Survival over safety: non-reporting of criminalised violence by young migrants excluded from protection

ABSTRACT

Children and young people seeking asylum on their own face violence in many forms. Little is known about how they seek protection from criminalised violence. This article is based on ethnographic research, interviews and a survey of young migrants living precariously, mostly from Afghanistan, who fled to Sweden alone when they were children, but who did not have their protection needs recognised. Through lived experiences of not reporting criminalised violence to police, the article examines how protection is further denied in the context of recent changes to the Swedish migratory and welfare regime. This article finds that young migrants often perceive non-reporting as a zero-sum strategy of survival over safety. Insecure legal status prevents young migrants from engaging the law for protection from criminalised violence. Experiences of discriminatory and violent police treatment and institutional violence forming part of trajectories of displacement reinforce the lack of protection. Strategies of silence and solidarity are used to ensure the preservation of the self, the migratory project, to protect friends, and, occasionally, perpetrators. By examining young migrants’ experiences of non-protection from criminalised violence, intersecting structural forms of violence become visible. These failures of protection constitute part of a continuum of violence experienced by young people seeking asylum.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarious young migrants
• continuum of violence
• victims of crime
• protection
• (un)safe reporting

Introduction

On 15 July 2020, Reza, a 20-year-old young Afghan man who had fled to Sweden, was murdered. In the lead-up to his killing, he had reported those who would later be convicted of his murder to the police four times, but he received no protection. Like many of the more than 35,000 Afghan children who fled alone to Sweden in 2015, Reza had grown up in Iran, as undocumented. In Iran, he and his family had been forced to flee following an assault that they did not dare to report to the police, due to fear of deportation. When Reza sought asylum in Sweden, he was re-aged as an adult following a medical age assessment, despite his own testimony, which was supported by social services, that he was a child. His asylum claim was subsequently refused as he, as an adult, was considered to lack the need for protection. Although Reza later obtained temporary residence, his subsequent appeal to make his stay permanent failed (Kazemi 2021, 276). At the time of his death, Reza was living in fear, not just of the perpetrators who would subsequently kill him, but of being deported.

Reza’s case illustrates multiple failures of protection from the many forms of violence – physical, psychological, as well as legal and administrative – affecting young people who seek asylum. Reza’s case illustrates how being excluded from protection – due to fear of deportation or asking for help but receiving none – can both amount to and perpetuate violence.

This article examines non-reporting of the criminalised violence from the perspectives of young migrants who, like Reza, fled to Sweden alone in or around 2015. Like Reza, many of these children did not have their protection needs recognised in Sweden. Some have spent years living as undocumented, in some cases managing to regularise on short, conditional study permits, before again being rejected. They have endured years of living hand-to-mouth in homelessness and hardship (Elsrud 2020) at the intersection of increasingly restrictive migration and social welfare laws and practices introduced in Sweden in 2016 (Lundberg and Kjellbom 2021). These changes have produced a precarious situation, legally and socially, particularly affecting young people who sought refuge.

In this article, I use the term ‘precarious’ to analyse the living conditions of young people with undocumented or insecure (temporary and conditional) legal status who have limited and unpredictable access to welfare rights. The uncertainty produced by legal processes of categorisation is reproduced by areas of law and institutions beyond migration law, such as social services and welfare legislation.

Precarious living creates conditions for violence that young migrants experience while affecting their ability to seek protection from such violence (PICUM 2015). In the present article, I examine experiences of, and responses to, criminalised violence (interpersonal acts inflicting harm in a manner prohibited by criminal law). Specifically, I analyse how young migrants reason about contacting police in these situations. How does the absence of stable legal status operate to restrict access to reporting and hence the possibility of state protection? What additional barriers to engaging law for protection are articulated? By exploring how young migrants reason around not reporting criminalised violence to police, many different forms of violence – inflicted pre-flight, during displacement and after reaching Sweden – are revealed. The article draws on an understanding of different forms of violence being interconnected, whereby structural violence creates the conditions for individual, criminalised violence over time and in different places, forming a ‘continuum of violence’, a concept explored in feminist research on gendered violence against women (Cockburn 2014; Krause 2015).

The article is based on ethnographic research carried out for six months with young people who sought refuge in Sweden. My analysis is also informed by my professional engagement working with young migrants as a lawyer for the past five years. A mix of empirical materials form the basis for analysis: interviews, a survey study, notes from the field, and individual criminal and immigration case documents. The findings are contextualised through migration studies research on safe reporting, feminist literature on violence against migrant women, as well as literature within the broader victimological field. The disposition of the article is as follows: In the next section, I contextualise the article and explain theoretical approaches that inform my analysis. I then set out the method and materials. In the third section, I present and discuss my research findings. In the final section, my conclusions are presented.

