to be covered. Once informed consent was given and interviews commenced, participants could stop at any point but all chose to continue. Each country followed a protocol setting out the procedures to follow if the interviewee or interviewer became distressed, and how to interview in a trauma-sensitive manner. We were able to refer respondents to pre-identified support as needed. Interviewers were asked to limit the number of interviews they undertook each week and were given optional access to psychological support.

Findings

Kind encounters occurred across the refugee journey from conflict to refuge. One encounter was reported during conflict in Syria and four where survivors had been forced to stop and work en–route. Fifteen encounters happened while in flight, often in the streets or while moving through countryside or desert. Nineteen encounters were reported in countries of refuge. Encounters differed in intensity and timeframe.

Extraordinary encounters

A number of encounters recalled by respondents was extraordinary because they involved considerable courage on the part of individuals. For example, Fatma from Sierra Leone was repeatedly raped while imprisoned in a Libyan brothel. A guard noticed that she was ‘very sick’ and fearing she may die helped her to escape. Also in Libya, Fadila from Ivory Coast, was imprisoned having entered ‘illegally’. She explained to a guard why she had entered the country and that she had lost her husband. The guard pitied her and helped her to escape imprisonment and leave Libya. Both guards, though part of the structures of oppression, stepped out of their roles and heteropatriarchal systems which degrade women, to notice the pain and suffering of their captives, risking possibly violent consequences of undermining those in power. We also heard an example of courage and kindness in Samia’s story. Samia was forced into an extremely violent marriage in Afghanistan and was trying to escape her husband’s family in order to prevent her daughter’s forced marriage. They were sheltering in a hostel in Iran when her brother-in-law entered, hit her and produced a gun, seemingly intending to kill her and return her children to Afghanistan. In an act of bravery and kindness, the hostel owner saved her by tackling the aggressor and facilitating her escape:

The owner of the hostel took his gun away and told him to leave for the night and come back the next morning and take me and children back. After he left, I talked to the owner of the hostel and told him that my husband’s brother would kill me if they let him take me and my children. I asked them to take me to Turkey. They put me and my children in a truck and asked me where to go. (Samia, under International Protection, Turkey)

In the above cases, and other similar instances, victims/survivors encounter kindness that enabled them to escape and survive.

Accepting an offer of help could, and sometimes did, result in respondents being tricked into dangerous situations where they ended up captive, raped and/or robbed. Thus taking up an offer of kindness represented a risk as well as a chance of survival and/or the ability to continue their journey. While many encounters with kindness during the journey were proffered by local people, some were helped by other migrants who risked their own safety to help a stranger. Melanie, from Cameroon, told of a kind encounter that occurred after the boat she was in capsized off the Libyan coast. Trying to escape the scene she was being pursued by the police, a situation which could end in violence or even death, for crossing borders illegally. A group of male Guinean migrants, also escaping, offered to help her. With no prospect of other assistance, Melanie said going with the Guineans was her only option. They offered her shelter and, even though she had given up hope of being reunited with her husband, they managed to find him, facilitating reunion and Melanie’s onward migration.

They called me, ‘where are you going?’ I was [afraid] they do me [harm] but they say, ‘No – don’t you fear, we will help you’. So they take me, they take me to their house. After, they ask me questions, they tell me if I want to call family. I say, ‘No, I have no number for family … ’. So, they told me to give them the number. (Melanie, irregular migrant, Tunisia)

In the above examples, we see how kind encounters sometimes saved lives, but also enabled victims/survivors to resist bordering practices by continuing their journeys.

Everyday

Other kind encounters were as Ware and Ware (2022) describe, banal, but nonetheless had important outcomes for survivors. Jamila, escaping conflict in Syria with her children, experienced several kind encounters. In Turkey, a shopkeeper allowed them to shelter overnight, away from the heat and the dangers of sleeping on the street. In Greece, so many people gave them food and toiletry items that Jamila could share her gifts with others.

Greeks are so kind, every once in a while, someone would pass and stop to give us something. They gave us bags of necessities, if only you could see the bags of pads they sent, cars would stop and ask us if we’re coming from Syria, they’d give us food and pizza. They sympathized with our situation a lot, and we had a lot of food so we started going around looking for people to give it to. I guess it was the sight of the kids with us that made them help. (Jamila, refugee, Sweden).

