Chapter nine:
Service provision, and the difficulty of ‘evidencing’ violence
This chapter provides an analysis of views expressed by participants on service provision in the UK and its impact on Pakistani women. It draws attention to the unevenness of service provision, inconsistencies within NASS practice, and particular difficulties for women and providers posed by the immigration rule on ‘no recourse to public funds’. It also highlights key problems associated with services provided by the police, interpreters and legal practitioners. This chapter comments on views concerning the treatment of evidence in Pakistani women’s cases and highlights particular problems experienced by women from different backgrounds (such as educated women, ‘poor’ women, non-Muslim women and ‘lone’ women). This includes a discussion on evidential problems associated with how women describe forms of domestic violence. Linked to this analysis is commentary on country reports and expert evidence. Finally the discussion on evidence is considered in relation to the perceived ‘culture of disbelief’ within the Home Office.
9.1 Service provision: an overview
Largely rooted in the charitable or voluntary sectors, services for women also included statutory services such as the police and the NHS. Services specifically for women who left domestic violence situations were consistently described as poorly resourced, thin on the ground, over-subscribed, unsympathetic, culturally unaware or culturally inappropriate. These were described as being at their most inadequate at ‘crisis point’ by a worker based in a refugee community organisation in the Midlands:
“…a woman who has experienced domestic violence has all the usual problems of money, where
to stay etc, but if you are an asylum seeker you’ve got all the worries about your asylum claim and
your immigration status on top, and the fact that you’ve no access to resources. I’ve even known of
some cases where women have gone back [to the abusive relationship] because it’s been so difficult
for us to find her somewhere and she’s spent all day in the office while we are trying to get them
accommodation and at the end of the day they start to question whether they are doing the right
thing. I mean if you’ve left somewhere and it takes a minimum of nine hours to find you a place to
stay for one night and then you have to go back the next day to find somewhere else you might
start to question whether it was worth it.”This participant spoke about the experiences of women asylum seekers and women who have been subjected to the rule on ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) and succinctly identified key underlying problems which impact on both categories of women; the rigidity of service providers, lack of resources, lack of safe shelter and women’s insecure immigration status. This bleak summary of the state of UK services for this group of service users presented clear parallels with the state of service provision in Pakistan, examined in Chapters four to seven.
Women’s refuges and the police described their services as the access route to a range of other providers, including lawyers, social services, and health practitioners. However, participants discussed how the process of navigating the system of service provision meant that, on occasion, women could access up to fifteen different services before reaching an appropriate form of support. As a result many women abandon the process and participants also described how many services were not always ‘obvious’ to Pakistani women. This exposed the inadequate framework within which some organisations define their services and raised questions about Pakistani women’s perceptions of their particular needs.
Cultural tensions and ‘clashes’ within service delivery were also highlighted, a point illustrated by this participant, a London based refuge worker:
“There was another lady who was here, who said that she was brought up in Pakistan to think that men were superior to women and you just wouldn’t communicate with men on an equal basis.”
This drew attention to how Pakistani women experience cultural alienation and also develop a sense of cultural ‘wrong doing’ by leaving their relationship and speaking to men in different contexts. Fears of this kind of ‘wrong doing’ often led women not to seek support. During the same interview, the participant described how many service providers lack an understanding of these issues, indicating gaps in awareness and a need for training:
“…and all of a sudden you are in England and you are fighting for your life here, and you are communicating with men on a daily basis, male housing officers, solicitors and social workers and she felt that they didn’t understand.”
As highlighted in previous chapters, these difficulties in practice within service provision may be contributing to concerns about under-reporting of domestic violence.
9.2 The regional picture: unevenness and lack of service provision
The scoping exercise and the interviews drew attention to the lack of uniform practice within service provision across different regions in the UK. In some regions, there appeared to be a high level of partnership working between health and social services, the police, and charitable organisations, demonstrating the success of the ‘passport to other services’ route described above. However, interviews conducted in areas such as North Wales, where women asylum seekers are dispersed into rural communities, presented a more barren landscape. Service provision was described as thin on the ground and unresponsive.
Some participants described their experience of barriers to access to certain services, such as those provided by GPs. The following quote from a worker in a Midlands based refugee community organisation illustrates the point:
“Every organisation has people [workers] who are difficult, or can be reluctant to help clients who are refugees or asylum seekers, but generally we have a good relationship with other services and access to health services is generally pretty good. I think the problem with GP’s, when we have them, is often with receptionists who just aren’t clued up and either haven’t got the information or haven’t read it. But if you work with them they can get better, it’s about pointing them in the right direction.”
The quote reinforces the need to work with staff to raise awareness in working with a diverse range of service users.
One participant, herself a local authority domestic violence support worker, also commented on the dual role that social services performed, highlighting the particular difficulties associated with their role as enforcers of immigration control:
“Although social services have a duty to help the family under the children’s act, the stance they are adopting is that they can go back and that they don’t have to go back to the same city and she will be safe. They will offer them plane tickets, because it’s still a cheaper option….”
In the view of most participants, this conflict, between their duty of care and their statutory obligations under immigration legislation, combined with the pressures of managing limited resources, has led social services throughout the UK to prioritise their obligations to ‘police’ asylum seeker clients. Participants were not able to provide any examples of ‘good practice’ within social services.
9.3 NASS, women’s refuges and domestic violence
Participants described the disruption to women’s lives brought about by the NASS dispersal system, as well as its interference with case work management and disruption to women’s support needs. Furthermore, although NASS has a policy on protecting women asylum seekers who experience domestic violence whilst asylum claims are pending, participants highlighted the continuing contradictions and lack of clarity about whether NASS will fund bed spaces in women’s refuges.
Many women’s services identified the additional problem of inconsistencies in practice across different regions in the UK leading to confusion about NASS’s position. A refuge worker explained the problem in the following terms:
“If the woman is an asylum seeker she only has access to NASS support and won’t be able to access the refuges or services that could give her the kind of extra support she needs. NASS will try and move a woman temporarily away from the area, but that’s not always possible. It’s difficult to get them to move the woman sometimes. I’ve only managed to get NASS to pay for a place at a refuge once, but that was quite a while ago and I’ve not managed since.”
NASS would not be interviewed for this study, thus preventing clarification of current NASS policy and practice.
9.4 Service providers and the ‘no recourse to public funds’ rule (NRPF)
The overwhelming majority of participants identified the NRPF as a major contributor to the hardship and injustice experienced by many women with insecure immigration status.
As explained in previous chapters, NRPF becomes relevant when a woman who came into the UK on a spouse visa leaves her spouse because of his and/or familial violence. She may consider an application under the domestic violence rules or a claim for asylum. She will have NRPF unless she succeeds in a domestic violence application under the immigration rules. Alternatively, unless she registers a claim for asylum, she will not be entitled to financial support and accommodation under NASS. She is likely to be a situation where she has no state support, faces homelessness if not already homeless and no financial means of supporting herself (although technically allowed to work under the immigration rules, in the experiences of most practitioners and the researchers in this project, the majority of women in this situation will not have been permitted to work by male spouses and/or their families). The following quote from a Pakistani women’s organisation in Wales elaborates on the dilemma a woman in this situation would face:
“…if a woman has left the house and has NRPF she cannot get a refuge and money. If the woman walks into here and she has been abused and says she wants to leave the house I call the police, then the first thing is shelter and food and if I look at her passport and there is no recourse to public funds on it I know she is stuck. She can get the safety because the police are there but where is she going to stay?”
Another refuge worker described the cost of providing services and the hardship resulting from shortfalls in resources where a woman client is subject to the NRPF rule:
“The rent for a room here is £150, so if you are not getting funding for the space that’s coming out of refuge funds every week. On top of that the woman needs clothes, food, things for the children, and on top of that you can be spending £20-30 a week on services like the language line. I think you can say £250 or so a week that is coming out of refuge funds that hasn’t been accounted for from any funding source, and that’s for every woman we support with NRPF and that can continue for much longer than the usual six month stay”
Participants widely recognised these injustices and felt that existing immigration laws did not protect women effectively against domestic violence, which, in turn, rendered women unable to leave violent relationships and denied them access to services. The UK state’s role in creating structures which perpetuated women’s ill-treatment became apparent during the course of this research, as did the role of the UK’s states’ agencies, notably social services, in supporting these structures. Furthermore, these emerging themes again drew attention to the UK state’s role in maintaining immigration legislation which is detrimental to women and how this parallels the Pakistani state’s endorsement of the Hudood Ordinances which are also detrimental to women.
9.5 Interpreters and translation services
Numerous difficulties in the delivery of interpretation and translation services were raised during interviews for this study. Participants indicated that there were fundamental flaws in the design and delivery of translation services and these needed to be urgently addressed.
Quality issues remained unresolved for many participants but were often linked with other structural problems. Legal practitioners for example described how clients regularly raised concerns about the skills of interpreters but lawyers were tied to limited resources and tight time frames to submit evidence, they were often prevented from carrying out checks to ensure accuracy and quality. This remained a critical issue for many service providers who relied on interpreters to accurately translate oral or written testimonies.
Participants spoke of how legalistic terms such as ‘asylum seeker’ increased many Pakistani women’s alienation from services. They identified the role of interpreters as critical in facilitating women’s understanding of their legal situation and that standards of interpretation had a direct bearing on how women presented, how they offered information, and how they described experiences. Many stated that there were serious shortfalls in interpreters’ skills to extract powerful and persuasive testimonies.
Furthermore, for some participants, delays in providing interpreters signified a lack of urgency and a lack of will to offer protection. The quote below, taken from an interview with the director of three women’s refuges, highlighted how delays contributed to women often ‘cooling’ during the period of delay, a known effect in domestic violence cases which some have attributed to low conviction rates:
“Right from the very word go when they need to interview a woman they can’t do it until they have an interpreter and the interpreter has to be someone police approved because they have to know the law. So there’s a delay and that delay will then continue happening all the way through. There’s this issue with domestic violence, its proven that there is a four hour opportunity after an incident where a woman is very open to getting support after that she starts to cool off…. there are going to be cases that slip through the net because of the delay.”
A policewoman interviewed for this study described how the police had to wait up to two days on occasions for interpreters to attend stations; other service providers complained that these were delays which were instigated by the police. A worker in a refugee community organisation amplified this point:
“The police also seem to use certain interpreters and they can take time to get to the area, they
come up from all sorts of different places. I’ve known them use interpreters from London and it can
take hours for them to arrive.”
Some participants attributed delays to the desire to ensure access to ‘known’ quality interpreters; however others indicated that this was often due to bureaucratic inflexibility and a lack of will on the part of certain services. Some relied on telephone interpretation services for emergencies, subject to resources to pay for them; however all of the preceding comments pointed to the unresolved clash between the need to quality assess interpreters and the need to address the language barriers many women experience.
Many in the voluntary sector described how interpretation services were insensitive and unresponsive to the needs of women who had experienced domestic violence, and appeared to lack basic understanding of the ways in which post-violence distress impacted on women’s communication.
Participants identified a raft of serious errors in how some services worked with interpreters, for example, male interpreters were often provided in spite of requests for female interpreters. Another example concerned a case where the perpetrators of violence were called upon by the police to interpret when they attended an incident in a house. The police again were identified by another participant in an example of inappropriate practice, when during an incident; they relied on children to interpret.
9.6 The police: inconsistent responses
The role of the police is a significant feature when intervening in domestic violence cases and one that has been examined in many other domestic violence studies. As one police officer interviewed for this study indicated, they received 1,100 reports of domestic violence incidents every month in their area of operation. However, for the purposes of this study police intervention was discussed in the context of women who were in the UK on spouse visas and sought protection following spousal and/or familial violence, and who were considering registering asylum claims because of fears of returning to Pakistan. This also involved examining how the police’s function as Home Office agents in immigration control affected their role to protect Pakistani women in this ‘category’. The discussion in Chapter one of the stigmatising effects of the ‘war on terror’ on Pakistani women drew attention to their ambivalent relationship with the police, indicating that the ‘engendering’ of a prohibitive climate by the Home Office ultimately acts as a disincentive to women to talk to the police, thus heightening the harm to which they are potentially exposed.
Interestingly, participants were divided on the issue of whether the police demonstrated appropriate responses to Pakistani women’s requests for support. The emerging picture illustrates how the police often do intervene irrespective of immigration status and yet fail to pay proper regard to women’s essential needs, for example the way in which they work with interpreters as described above. Whilst some participants stated that their experiences of working with the police were generally good and that the police were more responsive to domestic violence issues than ten years ago, others stated that the police’s primary motivation for intervening was to secure convictions.
Police responses were also considered to be largely dependent on the sensitivity and awareness of individual officers (male and female) arising from a combination of close working relationships between local station officers and local women’s service providers and quality training programmes. Yet in spite of training at all levels, the nature of the response was often dependant on individual officers within stations or regions. On balance participants concluded that cultural and institutional barriers to change remained in place. One legal practitioner in the Midlands described her negative experiences of working with the police:
“I’ve had to struggle with the police so much. I’ve got one woman, she’s from a village, uneducated, not Pushtoon but she’s from a tribe. She went to the GP when she was attacked by her husband and was pregnant and they called the police and they took photographs. But now three months down the line they’ve actually closed the case because they are saying they haven’t got enough evidence. They are saying the injuries could have been caused by anything, it is just an allegation. The police just have no understanding of the difficulties women in general, and particularly Asian women have in reporting violence. They have their own expectations of what a victim should have done and many women may come to their attention and then don’t want to make a statement or still have a connection to their husband. I had one tragic case, where a woman was stabbed by her husband and he was arrested and then when he was released (by the police) he talked her out of continuing with the case.”
In contrast, a support worker based in a refugee community organisation, also in the Midlands, presented a more positive account albeit with a cautionary ending:
“I was quite impressed with him because he’d been with the lady all morning and that’s something that happens to us a lot so it was good to see that other services experience those difficulties. It’s hit and miss really though, he seemed to be really on the ball and knew about the women’s services but he was part of a domestic violence team, he understood about violence that wasn’t just physical. But I’ve also come across other officers who when they find out it’s an asylum seeker with no recourse they just want to pack them off to another service as soon as possible.”
These two accounts reinforce key longstanding problems, notably the police’s need to create nationwide uniform practices in tackling violence, and the need to attend to training and awareness issues.