Research context and theoretical approaches: legal precariousness and the continuum of violence

Making a police report provides a gateway for crime victims into the formal protection system in Sweden, which includes state and municipal agencies, including criminal courts, social services, the prosecutor’s office and the Police. The Swedish system of victim protection has no ‘firewall’, separating the border-controlling functions of police from victim protection, which would allow for safe reporting for victims of crime at risk of deportation (Hermansson et al. 2020). For victims who lack a residence permit, once contact with police has been made, victim protection can be formally facilitated through a temporary permit as a victim or witness of crime provided by the Aliens Act ch.5:15. The purpose of this permit is for the victim or witness to be able to assist in the prosecution of serious violent crime such as human exploitation, rape or serious assaults (Prop. 2003/04, 35). Ancillary basic social rights for victims of crime, such as shelter, welfare and counselling, provided for by the Social Services Act, are difficult to access unless a residence permit has been granted.

Non-reporting results in victims remaining ‘invisible’ to formal systems of protection (Fohring 2014). Migrants living precariously rarely seek to engage the police to report the crime. Their exclusion from protection from criminalised violence is often examined in the field of migration studies by way of fear of deportation (FRA 2019; Crépeau and Hastie 2015; Timmerman 2020). Research in the field of youth studies suggests that young people, especially young racialised men, similarly rarely turn to police for protection or support (Burcar 2013; Fohring 2014; BRÅ 2020, 16; Thunberg 2020) and are often excluded from protection due to racist and discriminatory policing (Mulinari 2017). Young migrants living precariously face the same barriers to protection as other racialised young people (Khosravi 2017), yet their ability to access protection, by reporting to police, is additionally hindered by their lack of stable legal status.

The obstacles to engaging police by migrants living precariously are well-theorised, although rarely based on insights from migrants themselves (Crépeau and Hastie 2015; Timmerman, Leerkes, and Staring 2019; Bexelius 2016). Instead, experiences of migrant victims of crime are more frequently examined vicariously, through representations by staff managing asylum accommodation, social workers or civil society professionals (BRÅ 2020, 16; Oskarsson 2013). Rare exceptions in a Swedish context that present first-hand accounts include Khosravi (2010) and Voolma (2018). This lack of protection and how to address it have not (yet) received corresponding attention from politicians and policymakers (cf. earlier initiatives on municipal and national levels to improve protection for women survivors of gendered violence, Bexelius 2016; Oskarsson 2013). This article contributes to filling this empirical gap.

My examination of young migrants’ responses to criminalised violence is framed by the concept of precariousness. This concept demonstrates a wide range of legally distinct non-permanent immigration statuses (Marsden 2012). Precarious living contains a core of ‘legal instability’ (Menjívar 2006, 1003) or ‘legal liminality’ (Menjívar 2006, 1000), entailing the lack of unidirectional or linear progress towards permanent residence or citizenship, whereby status conferred may be revoked at any time (Ellermann 2020). Another feature of legal precariousness is highly complex, bureaucratised conditions of stay that are often subverted from safeguarding protection needs to requiring performance (Wyss and Fischer 2022). Precarious legal status results in unpredictable inclusion (Karlsen 2021), resulting in limited and uncertain access to basic social rights, while restrictions on the right to lawful employment produce vulnerable labour conditions and poverty (Villegas 2019; Marsden 2012). Threats to physical integrity are an integral part of precarious living (Khosravi 2017).

Violence is a nebulous, hard-to-define concept (Canning 2017). In the present study, I draw on different conceptualisations of violence. Criminal law definitions of violence stretch only to include limited forms of mostly interpersonal violence. By examining deliberations around the non-reporting of criminalised violence amongst young migrants, the effects of violent, racialised structures become visible. The potentially restrictive format of the minimalist lens of criminalised violence (Tombs 2019) thus becomes a nexus for the exposure of less visible forms of violence.

Rodríguez-Martínez and Cuenca-Piqueras (2019, 577) highlight the links between physical and more tacit forms of violence in the context of gendered violence against women with precarious status, arguing that ‘an analysis of one type of direct violence cannot be isolated from the others, nor from the general web of violence in which it is embedded’. This nexus between structural and interpersonal violence, where the former creates the conditions for the latter is a key feature of structural violence (Cockburn 2014, 362; see also Galtung (1969) in Phillimore et al. 2021). Structural violence describes indirect forms of violence created through laws, practices and (non) actions by institutions and structures of social injustice and inequality that hinder individual agency (Farmer 2004). The violent effects of migration control on the lives of Afghan refugees in Europe have recently been examined through the lens of structural violence (Wyss and Fischer 2022). The systems of asylum law and victim protection both purport to, in different ways, offer protection from violence and persecution. Yet, laws also create conditions for and facilitate violence by normalising its harmful effects, generating legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012).

