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Coronavirus putting increasing strain on specialist domestic abuse services which are falling apart at the seams and already having to close doors

Domestic abuse services and human rights organisations call for emergency protections for migrant women, as Home Secretary vows she will not let down victims of domestic abuse amid crisis

At a time when safety and healthcare is what we all need, migrant women victims of domestic abuse are denied these fundamental lifelines open letter to the Home Secretary

More than 20 BME specialist frontline services, migrant and human rights organisations in the UK have written an open letter to the Home Secretary calling for emergency support to help migrant victims of domestic abuse amidst the Covid-19 crisis.

The letter - organised by the Latin American Womens Rights Service and Amnesty International UK - expresses concern for the impact the current health emergency is having on domestic abuse cases, as self-isolation inevitably leads to an increase in violence.

It comes a day after the Home Secretarys comments in a national newspaper which clarified that domestic abuse victims are allowed to leave home to seek help at refuges despite measures put in place to stop Covid-19 spreading. The Home Secretary also made a pledge "to every potential victim: we have not forgotten you and we will not let you down.

Despite this, the Government has not provided any additional funds or resources to help frontline services cope with the additional strain during the health crisis. The organisations warn that the Home Secretarys guarantee doesnt go far enough to support women with an insecure immigration status, who often dont have access to public funds and therefore dont qualify for refuge beds.

Four in five migrant women are turned away from refuges, and they are often too scared to seek healthcare. At the same time, migrant women are prevented from reporting domestic abuse to the police or other statutory services as perpetrators threat them with deportation.

Domestic abuse services falling apart at the seams

The letter warns that refuges and counselling services are at full capacity and are falling apart at the seams, with most services already having to close doors to protect staff and the people we support.

The organisations are urging the Government to protect the many victims of this horrendous crime, no matter what their immigration status, including by:

Full letter and signatories:

Dear Secretary of State,

At a time when safety and healthcare is what we all need, migrant women victims of domestic abuse are denied these fundamental lifelines

The Step Up Migrant Women campaign - a coalition of more than 40 BME and migrant specialist frontline services, domestic abuse services, social justice and human rights organisations, led by the Latin American Womens Rights Service - are writing to urge you to establish an emergency national strategy that ensures migrant victims of domestic abuse can access the support they need in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We understand that self-isolating, social distancing and staying at home are necessary measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 and protect each other. But whilst home is often seen as a sanctuary, for many it is a place of hostility, violence and danger. For that reason, we are concerned about evidence showing increasing numbers of domestic abuse cases due to quarantine emergency measures.

Domestic abuse affects roughly two million people a year in the UK, the majority of whom are women. For those who experience violence at home, the prospect of self-isolating of being locked in with your abuser is terrifying beyond belief. And for those who cannot access the support they need those who do not qualify for spaces in refuges, and those who are too scared to seek healthcare or call the police for help the situation can be unbearable.

Many women with insecure immigration status do not have access to public funds so are often blocked from accessing safety and the support they need four in five are, for instance, turned away from refuges. They are reluctant to go to the doctor or hospital if they are worried about their health, because they are scared they will be reported to immigration enforcement. At the same time, migrant women are prevented from reporting domestic abuse to the police or other statutory services since perpetrators use immigration status as a tool of coercive control threatening them with detention, deportation, destitution or separation from their children.

Over the next few months, the situation is only going to get worse. Evidence from China and Italy is emerging that the COVID-19 crisis will exacerbate domestic abuse. More and more people will rely on frontline domestic abuse services, on refuges and counselling services. But these services are already at full capacity and are falling apart at the seams. Most of us are already having to close our doors to protect our staff and the people we support. We are working endless hours to put our services online, and to make sure we are able to carry on providing women with lifesaving advice and counselling services. However, we are worried that the vulnerability of migrant women may increase since specialist BME and migrant services are experiencing shrinking capacity due the lack of face-to-face support as a consequence of the virus outbreak.