After reaching Sweden, Jamila’s family was placed in a remote area, unable to reach the city to find healthcare and food. They were approached by strangers who gave them a pushchair and offered to drive Jamila to healthcare.

Reem, who also escaped Syria, spoke of encountering numerous acts of kindness. She received food and shelter, which kept her and her child safe from hunger and illness and facilitated their onward journey bolstering her determination to continue. Several respondents from different African countries described how donations of food, water and medicine offered by local people when they were crossing the desert, gave them the psychological and physical strength to continue and offer hope as Anderson (2017) suggests, for a better future.

Other SGBV survivors described feelings of hope after being advised how to claim asylum. Boadicea, from Guinea, recalled encountering a female passenger while flying to England to escape family abuse. The passenger told her to make an asylum claim and called a friend who helped Boadicea. Mortaza, arriving in Sweden from Afghanistan, encountered a police officer who told him how to claim asylum.

She told me ‘Good luck and welcome to Sweden again’. That made me feel very very good. After that, I went to the train station and told them I am seeking asylum and they gave me a free train ticket and told me where to go. I thought ‘I am illegal here. How can help me this way?’ It was a little shocking to me.

Encounters with kind local people were transformative as respondents explained they offered hope beyond survival, and re-instilled hopefulness for a better future. They also reshaped individuals’ self-perceptions. Experiencing kindness and being given advice on how to regularise their status made them feel deserving of refuge because local people encouraged them to apply, which they said, legitimised their right to be present. Encounters with local people gave three survivors hope that a future in Sweden was possible. Jamila explained ‘without the Swedish people I meet, I wouldn’t have managed living in Sweden’. She, Raja from Syria and Inez from Iraq all described kindnesses they encountered from local people including advice about how to enrol children in school, utilise health care systems, learn the language and understand Swedish life, all of which instilled hope that they could resettle in their country refuge and ‘feel at home’. Parla (2019) describes such hope as precarious in that it can foster solidarity that offers the prospect of belonging in the future but in the context of contingent rights to remain.

Elsewhere, in Australia, Salma from Egypt spoke of enduring multiple incidents of racial discrimination in public places, and in particular, an incident perpetrated by a shop assistant. A male customer intervened, remonstrated with the racist and offered help. Salma said the man’s support made her feel she had a right to be in Australia.

From kindness to care

We found, following Brownlie and Anderson(2017), that acts of kindness generated other actions, particularly acts of care. Several women were victimised in exploitative heteropatriarchal relations. For example, Natani, from Ethiopia, was captured and raped by the Libyan police. She was left for dead and escaped terrified the police would kill her. She encountered a local woman who offered her shelter. Once safe in the woman’s home the extent of her injuries became clear and the initial act of kindness morphed into longer-term care culminating in the woman smuggling Natani out of the country:

She took me, I stayed one month in her house. She hid me. She is a foreigner there in Libya. She has a husband, I don’t know where he comes from … She hid me with the police. She treated me with traditional medicine. (Natani, refused asylum seeker, England)

Sarai, escaping family violence in Algeria and France, approached strangers whom she overhead speaking her language, when sleeping rough in London. She described herself as having no hope beyond getting through each day. The strangers invited her to stay with them, they housed and fed her for weeks, and introduced her to a charity that helped her make an asylum claim, which she said gave her hope for the future.

Zahra, an Egyptian asylum seeker, visited a doctor in England to seek help with the psychological problems she experienced having been tortured. She unexpectedly encountered kindness from the receptionist when she told the woman that she needed medication because she wanted to kill herself. Zahra said she had lost all hope and thought suicide was her only option. The receptionist befriended her and visited her weekly at her asylum hostel, with her initial acts of kindness morphing into care and then friendship, which Zahra described to us as life-changing.

I take care of myself because they love me. She [the receptionist] is like a mother to me. I love her very much. Last Saturday, she came to the hostel, and we spent the whole day together. (Zahra, asylum seeker, England)

Most encounters with kindness resulted in unconditional and short-term offers of help, yet in some cases where kindness had transitioned into caring or hosting arrangements respondents experienced that care as a form of patronage that could be withdrawn. Lotifa, from Afghanistan, spoke of her ‘for now’ safe home in Turkey while her rent was covered by local Ramadan donations. Again in Turkey, Najma from Syria was housed by ‘friends of friends’ after escaping a violent marriage. The ‘friends’ were clear from the outset that the arrangement was temporary, but the initial act of kindness in agreeing to host morphed into a relationship of dependency. She was asked to leave but was then permitted to stay when she cried because she had nowhere to go. Najma felt the weight and contingency of the hosts’ patronage.

