Invoking vulnerability: practitioner attitudes to supporting refugee and migrant women in London-based third sector organisations

Abstract

The paper explores London-based third sector practitioners' engagement with vulnerability in their work with refugee and migrant women during pregnancy and in the postnatal period. Practitioners draw on notions of vulnerability that signal weakness and passivity as a strategy, which enables them to secure resources for the women they support as well as to sustain their own organisational existence in a third sector landscape that has been transformed by a range of neoliberal measures. Despite this invoking of essentialised vulnerability practitioners possess an awareness of how the broader context of women's lives, including government policies and structural disadvantage, acts to shape their vulnerability. The paper argues practitioners' contextual understanding of refuge and migrant women's vulnerability resonates with theoretical approaches that conceptualise vulnerability as an ontological characteristic of human existence. Strategic use of essentialised vulnerability is central to accessing resources, while an ontological understanding of vulnerability as a universal potential activated by socially mediated unequal power relations enables practitioners to address the specific factors that are producing women's vulnerability to harm. Crucially, this includes challenging the effects of the UK government's anti-immigrant "hostile environment" policy and neoliberal austerity measures.

Refugee Women Business Mentors: New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment

“…This is because the focus on empowerment as an incremental process for refugee women is contrary to the United Kingdom's neoliberal agenda of monetary self-reliance as the goal for refugee integration. In addition, the country's hostile immigration policy [70] and the more recent formalised policy to relocate and transfer responsibility for refugees to Rwanda [71] do more to invoke vulnerability [72,73] than empowerment. This means that the voice of the refugee woman must be represented in a way that presents her views, is sensitive to her vulnerabilities, and acknowledges the negative effects of a hostile immigration policy on the empowerment of the refugee woman.…”

‘We do things that matter’: Humanitarian representations of health and welfare services for forced migrants

“…Moreover, the participant places an emphasis on the type of work they do – ‘we do things that matter’ – and the fact that they are necessary and even fundamental for the person at the receiving end of this action. Implicitly in the quote ‘this person’ is defined as someone who has little control over the course of events because of their vulnerability (Mesaric and Vacchelli, 2021).…”

Procedures for claimant asylum within Canada, acceptance and rejection

“…This situation suggests that Global North states are not really facing a «refugee crisis», but rather a «political crisis of asylum», whereby they are increasingly trying to control spontaneous arrivals at their borders (Dauvergne, 2016;Tissier-Raffin, 2018). As a result, the protection space for refugees is shrinking, which is especially the case in European countries (Mesarič and Vacchelli, 2019;Smith and Waite, 2019;Tissier-Raffin, 2018), but also in traditional settlement societies such as Canada, the United States and Australia (Dauvergne, 2016;Bradley and Duin, 2020). The forced migration management models in countries of the Global North are thus becoming increasingly similar: security imperatives are at the forefront, in relation to rising fears of Islam.…”

“…Narratives about the necessity to resettle the most vulnerable people who are «lawfully waiting» in neighbouring countries are put forward, while asylum seekers coming to the borders are pictured as unwanted «queue jumpers» (Bradley and Duin, 2020;Tissier-Raffin, 2018). This chapter will therefore tackle this increasingly strategic use of resettlement by Global North states, including Canada, through a (re)conceptualization of the notion of vulnerability, which is central to the global refugee regime (Mesarič and Vacchelli, 2019;Richard, 2019Richard, , 2021Smith and Waite, 2019). In doing so, it will attempt to answer Dauvergne's (2016) call to renew the conceptual and policy vocabulary for the management of forced migration in the context of the political crisis of asylum of the last 20 years.…”