In her analysis of the harmful effects of asylum laws and systems upon the lives of women-seeking asylum in the UK, Canning highlights the ‘state’s facilitation of suffering’ and the ‘non-alleviation of avoidable harms’ as key elements of structural violence (Canning 2017, 48). Failure by states to act to alleviate or prevent harms is thus a central aspect of structural forms of violence. Violence through state failures to alleviate harm takes different forms. In their analysis of structural violence in the lives of migrants who have survived gender-based violence, Phillimore et al. (2021)describe state failures to protect women as ‘violent abandonment’ (Phillimore et al. 2021, 6). The withdrawal of welfare and enactment of policies that force migrants to subsist on minimal welfare support is a form of slow (structural) violence (Mayblin 2019).

Less attention has been paid to how laws and policies on victim protection produce exclusionary and harmful effects on migrant victims of crime. In the present article, structural violence describes how the system of immigration control and (lack of) welfare provision (re)create conditions of precarity and violence in which young migrants live and how the victim protection system fails to overreach obstacles produced by the immigration law regime, thus leaving this category of crime victims unprotected and abandoned by the state. Meanwhile, conceptualising violence as a continuum in the lives of young people-seeking asylum links their experiences of different forms of violence that occur over time and in different places and illustrate how these form barriers to reporting criminalised violence.

Methods and materials

The materials analysed in the present article have been collected as part of a research project that investigates how access to protection is negotiated by young people who sought refuge in Sweden. The research has been approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2020-00251). Empirical research with precarious migrants raises ethical concerns beyond formal ethics approval (Düvell et al. 2010; Liamputtong 2007), especially given the young age of research participants (Lind 2017). An approach of ethics-as-process has therefore been adopted (Cutcliffe and Ramcharan 2002), meaning, for instance, that informed consent has been secured continuously in connection with fieldwork. The study has been designed with the aim to ‘create safe spaces as part of the research process’ (Hunter et al. 2013, 132). Safe spaces include building trust between the researcher and research participants. Research has also been carried out at ‘safe spaces’, organisations that provide legal, social and practical support to migrants. Asking questions about past experiences of violence may evoke trauma. Research participants were therefore provided with contact information for separate counselling services.

Collection of empirical materials was multi-sited, relying on four safe spaces located in two Swedish cities. A mix of empirical materials has been collected – interviews, survey responses, and field notes. Immigration and criminal case documents relating to individual cases have at times been drawn upon to reinforce testimonies. Access to documents was secured through individual research participants. I spent six months during summer and autumn of 2020 visiting research sites. During visits, I spent time ‘hanging out’ with visitors, often sharing meals while engaging in informal conversations, some of which I recorded afterwards in my field notes. Prior to undertaking this research, I worked for five years as a lawyer supporting people seeking asylum at one of these sites.

The survey was designed with a combination of multi-choice and free text questions in easy Swedish about experiences of violence, racism, contact with authorities and in/formal protection. The survey was completed independently or one-on-one with 85 individual respondents. Language and contents were designed in consultation with staff and young male migrants. A pilot version was trialled with five young migrants. Many young people I spoke to referred to ‘fighting’ even in cases where it was clear that the violence was directed at one party. It is difficult to ask questions about personal experiences of violence. Under-disclosure is to be expected (Hopkins and Hill 2008). This may be due to stigma, fear, trauma, or lack of trust.

I carried out in-depth interviews with seven male young migrants who had experienced criminalised violence. Three had filed police reports. The interviews explored themes that emerged in the survey. Interviews were recorded and participants were informed of the possibility to read transcripts of their own interviews (none has so far asked to do so) (Repstad 2007). Non-professional interpreters known to the interviewee were relied upon on two occasions, at the request of the interviewee.

The empirical material was analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke 2006). I read and re-read transcripts of interviews, whilst searching for and reviewing themes, coding for experiences of criminalised violence and reasons for not contacting police. The analytical process has involved moving back and forth between analysis and writing, including my broader contextual knowledge of the field as a lawyer supporting young people in similar situations.

Presenting the research participants: young migrants living precariously

This article focuses mostly on male perspectives on non-protection. Eighty respondents self-identified as male, one person self-identified as non-binary, and four identified as female. The youngest person was 17 and the oldest was 25 years old. The majority had arrived in Sweden in 2015. Most of the participants had fled to Sweden from Afghanistan, although many had been displaced to or born in Pakistan or Iran. The majority were categorised as unaccompanied children upon arrival. Although no data on ethnicity or nationality were collected, most identified as Hazara, a persecuted minority in Afghanistan.

Research participants describe their legal status varyingly as ‘having no papers’, ‘being temporary’ or ‘being on the Study law’. 60 respondents answered ‘yes’ to the question if they had lived ‘without papers’ at some point during their time in Sweden. The high levels of insecure status and the correspondingly low number of young people who have had their claims for protection recognised are particularly notable.