We are in a crisis, and we need the Government to urgently act to protect the many victims of these horrendous crimes. For all the reasons above we are joining with the voices of other BME, migrant and social justice organisations and the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector - who are working together to set out what the government must do to protect all victims. From the Step Up Migrant Women coalition we calling on the government to:

The Step Up Migrant Women coalition is calling on the Government to ensure that victims are treated as victims first by prioritising their safety before their immigration status

Yours sincerely,

1. Abi Brunswick, Director, Project 17

2. Asfah Kosir, Immigration adviser, Kiran Support Services

3. Baljit Banga, Director, Imkaan

4. Clare Collier, Advocacy Director, Liberty

5. Daf Viney, Director of Services at Hackney Migrant Centre

6. Elizabeth Jimnez-Yez, Coordinator, Step Up Migrant Women Campaign

7. Fiona Dwyer, Chief Executive, Solace

8. Fizza Qureshi- CEO, Migrants' Rights Network

9. Gisela Valle, Director, Latin American Womens Rights Services

10. Halaleh Taheri, Executive Director, MEWSo

11. Jemima Olchawski, Chief Executive, Agenda

12. Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

13. Katie Richards, Trustee, Refugee Womens Centre

14. Lucila Granada, Director, FLEX

15. Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, Director, Womens Budget Group

16. Natasha Walter and Marchu Girma, Directors, Women for Refugee Women

17. Nicki Norman, Acting Co-Chief Executive, Womens Aid Federation of England

18. Dr Nicola Sharp-Jeffs, Chief Executive, Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA)

19. Pragna Patel, Director, Southall Black Sisters

20. Rena Sodhi, Director, London Black Womens Project

21. Rosa dos Ventos Lopes Heimer, Policy Coordinator, Latin American Womens Aid

22. Rosalind Bragg, Director, Maternity Action

23. Sarah Green, Director, End Violence Against Women Coalition

24. Satbir Singh, Chief Executive, JCWI

25. Sawsan Salim, Director, KMEWO

26. Vicky Marsh, Advocacy & Support Worker, Safety4Sisters

27. Vivienne Hayes, CEO, Womens Resource Centre

28. Umme Imam, Executive Director, The Angelou Centre

See more here:
Domestic abuse services call for urgent support for migrant victims blocked from safety, healthcare and refuges - Amnesty International UK

Indias chaotic attempt to go into a lockdown to combat the coronavirus has had an unusual side-effect: it has the attention of the elites, ensconced in their homes during the three-week period, to the plight of the countrys massive migrant labour population.

The Central governments failure to adequately plan forced hundreds of thousands of people to try to walk back home, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, since work and wages in the city had dried up. The Centre has however clearly asked for anyone on the roads to be treated as a violator of the lockdown, leaving them vulnerable to more mistreatment and violence from the state.

While some of this is due to the governments failure to frame an intelligent, empathetic plan before announcing the lockdown, the lack of attention for this particular group would not have been surprising from any government.

As many as 120 million Indians are estimated to travel seasonally every year from rural areas to work in cities, farms or industrial areas. Without them, Indias factories, farms and construction sites would simply not be able to operate. They often have to work in the low-paying, hazardous conditions and because they are informal, seasonal workers, there is little in the way of social security or employee safety on offer.

Even though they number in the tens of millions, the fact that they are dispersed through India and the fact that the migration is seasonal means that they are often left without a political voice. The timing of Indias general election in the current cycle, for example, specifically precludes the inclusion of seasonal migrants who have to choose work and a livelihood over their political franchise.

Being mobile and without political franchise often leaves them extremely vulnerable and, indeed, invisible to the Indian state. They have poor access to health services or a social safety. Often, the cities in which they live are extremely inhospitable, and they constantly risk police violence.

Despite the scale of migration, seasonal migrant families lead invisible, isolated lives as they remain dispersed across the wide canvas of the city, wrote Divya Ravindranath and Divya Varma in 2019. Devoid of voting rights in the urban destinations that they help build with their labour, their lives are stripped of any form of political voice or agency. Their needs are rarely a part of the imagination of urban public services, including health systems.

Big shocks to the economy, like the coronavirus crisis or demonetisation, are the only times when these populations suddenly make themselves felt, ironically by their absences, as many return to the relative security of home.

