Carers or Captors?

Report to the Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry on asylum

By Flo Krause, Farah Damji and Nanki Chawla

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1      This submission examines asylum through a gendered lens, with a focus on housing as a human right. Through our interactions with the women tenants of G4S  we propose policy recommendations with regards to both housing and the contracts and subcontractors in charge of this.

2      We conclude that the current asylum system fails women as a particularly vulnerable group, and must be overhauled in its entirety in order for gender mainstreaming to take place. We assert that housing contracts should only be given to housing associations, rather than corporations, and suggest the Housing First model as an alternative to the current system. We urge an immediate review of the current contractors, in order to assess their capabilities in fulfilling their current mandate, and to ensure that the vulnerable are not being ignored. We also point out that accountability mechanisms and transparency processes are vital to ensuring a fairer, more inclusive new system. We call for trauma sensitivity training for the officials which interact with this group of vulnerable people.

 “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

Maya Angelou 

This is an extract from a report to the Home Afairs Select Committee on asylum, that will be published  in parliament on June 4 2013 at an event hosted by Jeremy Corbyn MP. For further information please email info@kazuri.org.uk

Plastic soldiers plastic wars

The hell of war comes home. In July 2009 Colorado Springs Gazettea published a two-part series entitled “Casualties of War”. The articles focused on a single battalion based at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, who since returning from duty in Iraq had been involved in brawls, beatings, rapes, drunk driving, drug deals, domestic violence, shootings, stabbings, kidnapping and suicides. Returning soldiers were committing murder at a rate 20 times greater than other young American males. A separate investigation into the high suicide rate among veterans published in the New York Times in October 2010 revealed that three times as many California veterans and active service members were dying soon after returning home than those being killed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

We hear little about the personal hell soldiers live through after returning home.

  via Dorothy