Table 1 categorises the varieties of legal status that research participants disclosed at the time of the research. Survey results in the table represent all research participants, but qualitative insights presented in this article are drawn solely from male participants. The predominance of male perspectives within the data can be explained by the fact that the majority of visitors to the meeting places where data was collected.

Table 1. legal status of survey respondents.

Legal status:	Number of respondents (total 85):
Currently living with undocumented legal status	37
Pending asylum application	17
Temporary Study Law permit	14
Permanent residence	7
Temporary residence	5 (3 stated that residence was protection-based)
Did not respond	2
Temporary victim protection	1
Living with suspended deportation order for three years	1
Work permit (track change from asylum-track)	1

Findings and discussion

Experiences of violence and fear of police

The low level of protective status granted can be contrasted with the majority of participants, 63 survey respondents, who stated that they had experienced violence or threats of violence in their countries of origin before fleeing to Sweden, while 13 respondents chose not to answer this question. Children and young people fleeing alone have often experienced violence pre-flight and during displacement (Thomas et al. 2004; Hopkins and Hill 2008; Menjívar and Pereira 2019). Young migrants’ experiences of violence beyond Sweden in the countries of origin and transit are important because they reflect the wider context of violence experienced by young people seeking asylum and cumulatively shapes their responses to criminalised violence in the present. It is against this background that young migrants’ responses to criminalised violence in Sweden should be considered.

Young migrants living precariously in Sweden have survived an asylum process that, rather than protecting them from harm, in many cases inflicts and perpetuates violence (Elsrud 2020; see Canning 2017 for a similar analysis of the UK context). Unsafe practices of medical re-aging (Noll 2016) and long delays of up to five years for processing claims, during which time many aged into young adults, in combination with changes to law and policy had the effect of excluding ‘unaccompanied children’ from asylum, resulted in many not having their protection needs recognised (Lundberg and Jansson-Keshavarz 2019). Asylum claims by Afghan children who sought refuge on the their own were marked by high rejection rates after 2016, reflecting harsher assessments of protection needs rather than an increase in the safety in Afghanistan during this period (Garvik and Valenta 2021). Violence affecting the lives of Afghan asylum-seekers, then, are the result not only of war in Afghanistan but a consequence of migration laws and policies in Europe (Wyss and Fischer 2022).

Rates of suicide and self-harm among children seeking asylum alone are extremely high, in so far as they are recorded: nine times as many children or young people who fled to Sweden alone commit suicide, compared to Swedish-born young people (Hagström et al. 2018). A case against Sweden before the European Court of Human Rights due to alleged breaches of the right to life by Swedish authorities was brought by the younger of two brothers who fled together to Sweden in 2015 following the death of their parents. During the asylum process, the older brother killed himself in order so that his sight-impaired younger brother would not be returned to Afghanistan (Hasani v. Sweden, application no. 35950/20, 25 October 2021).

Since the summer of 2018 some 7,700 young people, including many participants in this study, have obtained temporary residence under the Study Law (Migrationsverket 2021b). The Study Law provided a new opportunity to stay for some of the children who had fled alone to Sweden (prop. 2017/18, 252:22). The law turned young asylum seekers, whose need for protection had not been recognised, into students, whose right to remain became dependent upon passing studies and finding permanent employment within six months of completing studies (Kazemi 2021). The subversion of protection-based into performance-based permits has made it easier to revoke legal status. The conditional nature of the Study Law may be situated within a general shift since 2016 within the Swedish asylum system, making temporary permits the norm, whereby more people seeking asylum in Sweden now spend longer periods living with uncertain legal status (EASO 2021; Migrationsverket 2021a; Öberg and Sager 2017).

Changes to the welfare regime since 2016 accelerated the precarity experienced by young migrants from welfare and housing upon final refusal of their asylum application, forcing many to increasingly rely on assistance from civil society (Lundberg and Kjellbom 2021). Many of these young people are now living in circumstances of homelessness and poverty, underpinned by uncertain access to basic rights to food, housing, and healthcare (Beskow 2020; Khosravi 2017; Elsrud 2020). A majority of survey respondents reported that their income was not enough to pay for food, rent or to meet basic needs (46 respondents). An additional 23 people reported that their income sometimes was enough to meet these expenses.

Recent legal and policy changes in Sweden have been accompanied by a hardening and increasingly racist societal discourse about immigration and migrants (Elsrud 2020). Experiences of everyday racism, often inflicted in encounters with passing strangers, on the bus or in the street, form part of the precarious living conditions for young migrants and represent a less visible form of violence. As set out in Table 2, survey participants reported experiencing high levels of racism alongside different forms of criminalised violence. Many reported multiple such experiences. The high incidence of physical violence as well as testimonies of witnessing or hearing about experiences of violence from others is notable.

