BWRAP statement to the
Refugees, Asylum Seekers & the Media Forum,
1 February 2001

Formed in 1991, we are a grassroots Black and immigrant women's organisation aiming to win justice for rape survivors. We work with women who, having fled from rape and other torture by police and soldiers because of their opposition to military dictatorships and other brutal regimes, are seeking asylum. We have been able to help many women, including from Ghana, India, Kenya, Turkey and Uganda, most of whom have won the right to stay. We also intervene to secure the release from detention of traumatised rape victims, to help single mothers and their children trying to survive on vouchers, to refuse forced dispersal outside London and to stop last-minute unjust, cruel and even life-threatening deportations.

Our experience over 10 years is that the ordeal women and their children seeking asylum face is hidden from public view, and often distorted by a media anxious to whip up a witch-hunt - as happened a year ago when most of the media followed the government's lead in targeting women and children for "begging". Some of the issues we want the Forum to address today include:

• Refugee women and grassroots support groups like ours are rarely asked for our experience and the views which arise from it;

• To the limited extent that it looks for comments from people other than politicians on asylum and immigration issues, the media usually applies to the few relatively well-funded organisations. Spokesmen and even spokeswomen for these groups rarely if ever focus on the problems and concerns particular to women seeking asylum. Some refer women asylum seekers who have suffered rape, to us.

• Some voluntary sector groups are now an integral part of the implementation of the Immigration Et Asylum Act*. Their comments to the press therefore cannot reflect the widespread opposition to the Act, or the anger about the Act's devastating impact on the people whom they are supposed to represent. Most journalists refuse to look critically at this connection between organisations claiming to serve asylum seekers, while implementing and disguising racist and repressive policies.

• What are journalists attending today's conference prepared to do about this censorship and meeting the RAM Project's Aims to "obtain a fair and accurate representation in the mass media"?

*Five voluntary sector organisations received £8 million from the Home Office to implement the government's dispersal progamme (Reported at the Barbed Wire Europe Conference, Oxford 16 Sept 2000).