Look at my situation; I am living with this family but since I don’t have money, I cannot leave their house. What should I do, I feel bad when I think this. Sometimes I cannot sleep and stay up until morning. (Najma, under Temporary protection, Turkey)

The effects of kind encounters

Resisting the cruelties of bordering and heteropatriarchy

The people who sheltered survivors escaping captivity or abusive families were instrumental in preventing their recapture, imprisonment and further abuse. Their actions were risky in that they confronted the hostile, violent and racialised practices which migrants frequently face, and in so doing they gave value to individuals who without the right to reside, described themselves as ‘illegal’ (Magnet and Trevenen 2014). Their encounters with kindness offered some challenges to hegemonic power structures from the bottom up and had a profound effect on the lives of the survivors who escaped abuse found temporary safety and were helped to continue their journey. The physical sustenance some received from kind strangers gave them strength, emotionally, physically and materially, to continue arduous journeys thus resulting in the practical outcomes identified by Anderson and Brownlie (2017). In some cases, the kind stranger potentially saved the respondent’s life by resisting, through their actions, taken for granted social norms around control, exploitation and abuse of women, thereby providing at least temporary respite. We might argue that in their everyday actions of offering shelter and sustenance, they confront border regimes that trapped respondents in liminal states and enabled violent exploitation by abusers acting with impunity because respondents were present ‘without papers’ or traceability.

We saw instances, i.e. Samia and Natani above, where kind strangers subverted bordering by facilitating victim/survivors ‘illegal’ border crossing in lorries or boats. In other cases, in countries of refuge, strangers' interventions in intimate partner violence (IPV), which saw women trapped in abusive situations for years or even decades, offered a disruption to dominant heteropatriarchal relations. For example Massara, from Syria, described how her neighbours called the police after her husband beat her ensuring that he was detained in a psychological hospital enabling her to return home.

Last year they called the police after I ran away from him. When the police came, they took my husband to the hospital. In the hospital, they told the police that my husband has a mental condition. (Massara, Temporary Protection, Turkey)

The outcome of kind encounters provided an opportunity to end lengthy cycles of abuse, with the kind encounter offering some challenge to social relations and resisting oppressive practices (Clegg and Rowland 2010; Magnet and Trevenen 2014).

Hope and humanity

Kind encounters enabled a change in perspective, which appeared to engender new forms of agency helping survivors to cope with suffering, such as losing family, having no food and no shelter, and then continuing their journey to a better life. Several victims/survivors described the positive impact of the hope generated by kind encounters. Melanie’s ‘radical’ hope that her encounter with a group of men could save her, led her to risk assistance from unknown people with whom she did not share a common language. The outcome of this encounter was re-embracing hope with the anticipation of being reunited with her husband (Kleist and Thorsen 2017). Jamila explained how she was able to continue her journey to an imagined refuge helped by the positive mindset developed through feelings of hope. She experienced what Brownlie and Anderson (2017) describe as a ‘spillover effect’ emanating from the kind of encounters that she and her children experienced, as they crossed multiple borders.

Having experienced multiple acts of cruelty at the hands of so many people some SGBV survivors lost hope and trust in fellow humans. Kind encounters could reinstall some degree of trust in humanity after months or years of degradation. Adaku, a refugee from Nigeria, entering Europe after a journey of years, had blood over her trousers having not been able to access sanitary products. She asked for, and was denied, help from several people as she crossed the border into Hungary. Their refusal to look at or help her made her feel worthless. Eventually, she encountered a woman crying in distress at seeing Adaku’s condition who took off her own trousers and handed them over. In this single act, in noticing and responding to Adaku’s pain, as Magnet and Trevenen (2014) explain, by appearing to open herself up to the vulnerability of others, the woman reinstalled in Adaku some faith in people.

I say please please, (points to legs and blood) no-one helps me … and one woman around she say where you from? What do you need? … She look me, oh she crying, she say wait give you mine, … she say go there we have toilet, I go there change my clothes, you know, nobody help … .some people understand why you coming from your country, why our coming like that.

Similarly, Senait, a refugee from Eritrea who had not washed or changed her clothes for months recalled encountering a young man who invited her home for a shower, clean clothes and a drink. She knew she was taking a risk but he turned out to be ‘good’. Her experience rekindled some hope in the future and her dignity.