Table 2. Survey participants’ experiences of violence.

Experiences of violence	Number of respondents
Racist language or abuse	41
Physical violence	28
Robbed	11
Threatened	6
Weapons used against them	6
Forced or unwanted sexual contact	3
Propositions to go home with men	1
Know someone who has been in a fight, been beaten up, received threats, or been forced to do something they did not want to	37
Have witnessed others being subject to violence	40

Fifteen participants stated that they had told police about what happened to them. Sixty-one had not told the police. The remainder either did not answer or gave unclear answers that partly indicated a negative view of the police (‘the police are idiots’). Participants expressed a range of (sometimes overlapping) reasons for not contacting the police, the most common of which are set out in Table 3.

Table 3. Survey respondents’ stated reasons for not contacting the police.

Reason for not contacting police	Number of respondents
Afraid of being deported	33
Would result in problems for me or someone else	24
Did not think that what happened was serious enough to report	12
Did not trust the police	11

Answers reflect a wide range of concerns that are primarily, but not exclusively, migration-related, but also connected to the perceived seriousness of the incident. A small number of the research participants did feel able to turn to police. Alongside many accounts articulated in interviews and in the survey of unwillingness to engage police by reporting crime or when witnessing violence, as illustrated by Table 4, more than half (44) of survey respondents indicated high levels of police contact related to internal border-enforcement.

Table 4. Other contact with police by survey respondents (not related to reporting a crime).

Police contact not related to reporting a crime	Number of respondents
Been stopped by police on the street	28
Police came to my home	11
Police took me to a detention centre	9

Next, I discuss three main themes that emerged from the survey and that were developed in interviews: the proliferation of legal precarity, silent solidarity practices, and past experiences of discriminatory and racist policing.

The proliferation of legal precarity: ‘I have a residence permit for such a short time only, it doesn’t feel safe [to report]’

The main reason reported in the survey for not reporting the crime to the police was concern that this would impact negatively on legal status or result in deportation. The lack of secure legal status operates in several complex ways to present obstacles to protection. Rohullah, a young man in his twenties from Afghanistan, explained, while completing the survey, how he was detained by police after he was run over by a car:

The ambulance came when I got run over, but I didn’t want to go [to the hospital] because I was afraid since I was undocumented. But the police were standing outside the ambulance and took me to immigration detention instead. I didn’t get any [medical] treatment. They took me to jail for 24 h, got no treatment there. Then they took me to immigration detention. It was her [the driver’s] fault, she was driving too fast. But I was afraid, because I didn’t have a residence permit. (ID No 38 Q31)

Rohullah’s experiences provide a violent illustration of the risk of police engagement for migrant victims of crime who, like Rohullah, risk being instantly re-categorised into a deportable migrant, resulting not only in the loss of protection but also, as in this case, in the loss of access to healthcare, to which he was legally entitled.

Omid is an Afghan man in his early twenties who fled to Sweden in 2015. When he received his final asylum refusal in 2017, he became homeless and was offered shelter by an unknown man who later raped him. When I interviewed Omid, he told me that he had been scared to tell anyone about what happened as he felt ashamed. He was also scared of contacting the police since ‘If I report, maybe the police will take me and put me in detention’. It took almost two years before he contacted the police. His case illustrates how the fear of deportation can be wielded as a weapon by the perpetrator to produce compliance:

He took his mobile and stood in front of the door. He said to me, if you do not give me a massage or let me touch you, I will call the police and they will pick you up because you are undocumented … I couldn’t escape because it was late at night. There were no buses … I felt compelled to stay, because if he had called police, I was sure they would take me. He said that ‘you have to do what I ask you’ (excerpt from police interview).

Even though Omid describes a situation where he is the victim, he believes that police will detain him, not the perpetrator. I found that, like Omid, many of the young people I spoke to, did not identify as victims of crime able to seek police protection. None of the young people I spoke to described themselves as ‘victims’. Some said they did not know that they had the right to report crimes. This may be seen as a reflection of how ever-present violence is normalised as it ‘becomes part of the cognitive repertoire of those exposed’, a key feature of legal violence (Menjívar and Abrego 2012, 1413). The perception of oneself as a victim also influences decision-making about whether to make a report (Fohring 2014; Burcar 2013).

