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Abstract
In the everyday lives of asylum seekers in Britain, the British and trans-national media are a key factor in the construction of identity, including national and gendered identities. The media play a role in the individual asylum seeker's notions of where she or he belongs, and what language skills she or he can acquire. Drawing on a series of focus groups conducted in 2005–2007, this study explores the gendered needs and uses for media amongst different cultural groups of asylum seekers, refugees, and their receiving communities in south Wales, UK.
Notes
1. The term ‘asylum seeker’ in the UK context refers to a person who has left their country of origin and, having applied for recognition from the British state as a refugee, awaits a decision on their application.
2. ‘Crime’ was the most important issue for 40 per cent, while ‘race relations/immigration/immigrants’ was felt to be the most important by 36 per cent of respondents (equal with the ‘National Health Service’).
3. The current editorial policies of certain newspapers (e.g. the Daily Express) are explicitly opposed to the unrestricted entry of asylum seekers into the UK.
In recent evidence to the House of Commons Joint Select Committee Commission on Human Rights (JCHR Citation2007, 56) the editor of the Daily Express stated his current editorial policy on the asylum issue:
What we cannot support is the unrestricted entry to this country of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom hate this country – people who want to destroy this country, people who want to become suicide bombers – there is an enormous amount of crime also for which, I am afraid, asylum seekers are responsible. (22 January 2007)
4. The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act introduced a policy of the systematic ‘dispersal’ of asylum seekers dependent on the support of the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). [Please see note 14 for a definition of NASS.] Dispersal was designed to move asylum seekers to areas outside London and the south east of England in order to avoid the concentration of newly arrived people. In Wales, Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, and Wrexham are each designated ‘cluster areas’ in which asylum seekers have been settled under the dispersal policy.
5. As such, negative representations of asylum seekers and refugees cannot be adequately accounted for by any simplistic recourse to ‘blaming the media’ for its ‘bias’ or its ‘lack of accuracy’ (Threadgold 2006).
6. These patterns are currently structured in relation to a policy discourse which is shifting away from an explicit concern with the human rights of asylum seekers and refugees and towards a primary concern with security and protecting ‘the nation’ (Lynn and Lea Citation2003; Moore Citation2005; 2007). They include the regular association of asylum and immigration issues with crime, and more recently with issues of terrorism (Buonfino Citation2004; Threadgold et al. Citationforthcoming; Moore Citation2007). A recent example includes the foreign prisoner deportation crises at the Home Office, extensively covered on the television news during the summer of 2006. This story was ongoing for a number of weeks, and centred on the government's failure to successfully implement its own policy of deporting convicted foreign nationals after they completed their sentences. Media coverage closely associated issues of public safety with the rigidity of the immigration system, and at times also tied asylum seeking itself to criminal behaviour.
7. For example, while in 2003 the number of female principal applicants among Iraqis was six per cent, among Somalis 52 per cent of principal applicants were women (Dumper Citation2005, 18).
8. The Home Office is a government department of the United Kingdom. It is the department which bears responsibility for immigration and asylum and a range of other domestic policy areas, including law and order and counter-terrorism.
9. One project, funded by the Welsh Assembly Government as part of the development of the Refugee Inclusion Strategy in Wales (WAG Citation2006), focused on identifying ways in which asylum seekers and refugees could be fully included in majority society (Threadgold and Clifford Citation2005). The other study, carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, examined the construction of social cohesion and communities in cosmopolitan south east Wales, including 26 different ethnic communities from Europe, Africa, and east Asia (Threadgold et al. forthcoming).
10. Blunkett's comments were widely reported in the British news media at the time (for example: Daily Mail 16.9.02; Guardian 16.9.02; Express 17.9.02).
11. Wrexham is a town in north Wales, and is an asylum seeker dispersal ‘cluster area’.
12. During the morning rush hour of 7 July 2005, a series of explosions on London's public transport network resulted in the deaths of 52 commuters and the injury of hundreds of others. The explosions were perpetrated by a group of four young British Muslim men, Hasib Hussain, Mohammad Sidique Khan, Germaine Lindsay, and Shehzad Tanweer, in a coordinated act of suicide bombing. Our respondents refer to their sense of an intensified culture of fear surrounding the threat of terrorism and experiences of suspicion and hostility following these attacks, directed towards them as Muslims in the UK.
13. The Daily Mirror is a national British tabloid newspaper which, in the run up to the 2003 UK and US invasion of Iraq, was the only national daily newspaper in the UK to adopt an unequivocally anti-war stance.
14. NASS was established in April 2000. It has responsibility for providing accommodation and subsistence support to asylum seekers while their claims are being considered by the Home Office.
15. Alice Bloch's (Citation1999) work on the social exclusion of refugees in the London borough of Newham highlights the importance of English language proficiency for social inclusion, and for women in particular.
16. Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al-Nehaian was President of the United Arab Emirates until his death on 2 November 2004.
17. This echoes Marie Gillespie's research on the news consumption of multilingual families in the UK after 11 September 2001 (Gillespie Citation2006).
18. Channel 4 News is a terrestrial television news programme broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. It has a lunchtime programme at 12pm and a main, hour-long evening broadcast at 7pm on weekdays.