I just saw the person at that time and being young you just think what you want to do, you just want to have a shower, you felt dirty I’m so like disgusting, but I just followed and did that. But I just always think there’s no, I’ve never seen a person as kind and as good as him. (Senait, refugee, England)

In Sweden, Nasrin, who had experienced racism on public transport, later encountered a stranger who helped her book a medical appointment. The stranger’s actions made her realise that not all Swedish people were ‘bad’ and some ‘share love’. The kind encounters experienced by Jamila, also made her feel ‘people can be “good”’. The kind encounter which led to the remonstration of the racist shop assistant made Salma feel hopeful that other people would be kind, reignited her hope in humanity and helped her to realise she had the right to be in public spaces. In these examples, we see how kindness was experienced as micropolitical because it enabled small reconstitutions of social relations through everyday challenges to harassment (Hill and Laredo 2020) and cruel bordering practices and again offered precarious hope of some form of belonging.

Gendering and locating encounters with kindness

Many more women (35/166) reported kind encounters than men (2/166) with respondents in their 30s and 40s more likely to report encounters than other age groups. Those with refused/undocumented status, or who were refugees were much more likely to recount kind encounters than asylum seekers and spousal migrants, as were single and separated respondents. Single women and women with children may be more likely to be treated kindly as they are seen as less threatening than males (Ward 2019), and more in need of protection (Adida et al. 2019) plus their status meant they had no access to other kinds of support. Jamila herself notes that she may have encountered so much kindness because she was delineated as deserving (Brownlie and Anderson 2017) because she was accompanied by children.

The case of Amir, from Syria, illustrates how kind encounters may be gendered. He told us how his wife faced ‘interrogations’ about wearing the hijab, and assumptions that she was oppressed by him, to the point he started to question the motives of benefactors. He described occasions where people told his wife she was forced to wear the hijab, refusing to consider that she made her own choices.

They try to ask questions about our religious beliefs but in jokingly manners, ‘Come one, tell us, isn’t your husband the one who forced you to wear the hijab? Why would you wear it on your own’. There is a lot of them who still believe until this that we ride camels and we get married seven or eight times, and we force them to be our slaves. No matter how developed they become they don’t develop this idea. This is insulting for a man. (Amir, Refugee, Sweden)

Amir said their offers to help his family ‘put the poison in the honey’ and led him to refuse ‘kindnesses’. In this case, it appeared that those framed as oppressed were classified as ‘deserving’ of kindness but this kindness did not always go unquestioned in the context of wider racialised societal and cultural structures.

The nature of kind encounters varied but most encounters were with individuals. The act of being kind appeared to be gendered. More respondents had kind encounters with women (13), than men (8) which reflects trends in volunteering patterns wherein women are more likely to offer caring assistance (Taniguchi 2006). Encounters ‘in flight’ often happened in the streets or while moving through countryside or desert. Survivors in flight were more likely to recount encounters with groups of people (8), one time all-female, another all-male, but usually unspecified, who were kind. Four respondents recalled multiple kind encounters with ‘people’, for example, while crossing the Sahara. Encounters ‘in refuge’ tended to occur in local neighbourhoods or temporary housing but were also reported in classrooms, shops and transport settings. Once in refuge, four respondents encountered local people who reached out to them when they saw that they were injured. Three survivors talked of encounters with kind professionals who extended beyond their remit to offer free services or provide assistance that bore no relationship to their profession. Elmira, from Iraq, described the support offered to her by an interpreter.

When I was pregnant, I would go to see a doctor, and they brought me a translator, who was also from Mosul. When I found out my son had heart problems, I became psychologically unwell, so she gave me her number. And then, whenever he did something to me, I would call her and tell her everything because I just needed someone. (Elmira, Refugee, Sweden)