Amongst some informants, this inability to see oneself as a victim was reinforced by explicitly negative perceptions of law. Daniel is a 22-year-old young man who, as a child fled alone from Afghanistan to Sweden in 2015. His asylum application was rejected but he managed to obtain a permit through the Study Law. I interviewed Daniel about an incident when he had been physically assaulted. He explained how he reasoned around not contacting the police:

I have a residence permit for such a short time only, it doesn’t feel safe. Yeah, when I get permanent residence permit, then you think that you belong to this society, that you are more safe. I do not want to end up in a situation that ends up with the police, can’t risk my life … If the Migration Agency changed the damn law, the study law … Some crime happened, you haven’t done it, but you become a suspect. You will ruin your whole life … just because someone has committed a crime against you, [because] you dare to complain. [When you have a permanent residence permit], then you have more chances to complain. Maybe you end up in jail even if you didn’t commit the crime, or pay a fine, but you will not be deported. Deportation is the same as the death penalty … (interview 7 May)

From Daniel’s perspective, any contact with police risked putting in motion a chain of events that end with deportation. Running through Daniel’s entire interview is a hyperawareness of his own precarious position in relation to the law. Daniel explicitly refers to ‘[t]hat fucking law, the Study law … ’ as an explanation for why he did not report the assault to the police. He does not explicitly refer to how that law operates to exclude applicants on the basis of minor criminality, but by identifying the risk of being seen as a perpetrator instead of as a victim, he is inverting his position before the law. He is simultaneously accountable to the law yet excluded from legal protection (Menjívar and Abrego 2012), a position that Khosravi similarly describes as being included yet excepted (2010).

Daniel equates progression to permanent residence with a feeling of safety and belonging, which, he says, would make him more willing to contact the police. Interestingly, one of the few young people in the study who had obtained permanent residence expressed similar sentiments, explaining that he would not report a crime to police until he obtained citizenship for fear that this could disrupt his progress. The position expressed, whether or not informed by an accurate understanding of the law, reflects a state of precarity that persists beyond the permanent residence. The legal instability is ever-present and, as described by Ellermann (2020, 2464):

Far from reflecting a linear progression from alien to denizen to citizen, status can travel along downward trajectories that – even for permanent residents and certain citizens – can result in legal precarity and loss of status.

These testimonies provide examples of how the increasingly temporary nature of residence dictated by the migration law regime in Sweden is impacting on possibilities for seeking protection from criminalised violence. Literature on the protection of deportable migrant victims of crime often focuses on the need to establish firewalls, a form of legal immunity that enables reporting to police without fear that such contact will result in their expulsion (Crépeau and Hastie 2015). While remaining crucially important, such strategies do not address the new forms of legal precarity produced by the Study law or other forms of temporary residence that have been in use for longer, but which are now becoming more prevalent not just in Sweden, but in a European context.

Silence as solidarity: ‘I didn’t say their names … ’

Fear of deportation in the context of non-reporting of crime can manifest as complex strategies of silent solidarity with others, such as peers, or even perpetrators. Several of the young men I spoke to referred to situations where they declined to report serious violence due to their relationship with the perpetrator. I interviewed Fakhrudin, a 20-year-old male from Afghanistan who fled to Sweden as a child and who had recently received the final refusal on his asylum application. He told me how he had been assaulted with a knife by friends, sustaining serious injuries that required hospitalisation. He told hospital staff that he had fallen while drunk (although in his interview with me he took care to explain that he never drinks alcohol). He gave the same account of the incident to teachers and others at school. He explained: ‘I didn’t say their [the perpetrators] names [to the police], I really don’t want to do that, it will be bad for them [as they were undocumented] … ’.

Sometimes, silence as solidarity involves deferring police contact even in situations when such contact is proposed. Azatullah, a young man, also of Afghan origin, with whom I had an informal conversation, told me how he had ended up in hospital after having been assaulted by a friend. He showed me several thick scars running along on one of his arms and told me that, during his time in hospital,

the hospital staff asked what had happened and they asked me if I wanted to make a report to the police. I said, later, but then I left as soon as I had received medical treatment. I didn’t want my friend to get into trouble with the police, because he was undocumented. (fieldnote 8 July 2020)

These accounts provide testimony of solidarity practices with peers amongst young migrants, while the casual mentions of ‘friends’ as perpetrators highlight the high risks faced by young men of peer-on-peer violence. Practices of silence may also be related to peer pressure and fear of retaliation, a concern explicitly mentioned by some young people in this study.

Silence as solidarity is apparent also in the context of labour exploitation where some young people expressed hesitance about reporting a previous employer to the police as they would not want to risk the livelihood of friends relying on the employer for their livelihood.

Earlier research into non-reporting by migrants suggests that victims may be reluctant to report the crime to police when the offender is a member of the family or comes from the same ethnic or national background, as they feel guilty about the consequences for the perpetrator (Taverriti 2019; PICUM 2015). Feelings of guilt or concern about consequences for others were reported by several respondents. One young man who had been assaulted and whose perpetrator had been convicted said that he felt guilty when he realised that the perpetrator would be deported as part of the sentence he received (to the same war-torn country the informant had fled from). One young person reasoned that if he had reported the person who committed a crime against him, this could have negatively affected a third-party application, potentially preventing that person from being able to leave the same country from which the young person had fled.

