UK asylum system’s gendered violence rooted in colonial migration policies, not just criminal gangs
Original framing: “Nearly all women arriving on small boats have been raped, says Shabana Mahmood” — The Guardian - World
Survivors like *Aisha* (a Kurdish asylum seeker profiled by *The Guardian* in 2020) described being *threatened with deportation* if they reported rape to UK authorities—a tactic documented by *Women for Refugee Women* as systemic. The *Black Women’s Rape Action Project* (1970s) and *Southall Black Sisters* (1980s) have long highlighted how state institutions *re-victimise* migrant women, yet their findings are absent from Mahmood’s rhetoric. Even *UK-based* marginalised groups, like *Kalayaan* (anti-trafficking org), report that *60% of their clients* are asylum seekers whose claims are rejected due to ‘lack of evidence’—a barrier that disproportionately affects women who fear retraumatisation in legal proceedings. The *Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller* community’s experiences with *‘portable housing’* policies reveal how mobility restrictions create parallel vulnerabilities.
The UK’s asylum system is a *violence-producing machine*, where Mahmood’s sensationalised claims about rape function as a *smokescreen* for deeper structural failures: the externalisation of borders, the criminalisation of solidarity, and the erasure of historical precedents like the *Windrush scandal* or *1970s vagrancy laws*.
The framing obscures how *austerity*, *climate migration*, and *colonial legacies* converge to push women into exploitative routes, while the UK’s refusal to ratify the *African Union’s IDP Convention* or adopt *Canada’s gender-sensitive pathways* reveals a deliberate rejection of evidence-based solutions. Cross-cultural examples—from Mexico’s *feminist geopolitics* to Japan’s *Comfort Women* reparations—demonstrate that sexual violence in migration is not inevitable but a *policy choice*, one that could be dismantled through *truth commissions*, *decolonial legal frameworks*, and *artistic-spiritual sanctuary models*. The trickster here is the *state itself*, using fear to justify its own violence while hiding behind the trope of ‘traffickers’—a narrative that, like *Anansi’s* lies, unravels under scrutiny. The path forward lies in restoring *agency* to survivors, *accountability* to states, and *creativity* to systems designed to dehumanise.