Everyday encounters with kindness occurred across the migration journey into the refuge, but the ‘extraordinary’ encounters were recounted in flight, while ‘caring’ encounters were reported both in flight and refuge. The major differences in kind encounters between flight and refuge revolve around the provision of protection and resources. In flight, the complete absence of support services perhaps meant the only route to food and shelter was a kind encounter. Certainly, respondents such as Melanie and Senait explained that they took a risk in taking up offers of kindness from men because there were no other options. In refuge and once static, survivors’ situations were noticed by local people who tended to offer information, knowledge or affirmation and on occasion short-term, but urgent, support to help women escape abusive relationships.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have, for the first time, uncovered the practices and importance of kind encounters for forced migrant SGBV survivors. We argue that there are good reasons for revealing and examining these acts given the extreme cruelty faced in contexts where little protection or support is available. Kind encounters generated a range of effects. Some encounters were described as ‘lifesaving’; others enabled the continuation of journeys after a period of enforced immobility. The kindness encountered offered some resistance to border regimes, at least at the moment, and re-shaped the balance of power in abusive relationships (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2011). Acts, such as the provision of food and hygiene items, enabled individuals to continue their journeys, or facilitated border crossings, supported asylum claims or offered some push back against racism and harmful bordering practices and re-categorised individuals, in that moment, as worthy of kindness, and therefore deserving of human dignity. Kind encounters enabled to escape from heteropatriarchal exploitation and abuse, whether in forced prostitution or IPV, resisting these practices allowed survivors to experience relief in order to muster the strength to move on with their lives.

Elsewhere acts of kindness have been described as a ‘technology of social transformation’ recognizing their capacity to bring about significant positive changes in society, from the practical to the solidaristic (cf. Magnet and Trevenen 2014; Anderson and Brownlee 2019). We argue that kind encounters might be viewed as micropolitical. Micropolitics concerns the ways in which formal and informal power are used in everyday life (cf. Clark 1990). The nature of encounters embeds social structures and maintains ‘social place’ in relation to gendered and racialised hierarchies (Bottero and Irwin 2003). Clark (1990) argues that social interactions are a negotiation of social standing where actions such as kindness, may be used at a micropolitical level to indicate where individuals wish to stand. The kind of encounters we have described built connections across social and cultural cleavages (Clegg and Rowland 2010), and offered the potential to resist oppressive practices (Magnet and Trevenen 2014). Micropolitical (inter)actions are small-scale and can function as ‘tactics’ for subverting and pushing back against controlling ‘strategies’ used by those who hold power whether in our study that is an authority figure or an abusive partner (Magnet and Trevenen 2014). Anderson (2017) sees micropolitical actions as offering hope for alternative futures enabling disruption to the norm through individuals’ everyday actions re-orientating towards ‘practices of the possible’. Lipsky (2010) contends that acts of kindness can be re-humanising. In our data we see evidence of the re-humanising effects of kind encounters through survivors accounts of how being treated with care and respect made them feel human, rather than ‘illegal’ and offered the precarious hope of future belonging (Parla 2019).

Solnit (2009) points to new relations emerging from disruptions to the norm that offer hope (Pine 2014). Disillusionment stemming from various factors, such as unmet expectations, repeated setbacks, cruelty and structural circumstances that seem insurmountable is common among forced migrants. Lost hope of getting a refugee status, finding a home or reunion with family often generates feelings of sadness or despair (Kallio, Meier, and Häkli 2021, 4010). Whilst forced migration is generally an act of desperation it is important to acknowledge that it is also an act of hope for a safer future (Hodge and Hodge 2021; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2007). Stories recounted by participants in our research pointed to the importance of kind encounters in engendering or maintaining hope and enabling an ability to cope and continue arduous journeys (Kleist and Thorsen 2017).

Yet dependence on kindness could feel disempowering. Cole (2020) in Australia, reported how Karen refugees became increasingly reliant on kindness with such acts morphing into power and patronage. The under-reciprocal nature of kind encounters means there is inevitably a power imbalance that can instil an uncomfortable sense of dependency in the recipient (Phillimore, Humphris, and Khan 2018). As we saw from the examples of Najma and Amir, kindness offered in pity or perhaps as a ‘strategy’ of control may maintain racialised social hierarchies and further disempower individuals (cf. Bottero and Irwin 2003; Clark 1990). Further, we saw indications that those who are offered kindness may be marked out as ‘deserving’, with an uneven distribution of kindness linked to differences such as gender and race (Brownlie and Anderson 2017).