Some participants made reference to the cultural framework of Pakistani women’s negative experiences of police involvement in Pakistan. Yet again, as some of the examples referred to above suggest, this provides further parallels with police practice in the UK which has led many women to simply not consider approaching the UK police. In her interview for this study a police officer discussed her awareness of the complexities of handling cases involving women from non-western cultural contexts and clearly identified aspects of immigration control, notably the rule on ‘no recourse to public funds’, as a particular barrier to women’s access to support. Her insight is an indicator of positive developments in police awareness of domestic violence with Pakistani communities, yet there remain widespread inconsistencies in practice.
9.7 Legal services: barriers for lawyers are barriers for women
“Many women are so panicked that they don’t want to tell their story, they don’t know if the listener is sympathetic or a part of the government and that is where they need more help. Some of them will only speak to a woman and that is not always provided, there are often male solicitors and they are not given a choice, but they won’t speak about certain things in front of a man.”
This extract from an interview with the chief executive of a BMER187 organisation in Wales highlighted some of the practical problems women experienced when trying to access legal services. However, other participants explained that these problems only partly described the barriers. The provision of legal services in asylum cases involves a consideration of a number of complex interlinked factors, in particular, access to resources, the politicisation of asylum law and practice, and access to justice. However many participants also raised concerns about the general lack of knowledge, understanding and expertise on the part of many legal practitioners in domestic violence cases. The following interview extracts highlight these deficiencies and, additionally, how their lack of attention to detail can obscure the actual and specific nature of women’s experiences. One participant, herself a lawyer based in a law centre, explained that:
“It’s not just black and white ‘has he hit you?’ there’s all the emotional abuse that can go on in a relationship which needs to be brought out. The definition of domestic violence was only broadened by organisations pushing at the boundaries and understanding what the experience of domestic violence is for women, but solicitors don’t think in terms of grey areas.”
The director of an international NGO put it in these terms:
“They [solicitors] tend to go for the ‘fashionable overkill’ and will use lots of allegations involving honour and the threat of violence and potential harm or death, but that won’t necessarily get to the specificity of the case. If you talk to a woman the actual reality of the case is often more horrific. If you can bring out what is happening to the actual women, the real story is often more horrendous than these dramatic allegations, but to bring out the real story takes time to talk to her and get the information. It’s possible sloppiness by solicitors but also a lack of time and preparation.”
The latter part of this quote is a point also echoed by lawyers in relation to complacent and corrupt practitioners, including ‘cowboy community consultants’:
“One case I remember the initial handling was appalling, it was negligent.”
The extent of corrupt practice is supported by anecdotal evidence from reputable lawyers as well as investigations carried out by OISC188 however women in need of legal ‘support’ continued to be financially exploited. Another lawyer described their experiences of ‘unscrupulous’ practitioners:
“Domestic violence affects all women, but for women with insecure immigration status the effects are even worse. For you or I we can go and find help, get benefits but they can’t do that and there are many unscrupulous solicitors and advisors who will take money from these poor women and they will beg borrow or steal to get the money to pay them. They are just exploited even by their own representatives. One woman’s sister gave [a] firm £500 but they botched up the case so badly that any subsequent evidence that was provided was dismissed by the Home Office.”
The squeeze on legal aid funding has, additionally, led to many reputable private practitioners across the UK to cease immigration and asylum case work altogether. This has in turn overburdened the not-for-profit providers of legal services and enabled the flourishing private market of ‘consultants’ to capitalise on this new ‘market’. Participants highlighted that in combination, these factors had ultimately contributed to women’s inability to present credible cases. A barrister drew particular attention to quality issues in legal services during her interview for this study:
“Having a good solicitor is extremely important and knowing what to look for and what evidence to get…a lot of women are not represented, or represented late or not represented by people who know what they are doing... sometimes I pick up on appeal something which has been messed up.”
One Pakistani woman participant drew parallels between her experiences of legal services in the UK with those in Pakistan:
“I found my situation to be the same as in Pakistan. The solicitors would not take my mother’s case unless they were paid...”
187 For this study, BMER refers to Black, Minority Ethnic and Refugee Women.
188 OISC is a public body set up under the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 and is responsible for regulating immigration
advisers.Participants also highlighted the impact of the NASS dispersal system on legal services provision, for example when women had to change representatives, often at critical times before an interview or before a hearing. A solicitor in London stated that:
“I had one woman I was dealing with but unfortunately she was dispersed and it just wasn’t possible to keep the case on. She had to seek advice from a local solicitor; legal aid recommends that you seek advice locally as well so we couldn’t keep her on.”
Participants also highlighted the practice at the Home Office of ‘fast tracking’ asylum cases (tightening the timeframe within which asylum claims from certain countries are disposed of once they are registered). They felt that this had an effect of limiting the amount of time lawyers could realistically and financially afford to spend on case preparation and evidence gathering, and resulted in chaotic, under-resourced and highly pressured legal service provision. Participants perceived women to be the victims of these structural and political problems. A housing support worker in Wales provided a perspective on how women struggle to keep up with the legal services and the asylum system:

“The solicitors are all up in London, there is one in Newport and the Immigration Advisory Service in Cardiff, but they are run off their feet and only come here once a week or so to give advice sessions and they can’t really take cases that show any kind of weakness. And don’t forget the solicitors often don’t even turn up in the appeal court, they just send the papers on, so she wouldn’t have had anyone there and every time she went she had to desperately try and find someone to look after the girls because they were terrified of going. If she had to take them it was a 3-4 hour journey to London and then on the tube with three kids, even if she managed to leave them here she’d have to rush back to pick them up because it would be such a long day and it was difficult to find the money to go.”
9.8 Evidence: compelling, credible and immaterial?
Evidence in domestic violence asylum cases consists of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ material (see Chapter three). Typically in a domestic violence asylum claim, evidence might consist of a woman’s written statement of her experiences, witness statements, medical reports, experts reports (which might address any number of specific issues pertaining to the individual woman’s circumstances, but which on the other hand might be a generic country report) and any other documentary evidence to support the account. The latter type of evidence might specifically corroborate facts, for example in a Pakistani woman’s situation, this might consist of a ‘first information report’ which is generated by the Pakistani police if/when she registered the violent incident(s) at the police station, and whilst not contemporaneous, it should provide a factual description to the police of what actually took place. It might also consist of evidence from which inferences can be made, for example a Pakistani newspaper article which refers to a male relative’s business, political and/or community interests.