But suddenly, because of the way Covid-19 operates and can be transported from the rich in the cities to the poor in the villages, policymakers are having to actually think about the patterns and needs of these migrants. Suddenly, Indians are realising that stay at home means very different things, depending on where you are in the pecking order.

Rather than penalising these people for attempting to make their way home, it is important for the Indian state at every level to use this opportunity as a wake-up call.

This must result in better coordination of policies between the source city and destination states (since the patterns are quite clearly etched), the Central government making an effort to provide a social safety net and an initiative to make it easier for internal migrants to have a political voice. This crisis serves as an important reminder that policies with a 120 million-person hole at the heart of them are flawed.

Read more here:
Indias seasonal migrants have been invisible for too long. This crisis should be a wake-up call - Scroll.in

The corona crisis affects everyone, not least of which the thousands of Polish and other temporary workers in the Netherlands. They are now losing their jobs and their homes, and are being excluded from financial bail-out schemes. No-one is listening to their cry for help, writes Malgorzata Bos-Karczewska.

Stories about EU labour migrants in the Netherlands are always driven by economics. The current big question makes this all too clear: If the Poles dont come, nobody will harvest the asparagus.

Distraught growers wonder if their crops will be left to go to seed? Branch organization LTO is investigating the problems facing the sector. But who cares about the fate of Polish and other temporary workers in the Netherlands who are supposed to be doing the work?

When the prime minister Mark Rutte said, We will not let you down did he address all the residents of our country? The governments emergency plan to keep jobs does not regulate temporary labour migrants. They are the forgotten people in this crisis.

Recession

Many companies affected by a significant drop in demand are ceasing production and kicking out their unwanted workers on temporary contracts.

The recession is inevitable and unemployment among flex workers will increase, the governments CPB economic think-tank warned last Thursday. Certainly not good news for EU migrant workers.

Here, as a rule, Poles, Romanians and others work for low pay on short flexible terms, sometimes one week or or zero-hour contracts. The employment agencies also arrange housing. The agency clause in a contract of uitzendbeding or no work no pay is now having dire consequences. Lose your job and you are also likely to lose your home.

StuckMany are ending up homeless on the streets, looking for scarce work and housing. Some are ill. But thanks to the corona crisis, they cannot return to Poland, Romania or Portugal. There is hardly any transportation for a start.

Concerned Polish parents have been contacting us, asking if they can pick up their offspring by car. Their children want to leave. They would prefer two weeks of mandatory quarantine in Poland than being exposed to the virus in the workplace in the Netherlands.If you feel sick, you have to stay at home that is the most important anti-corona rule brought in by the Dutch government. But if you are on a temporary contract, will you be paid if you call in sick? No, you are more likely to lose your job.

So some continue to go to work and officials do not pay any attention to sneezing or coughing. After all, the work must get done.

At some distribution centres, Polish and other EU workers sick or not are forced to work extremely long hours, because the customer is king and is hoarding. Is it wise to work such long hours? It takes more energy to build up immunity now.

And if you live in a small house with eight others, which has been provided by your employer, how can you recover and follow home isolation rules anyway?

Poles speak up

Polish migrant workers fear for their health, are afraid of contamination. Some feel responsibility for others.

I work with 100 people in a team at an AH distribution centre. How can we work safely?, one worried worker wrote to Polonia.nl. Some of us dont have gloves, even those who pack products for online orders. It is impossible to keep a distance of 1.5 metre. How can we be sure that someone is not ill?

In one case we are aware of, a team of 11 people working at a laundry in Eindhoven refused to sort contaminated bed linen from a hospital without precautionary measures. They were then fired.

I work in a hotel in Rotterdam. There are no disinfectants, just gloves, said another. What about the common sense and responsibility of the employer for employees?

IndispensableThese cheap EU workers are now indispensable. While many Dutch people are at home, the Poles, the Romanians and the Bulgarians who can, are at work.

These cheap Polish labour migrants, the ones so often accused of defrauding the Dutch social security system, are the order pickers, sorters, truck drivers and cleaners helping to keep the Netherlands going.

They are the ones who will be called in to pick the tomatoes, the strawberries and the asparagus because Dutch farmers need them.