Degrading acts of SGBV coupled with hostile bordering regimes and dire material circumstances have a debilitating impact on survivors’ psychological wellbeing (Phillimore et al. 2023). Such circumstances can lead survivors to make pragmatic decisions, accepting the charity of others or taking risks in a bid to survive, move or build a new life. Such decisions can be contexualised within Khader’s (2011) notion of ‘adaptive preferences', which in the context of SGBV highlights the complex ways in which individuals may put themselves at risk as a means of survival or coping because of the lack of viable alternatives. Such decisions can be unconducive to safety and wellbeing, and may not be made in better circumstances. The encounters with kindness that we describe thus highlight the lack of formal protection and support services available for forced migrants (Bradby et al. 2023). These encounters indicate the close proximity of kindness and cruelty for women on the move, who often have no choice but to risk kindness from a stranger knowing that this offer may result in harm.

Building on Brownlie and Anderson (2017) we show that kindness can be experienced in multiple ways with multiple outcomes. The kindnesses from which respondents largely benefitted possessed all four of Brownlie and Anderson’s features of kindness: that they are small-scale and practical, involve recognition and voluntarily responses, have emotional consequences and can challenge social categories. Although most acts were small-scale, some kind encounters resulted in extraordinary acts, wherein strangers risked their lives, or enduring acts where kindness morphed into longer-term aid. Following Brownlie and Anderson (2017) we agree that in all cases kindness was fundamentally interpersonal and argue the importance of focusing on the nature of kind encounters.

The encounter between forced migrants and individuals or groups was not inevitably kind, in fact, SGBV perpetration sometimes results from cruel encounters with strangers (Phillimore et al. 2023). Yet there can be no kindness without human encounters. As Clegg and Rowland (2010) posit, respondents’ accounts indicate the importance of the ‘donor’ noticing the victim/survivors’ pain/problem, rather than looking away, and then acting to address the problem. We suggest that this moment between noticing and action is important as it involves emotions in the contemplation of options, in determining whether indifference, kindness or cruelty will result. More research is needed with donors of kindness to understand their feelings and thought processes. Such research will be challenging given the fleeting nature of encounters, the involvement of strangers and their occurrence in adverse environments. Yet kind encounters are potentially of great significance, in light of hostile bordering regimes, if they can reconstitute relations and push back against the cruelty of heteropatriarchy and bordering, enabling individuals to survive, feel human and regain a sense of hope. We acknowledge that kind encounters lack the power, scale and critical mass needed to contest the structuring of taken for granted border regimes, but on a personal level such encounters can be significant and even make the difference between life and death.

We have argued that the study of kindness has great potential in Migration Studies and beyond precisely because kind encounters can contribute to addressing social inequalities in hostile environments. Acts of kindness empower survivors by showing them that they are not alone, there are people who care about their well-being and that there is hope of belonging albeit precarious (Parla 2019). Further research is needed to understand how such empowerment plays out for survivors in the longer-term. Acts of kindness may help restore trust and solidarity among community members, fostering an environment where survivors are more likely to come forward and seek justice or assistance. Over time consistent displays of kindness have the potential to lead to cultural shifts by helping to redefine what it means to be a caring and responsible member of society, challenging traditional gender roles and the racism of border regimes.

We have argued how encounters with kindness in the context of SGBV constitute a range of different acts with the power to produce different types of outcomes. These outcomes can include the offer of some challenge to harmful norms, empowerment of survivors, and the building of supportive communities that can work together to begin to protect forced migrants from, or mitigate the impact of, SGBV and offer precarious hope for a better future. Kindness as a concept has much potential to help us understand supportive relations in other migration situations such as within institutionalised housing (Brownlie and Anderson 2017). We acknowledge that our study has several limitations. We rely on the memory and selectivity of individuals who recounted kind encounters, we did not ask why they recounted those stories, whether they had experienced other positive/negative encounters with kindness, nor did we ask all respondents if they had experienced kindness. Thus, the incidence of kind encounters is inevitably undercounted, and our findings only reflect the encounters that individuals felt were important when recounting their experiences of SGBV. Future research might ask all respondents if they had experienced kind encounters and about the function of those encounters. Further, our interviews were only with forced migrants. More research is needed on strangers who offer kindness to examine their motivations and the effects of the encounter on their beliefs and future actions.

Declaration of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the survivors and service providers who participated in this study and shared their stories and experiences with us. We are grateful for the work of the remaining SEREDA project research team for their work collecting and analyzing data for the wider project amongst many other activities. We are particularly grateful for the input of Anna Papoutsi and Anna Perez Aronsson into earlier versions of this paper. The authors wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for their particularly insightful suggestions which enabled us to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond; Lansons and THE Leverhulme Foundation.