Abused migrant women failed by the UK’s immigration system

Luna Williams is a political correspondent at the Immigration Advice Service. This is an organisation of UK based immigration lawyers that provides legal aid to asylum seekers, domestic abuse victims, detainees and trafficking survivors. Here she describes how abused migrant women are continuing to fall through the cracks of the UK’s immigration system.

According to the most recent government data, around 1.6 million women were the victims domestic abuse in the UK last year.

In turn, the National Crime Agency also logged one of its highest numbers of female victims of trafficking during the same year; in the first quarter of which 773 women and girls were reported as victims of modern slavery. These people are subject to severe forms of abuse and exploitation, with the vast majority of female victims in particular subject to forced marriage, forced prostitution or sexual slavery.

Despite some efforts being implemented to help these women, these numbers indicate that there is still a huge gender disparity when it comes to the presence of these forms of abuse, with women and girls overwhelmingly the targets, and men overwhelmingly the perpetrators.

While the government has introduced ongoing measures, which are supposedly designed to protect and support victims of human trafficking and domestic abuse, these have consistently fallen short. Vulnerable women, particularly those from overseas, are still incredibly susceptible to staying silent for longer and going without vital care and support when living in an abusive or exploitative situation.

This is due to several factors, one of which is the presence of a culture of disbelief and hostility within many of the UK’s legal structures – including the immigration system – that work to cut migrants out of support networks. The last decade has seen the UK’s immigration laws shift and tighten, as the focus on ‘illegal’ immigration has increased across public and political spheres. These law changes have resulted in many civil servants and service-providers (including government caseworkers, the police and the NHS) being encouraged to vet, report and refuse their services to migrants who are unable to produce the correct documentation.

This presents severe issues for victims of domestic abuse and trafficking, the latter of which often have no identification documents. Traffickers often confiscate the documents of their victims. This usually happens in the victim’s home country, when perpetrators posing as people smugglers target women who experience abuse and violence at home, offering them the chance to escape and seek refuge in the UK. In these circumstances, the women will be offered safe passage to Britain and legitimate work/living arrangements in exchange for their documents and a fee. When they arrive they are then forced into prostitution or marriages. After these documents have been confiscated they are usually destroyed or used as leverage to force the victim to continue working for or serving the trafficker.

Because of this trend, coming forward to seek help and support from authorities once living in Britain can be particularly difficult for women and girls who are forced into sexual exploitation or domestic servitude in the UK. Equally, migrant women who are being abused by their husbands and partners (which is very common in trafficking cases that involve forced marriage) on top of this have been found to avoid coming forward for longer than victims who are British nationals. One survey by SafeLives found that non-white migrant women are especially susceptible to staying silent for longer when they are being abused, estimating that they endure their abuse for 1.5 times longer than their white-British counterparts. 

While there are various factors that contribute to this, it is clear that hostile immigration policies and an ongoing lack of support for migrant abuse victims means that vulnerable women and girls are still unable to reach out for help when their safety and lives are at risk.

Currently, migrants who are unable to produce the correct documents are not allowed to access domestic abuse support networks, under what are called the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ measures. Under these measures, abuse victims without documentation cannot access public funding, refuges or shelters.

Despite ongoing calls from charities and activists asking the government to offer more support for women who are affected, the latest draft of the Domestic Abuse Bill, published this March, fails to provide this. This means that migrant women are continuing to be cut off from services designed to protect people in their situation.

Stringent and hostile immigration policies that target undocumented people should have no weight when it comes to protecting the safety and lives of abuse victims and trafficked people. According to research by Amnesty, 92% of migrant women who are abused by their partners report being threatened with deportation as part of their abuse. Likewise, many trafficking survivors describe how their immigration status was used as a coercive tool while they were held as modern slaves. It is the government’s duty to stop feeding into these narratives. Policymakers and MPs must act quickly in order to redraft laws that bar migrants from accessing vital care, so that the UK can continue to make steps towards offering an even playing field when it comes to protecting abused women.   

Luna Williams political correspondent at the Immigration Advice Service.