But in return, the government must take care of them. The government must protect them too.

Supermarkets can be fined up to 4,000 if they do not create a safe environment for their customers. But why not bring in fines for for the staffing agencies and their clients who fail to comply with the RIVM corona guidelines on the work floor, in housing and in transport to work?

It is not just a moral appeal. The Netherlands should realise: their health is our health. It is only by acting together that we can beat corona.

Malgorzata Bos-Karczewska is a Polish-Dutch journalist and editor-in-chief of Polonia.nl a website for Poles in the Netherlands

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Europe's seasonal workers are being forgotten in the corona crisis - DutchNews.nl

BRUSSELS For Europe, the coronavirus could not have arrived at a worse time.

This was the year with Britain out, terrorism waning and the migrant crisis at an ebb that the European Union had hoped to repair and revive its cherished goal of open internal borders.

But cases of the virus have emerged nearly daily in new European countries in Spain, Greece, Croatia, France, Switzerland and, on Wednesday, in Germany. Many of them can be traced back to Europes largest outbreak, in Italy, where more than 300 people are now infected.

[Update: Nigeria records Sub-Saharan Africas first case of coronavirus.]

As the cases spread and multiply, calls for closing borders have grown louder, most predictably from the far right and populists who were never fans of the blocs open border policy

So far no country has taken that drastic step, but privately European officials warned that this could change quickly. On Wednesday, the blocs top official for communicable diseases said that Europe needed to prepare more broadly for the kind of crisis that has hit northern Italy.

Our current assessment is that we will likely see a similar situation in other countries in Europe, and that the picture may vary from country to country, said the official, Andrea Ammon, director of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

We also need to consider the need to prepare for other scenarios for example, large clusters elsewhere in Europe, she added, speaking at a news conference in Rome.

While she urged far greater coordination among European Union members, she stopped well short of recommending that they start shutting their borders.

Other health experts argued that such a step would be of dubious benefit in any case.

Travel restrictions dont work: people find another way around it, it might only slow the virus down, said Dr. Clare Wenham, of the London School of Economics Global Health Initiative.

The free movement of people and goods is a cornerstone of the European Union, referred to by the shorthand Schengen, after the city in Luxembourg where the 1985 treaty that created what is now a 26-nation, passport-free zone was signed.

Europeans consider it one of the blocs biggest achievements. But if it has nurtured prosperity and become a fundamental building block of European identity, it has also, practically speaking, been suffering a death by a thousand cuts.

Updated Feb. 26, 2020

The latest came in 2015, when a number of countries suspended Schengen to allow full control over their borders and stop refugees who had landed in Greece and elsewhere from making their way to the wealthier European north.

The rules allow for the temporary reintroduction of border checks for specific reasons, including terrorist attacks, major migrant surges or health emergencies.

The key, though, is the word temporary. A country can suspend the rules, but it needs to explain why its doing it, and in theory it cant carry out border controls for longer than two years, according to existing rules.

In what experts argue is an abuse of the rules, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Austria and Norway have practically scrapped Schengen and have been checking passports of travelers arriving from other member states for the past four and a half years, using legal maneuvers to circumvent the two-year limit.

Schengen is in a very poor and problematic state, said Marie De Somer, the head of the migration program at the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Center, adding that restoring it to its full functionality hinges on reforming the blocs asylum and migration rules.

The virus is yet another challenge, as it has given new ammunition to nationalists who want to see borders tightened or restored even before the contagion arrived.

Eric Ciotti, a French parliamentarian from the region bordering Italy and a member of the right-wing Republican party, called for reinforced border controls before it is too late.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, weighed in, also calling for border closures with Italy.

And in Switzerland, which isnt a European Union member but does participate in the border-free area, Lorenzo Quadri of the right-wing Lega dei Ticinesi, called for a closed-doors policy.

It is alarming that the dogma of wide-open borders is considered a priority, he said.

Long before the virus, many nationalists, led by Hungarys prime minister, Viktor Orban, had complained that Europe could not have open internal borders if its outer borders were weak, allowing asylum seekers to enter unchecked.