The solidarity practices discussed here can be seen as complex deliberations of non-protection concerned with the deportability of other people who are in similarly precarious situations. While silent solidarity practices, such as a collective decision by migrant communities not to engage with police have been framed as a political act of contestation of the border regime (Chapin 2011), the solidarity practices of silence described here represent individual deliberations in face of structural inequalities that forces a stark choice between one’s own safety and the survival of others, underscoring both the vulnerabilities and resilience of young migrant victims of crime.

Experiences of discriminatory and racist policing: ‘I haven’t done anything, but I will be the suspect’

Most of the young migrants I interviewed tended to perceive police negatively: ‘You don’t see police like a source of security, but more like a threat’ (ID No11 Q31). Research participants frequently mentioned having been stopped by police ‘for no reason’ and strongly questioned the idea of turning to the police for help. They often linked negative treatment by police to profiling based on appearance or ethnicity. Negative attitudes or fear of police prevent victims of crime from reporting to or seeking help from the police (Rypi et al. 2019; Boateng 2018).

Young migrants and young men racialised as non-white commonly experience racist or discriminatory policing and are disproportionately targeted by police (Mulinari 2017; Wästerfors and Burcar Alm 2020; Mulinari and Keskinen 2022) Policing is often performed alongside bordering, such as immigration raids to round up migrants for deportation. Young racialised people are often considered perpetrators (Rypi et al. 2019) and described as being treated as ‘criminals’ rather than victims by police (Mulinari 2017). The cultural construction of young, male migrants as ‘dangerous’ or ‘criminal’ has particularly affected young men who fled alone as children (Herz 2019, 2). One young Afghan man told me that he had been stopped by police and accused of selling drugs because of his dark hair: ‘The police asked me ‘how much drugs have you sold in Afghanistan?’ They saw my hair and thought I was from Afghanistan’ (field note dated 20 August). Another young man, also from Afghanistan confirmed that he, too had been stopped by police many times, not just late at night but also during the day, for no apparent reason ‘because of how I look’ (ID No13 Q31).

Negative attitudes to police were sometimes connected to distrust in authorities more generally and the Swedish asylum process. But while experiences of police racism and discriminatory practices potentially affect all racialised young people, young migrants with precarious legal status face additional obstacles to protection intrinsically connected with (the lack of stable) legal status. Feminist studies of violence against migrant women have long made use of a more intersectional approach to highlight how gender intersects with race and legal status to compound risks of violence as well as restricting access to protection (Oskarsson 2013; Voolma 2018; Bexelius 2016; Canning 2017; Rodríguez-Martínez and Cuenca-Piqueras 2019). The ways in which insecure legal status and racialised targeting by police intersect to exclude young male migrants from seeking protection have received considerably less attention.

While experiences of discriminatory treatment based on ethnicity were commonly voiced, participants’ (young) age or (male) gender are rarely explicitly acknowledged in the material. However, Daniel, cited above, casually refers to his encounters with police with reference to discriminatory practices that seem to target young males: ‘When the police come, they will first gather all the guys who are a bit young, mostly my age, and I’ll end up in a situation where I haven’t done anything, but I will be the suspect’ (interview 7 May 2020). This suggests that experiences of ethnic profiling may be hard to separate from discrimination that derives from being young and male.

Many of the young migrants included in the study inhabit a liminal, precarious space not just because of their legal status, but due to their young age and the violent transition to young adulthood through state practices of re-aging (Kaukko and Wernesjö 2017; Kazemi 2021). Age can be a barrier to protection since young people are less likely to report a crime (Merenius and Sellgren Karlsson 2020; Rypi et al. 2019; Boateng 2018). Young men, including those from ethnic minority backgrounds, tend not to report experiences of criminalised violence to the police (Burcar 2013; Fohring 2014; BRÅ 2020, 16) and rarely seek victim support (Thunberg 2020). The concerns articulated by study participants indicate a need for migration researchers to ‘de-migranticise’ (Dahinden 2016) research on non-reporting by migrant crime victims by looking beyond legal status as a barrier to reporting to gain a more complete understanding of the formal and informal barriers that intersect to prevent police contact.

Many research participants, like others who have sought asylum, have experienced police violence and racism in countries they have fled or transited (Thomas et al. 2004; Hopkins and Hill 2008). My material suggests that these experiences shape negative perceptions of police in Sweden and influence decisions not to engage the police. Bagher, a young man who had fled to Sweden from Afghanistan, recounted experiences of police brutality as an undocumented migrant in Iran and during his flight through Turkey and Greece. He explained his fear of police in Sweden with reference to these past experiences of police brutality:

I’m afraid of the police. I’m not sure where that [fear] comes from, think it comes from Iran when I was living there undocumented. Or maybe Greece, but police there [weren’t] as dangerous, didn’t beat [us] as much. [I was] scared of the police, we hid from them on the way here. Sat in jail in Turkey where police hit our backs [until] totally black. (Field note 10 June)

Fakhrudin, cited above, explained in similar terms why he did not report an assault to the police. His account of police violence in Iran – apparently motivated by his ethnicity, lack of legal status, and being a migrant crossing borders – illustrates the complex ways in which racism and border control are interwoven:

F: I can’t deal with police and stuff. Because in my home country, when I was in Iran, the police punished me many times, a lot I was punished by police.