The European Commission was trying to put together a plan to fix Europes asylum system, including bolstering Frontex, the European Union border agency, by adding staff and funding and stepping up its operations at the blocs external borders.

But the plan is facing resistance because it also aims to create a system for distributing asylum seekers, something Hungary is likely to veto.

The divisions over the policy are manifold. Germany wants all countries to take refugees whether they like it or not. Greece wants asylum seekers quickly taken out of its detention centers. Italy doesnt want rescue boats to take refugees to its ports. The list of complaints goes on.

Ms. De Somer said that its impossible to know the true impact of the suspension because Germany and the other countries that have reintroduced border controls have shared little information on how theyre using these checks and with what outcomes.

We have very few figures on how the suspension of Schengen affects people, and its likely theres not much to show for it. That tells us this is about symbolism rather than about practical issues: Its about politics rather than policy, she said.

European officials working on a migration overhaul that will affect borderless travel say that the virus is at the very least a setback for their efforts, as it offers populists another opportunity to underline the importance of national border controls. The virus, some officials said, could offer a reason to kick the can down the road, avoiding a thorny subject bound to cause division.

Ms. De Somer, of the European Policy Center, is more optimistic. She thinks that even if border checks are reintroduced because of the virus, it could be an opportunity to show that Schengen is flexible and can work to protect citizens.

If health experts and the commission recommend this, then it would show the system actually can function even in a crisis, she said.

The catch?

The checks would need to be lifted according to the rules, when the threat from the virus goes away.

Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting.

More:
Coronavirus Nightmare Could Be the End for Europes Borderless Dream - The New York Times

The context for The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermess new satirical novel, is not as far-fetched as all that. Were just a short distance in the future, a time when a prosperous Europe is under pressure to formulate its responses to the massive refugee camps that are swelling all over Africa. (Significantly, this setting is explicitly post-Merkel Germany, in the years following the major influx of refugees allowed under her leadership.) Enter a TV producer, who can think of no better way to handle the global crisis than to send his star-of-the-moment to visit one of the large African camps and meet some of its inhabitants. It will be the perfect culmination of the companys hit reality series, Angel in Adversity, adored by viewers and advertisers alike. What could possibly go wrong The beautiful, elegant and vacuous Nadeche Hackenbusch shows up at the two-million-person camp, where she is welcomed as an angel. One of the refugees who has been employed to help around the camp calls her Malaika, because thats what angels are in Swahili; she, meanwhile, calls him Lionel because well, for reasons too involved to go into here.

Once they have met, Lionel (handsome, charismatic, seemingly mysterious) becomes one of the main drivers of the plot, as he devises a simple, if outlandish, idea to get himself and his friends away from their protracted desert hopelessness and up into Germany. But watching back home, how will Germanys reality TV audience feel about this new development? Its one thing to pity people suffering terribly 12,000 kilometres away, but quite another to want a few hundred thousand of them showing up on ones own border.

So what is the German government to do about it? Well, lets just say that the Overton window shifts terrifyingly fast. The dramatic climax to which this story builds asks who might be the casualties of such a confrontation and, conversely, who might do rather well out of it? And what, if anything, will people learn from the experience and the outcome?

As Vermess book is a work of satire, it would be unfair to tax it too harshly for its lack of interest in conveying complex characterisation or actual plausibility (we get little real sense of the refugees themselves); but its still a shame that its targets are such easy ones. There is a greedy, mostly amoral TV producer; a self-absorbed media star; a magazine features writer obsessed with celebrity access, whose lofty regard for her own journalistic work is matched by no discernible qualities; and a young politician who is quick to compromise principle for ambition. For all its original twists, Im not sure this is as bold as it thinks it is.

That said, The Hungry and the Fat is an immensely enjoyable read: it manages to avoid the common problem of diminishing returns (impressive for a single piece of satire spanning 560 pages), and really speeds along. Like so many of the most distasteful, grotesque spectacles, once its caught your eye, you find it almost impossible to look away.

Originally posted here:
Wouldnt the migrant crisis make fantastic reality TV? Timur Vermess The Hungry and the Fat reviewed - Spectator.co.uk