Author: Why did police punish you?

F: Because I was Afghan and because I didn’t have … same situation as right now, had no papers and that’s why they beat me, many times. Until the last time on the way to Sweden in the mountains between Turkey and Iran, border police, they shot us because of where we were going and stuff … 

Testimonies of police violence and racism in displacement not only help to explain why protection from criminalised forms of violence in Sweden may be hard to access. They also provide an important reminder that the feat of young migrants’ endurance extends far beyond the many years of bare life survival in Sweden. People who migrate face an inordinate amount of violence over time and in different places, testifying to the violence of borders (Jones 2016). Afghanistan, the country of citizenship for most of the study participants, has been and remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world where civilians and ethno-religious minorities such as the Hazara, are at risk of persecution (UNAMA 2021, Larrucea et al. 2021).

Conclusion: exclusion from protection as part of a continuum of violence

The testimonies of non-reporting show how young migrant victims of crime are excluded from state protection when insecure legal status intersects with past experiences of violence, racism and other forms of discrimination, resulting in reporting not being perceived as a viable or safe option. Experiences of violence stretch beyond borders and over time, testifying to the global reach of racism and institutional violence that restrain the ability of young asylum-seekers to engage the law to seek protection from criminalised violence. Complex solidarity practices performed at a great cost of personal safety and integrity also inhibit police contact.

The accounts presented above illustrate how non-protection from criminalised violence occurs at – and is facilitated by – intersections of different forms of tacit, structural forms of violence. State failures to prevent or counteract the harmful effects of immigration laws, discriminatory policing and racist violence to allow young migrants to safely engage the police when suffering criminalised violence facilitates further harm. This failure of victim protection follows upon the failure to extend protection by asylum or inclusion in welfare and represents yet another instance of violence experienced by young migrants. Non-protection from criminalised violence, then, must be approached not as an isolated problem of criminal justice shortcomings, but as part of the continuum of violence facing young precarious migrants. The violence continuum extends from the countries of origin and continues during flight and in displacement. It is further inflicted by laws and policies on asylum and social welfare in Sweden and continues post-deportation (Khosravi et al. 2016; Khosravi 2017; Larrucea et al. 2021; Gladwell et al. 2016). In some cases, the violence of borders does not cease even upon death. The dead body of Reza, the young man murdered in the north of Sweden, could not be brought back to his family in Iran, due to intractable bureaucratic regulations, in a final act of violent bordering.

The system of victim protection for migrants represents an extension of border control systems, reproducing inherently violent qualities of the border. Systems of immigration control and victim protection mirror each other, subverting needs-based protection and requiring performance (as a victim, or as a worker/student). Simultaneously, the state carries a legislated, non-negotiable responsibility for protecting all persons within its territory from criminalised violence.

So, how can precarious young migrants be expected to turn to the police, whether as victims or witnesses of crime? How may the ‘density of the web of violence’ resulting from interactions between direct and structural violence (Rodríguez-Martínez and Cuenca-Piqueras 2019, 586) be disentangled and conditions for protection created? Cockburn concludes that: ‘[I]f violence is a continuum, our movements have to be alliances capable of acting in many places, at many levels and on many problems simultaneously’ (Cockburn 2014, 372–373). Similarly, protection of young migrants must address all forms of violence shaping their lives, including the precarity created by a system of immigration control where temporary residence has become the norm and where access to social welfare has been made increasingly uncertain and unequal. Improving the potential for protection means addressing shortcomings within the criminal justice system, for example by continuing to engage, academically as well as politically, with the concept of firewalls as legal and policy starting points for safe(r) reporting, while addressing the injurious effects of past and present racist and discriminatory policing. It involves the need for grassroots legal education with young people seeking refuge to share knowledge and experiences of encounters with the law. For now, though, young people living precariously face a stark choice between survival and safety.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors Anna Lundberg and Ulrika Wernsjö, both at Linköping University, for their support and guidance. Thank you also to Victoria Canning of Bristol University for her input. I am grateful for the helpful comments by the two anonymous reviewers and the constructive manner in which they were given. I would also like to acknowledge the funding by the Swedish Crime Victim Authority. Most of all I am grateful to the young people who participated in my research. Thank you for sharing your experiences with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Funded by Swedish Crime Victim Authority (Brottsoffermyndigheten) [grant number: 03589/2019].