A large majority of participants who assisted women to compile evidence were sceptical about whether most Pakistani women would be able to present such a body of evidence, and furthermore, whether such evidence, however compelling, actually would succeed in persuading the decision makers. They identified a number of specific factors which were indicative of this cynical treatment of evidence, a cynicism which they argued permeated the decision making system. These factors were connected to women’s class, women’s own perspectives and understanding of violence, the role of country reports and expert evidence, and the ‘culture of disbelief’ which appeared to pervade decision-making. Each of these factors is discussed below.

9.8.1 Economically disadvantaged women: economic with the truth?

Women from rural areas in Pakistan were identified by many participants as the primary social group who are least likely to be able to produce ‘subjective’ evidence, other than their own statements, in support of an asylum claim and were more likely to be regarded as economic migrants by the Home Office. One participant, a worker in a BME organisation, explained:

“...but if they say they are poor and from a village they just assume they are economic migrants and women’s cases are not getting fully investigated”.

This correlation between the low socio-economic profiles of many Pakistani women, their inability to evidence their experiences of domestic violence beyond their own testimonies, and subsequent negative judgements about their ‘real’ motives for fleeing, was consistent with women’s experiences globally.

Critically for this study, it brought into sharp focus the relationship between women in these circumstances and, as the above extract highlighted, the perceptions decision-makers hold which lead to negative judgements. Interestingly, whilst the majority view of participants suggested that the Home Office are perceived to discriminate against economically disadvantaged women from rural areas, participants also described the parallel suspicions of the Home Office against women from wealthier backgrounds, as illustrated below.

9.8.2 Economically advantaged women: better off?

In the following extract, a barrister explains how a woman from an educated, higher class succeeded in her asylum case:

“I realised that the reason we won the case was because the women was very together, she had language skills and she was obviously bright and stood up for herself and walked out early on before the violence became too great. I think it’s almost more difficult when someone has experienced violence over along period of time because the Home Office will not believe that they have put up with the violence for so long.”

The barrister recognised how the perceptions of decision-makers of women and their class could lead to inaccurate portrayals of women’s experiences; he alluded to the woman’s education and consequent ability to explain her case in clear terms as the reason why she won her case, but highlighted the further misconceptions of the Home Office that her higher class and ability to ‘walk away’ from violence were interlinked. The following extract from an interview with a Midlands based legal practitioner further illustrated the contradictions in Home Office reasoning when it came to issues of class and background:

“The problems that we’ve encountered, and I think other solicitors would share this problem, are cases where the woman is well educated or professional, perhaps from a city area…I mean there obviously is variation across areas and regions and within regions, there are upper class women and women are in different positions in society, and I think the Home Office has grabbed onto that, has seen that women have held high positions in Pakistani society and they say ‘how can you reconcile that with a woman who is saying if she goes home it will put her life in danger?’ They think it’s out of proportion. Yet if you’ve got a case of say, a daughter of a high ranking official or politician then her father has to be seen to save face and that can involve killing her. Yet if she has some qualifications, the stakes are very high; she has to prove that she can’t just move to another city.”

Undoubtedly each individual woman’s circumstances need to be considered in their own right, however, as this participant identified at the beginning of this quotation, most other legal practitioners who were interviewed expressed similar frustrations with the inconsistencies in and inaccuracies of the Home Office’s approach in relation to women of different socio-economic backgrounds.

9.8.3 No-one is ‘genuine’

The above examples suggested that practitioners were questioning whether a new trend was emerging in decision-making on Pakistani women’s asylum cases. Many participants suggested that the Home Office had become less accepting of Pakistani women’s accounts and evidence of violence, irrespective of class. For example, a solicitor based in London stated as follows:

“Now they are more strict, they are not finding anyone genuine at the moment…Even the First Incident Report they are not accepting that any more, they are saying that this is not good evidence…”

9.8.4 Pakistani women and the language of violence

Another factor which undermined evidence concerned the nature and description of violence itself. Many participants highlighted the indirect ways in which women described the intimate details of spousal interaction. However, in conjunction, they stressed the difficulty of preparing statements when, for example, there appeared to be no obvious linguistic reference points for certain forms of sexual violence that are meaningful in a western legal context. They also stated that Pakistani women themselves struggled with their own anxieties about confronting violence and about facing counter-accusations of ‘sexually deviant’ behaviour for drawing attention to violent spouses. One legal practitioner described these obstacles as follows:

“Women will often not give as much detail as is needed, they will summarise it. They will say things like, well he hit me for three days a week for six months, but they won’t actually say what happened, if they were hit or punched or where they were hit. I have to push them to get them to describe the detail. I’ve got one woman who was raped in her marriage and she has only just revealed that to me, she didn’t want to talk about it she felt so dirty. We had had to write a supplementary statement explaining why she didn’t raise it before. She felt that no-one would believe that a husband would rape his wife. Especially for Pakistani woman sex is just something you don’t talk about. There are certain phrases in Urdu and Punjabi which would signify that you were sleeping with your husband, you would never say sex. So when there’s been sexual abuse there is no language to express it, even the way I’m talking now would be very difficult to translate into Urdu, less educated women don’t even know the word for sex so its very difficult when I’m talking to them to try and bring out those issues.”
This example indicated that if the words did not exist, or alternatively, if women were not able to describe their experiences in those terms, accusations of ‘fabricating’ evidence might well ensue. Additionally, as discussed above, difficulties associated with interpretation services could lead to ambiguities and inaccuracies.
9.8.5 Country reports
Reports which provide all the relevant country information vary in detail, quality, accuracy and reliability. Participants perceived country reports, in particular, Home Office generated reports, to be lacking in objectivity; the majority view was that they were, as a rule, incapable of being ‘independent’. Relied on by the Home Office for assessing asylum claims, their country reports were regarded by participants with suspicion, not only for what they contained, but also for what they lacked or glossed over. Whilst participants did not make reference to reports commissioned by non-governmental organisations, the writers of this report were aware of similar accusations arguably being levelled at reports produced by those organisations. Participants referred to the Home Office’s own reports as essentially the only ones to which the Home Office paid due regard.
However, there is a considerable onus on report writers to source accurately and to make clear and unambiguous findings. Participants stated that in their experiences, Home Office reports did not stand up to this scrutiny (see chapter three for a summary of Home Office country reports and references to other studies which criticise their reliability). In the case of Pakistan, participants gave examples such as the continuing lack of detailed information about the situation for women that addressed women’s particular position in society, the familial, class, religious and societal structures which led to women’s ill-treatment and the considerable lack of attention to the complexities of internal flight. An adviser at a refugee legal centre explained the difficulties with Home Office reports as follows:
“In relation to country information reports, the information can be very poor on women…which doesn’t really reflect their experience of human rights violation. Credibility may be an issue because if the report doesn’t refer to the situation of women a judge may not believe her… [Home office officials] take decisions on the basis of deficient reports, but don’t try to understand the situation as far as the individual is concerned, or because the report is not comprehensive they say ‘oh its fine, you can go to the police’. They either ignore the individual situation or make broad generalisations on the basis of reports which are just not good enough…they don’t understand the culture as well…we were told of one case of a woman who had declared to the Home Office that she had suffered domestic violence in Pakistan for x number of years and the decision maker just said that it was just not plausible that she had suffered to the extent that she described.”
This suggested that sole reliance on Home Office reports was a flawed approach, and one which undermined women’s own evidence.
9.8.6 Expert evidence
Participants spoke about how experts’ reports, and indeed, experts themselves, had also come under close examination by decision makers and often faced similar accusations of a lack of credibility for their findings. Experts can address country specific issues, women’s specific histories, health and wellbeing matters and the applicability of concepts such as internal flight in particular circumstances:
“For us, providing an expert report is very much about addressing these issues of credibility and implausibility, usually at the appeal stage…we can tease out the reasons why stories don’t seem to hang together. We can use our expertise to demonstrate that things which seem outrageous or impossible are actually very possible in that context.”
As this quote from a legal practitioner demonstrated, their role in corroborating the credibility of Pakistani women’s accounts of violence, and of fears of returning to their country, was potentially invaluable. The challenge they faced, however, when exposed to a critical inspection at the hands of the Home Office and the courts, was proving their own credibility:
“For experts it’s very difficult because their framework is very different and they are finding their reports are going to court and being rubbished.”
It is without doubt important to identify experts with appropriate and well established expertise. However, the above quote from another legal practitioner alluded to the crux of the problem that is, the ongoing difficulty of locating experts which the decision-makers accepted as reliable or credible. It also appeared that this is inextricable from the ‘culture of disbelief’ (see below) which framed decision-makers’ negative approach to the analysis of evidence; the cumulative effect of these factors appeared to undermine the evidence of experts.
9.8.7 The inherent ‘culture of disbelief’
This notion has been considered in Chapter three and a number of these points have been well-rehearsed in other studies referred to in that chapter. Yet the notion of a ‘culture of disbelief’ persisted throughout the research and consistently informed the responses of participants who believed that this culture underpinned the attitude of decision makers towards Pakistani women’s asylum claims.
“Here they don’t understand the system in Pakistan and how, if you leave a family, if you run, the family can be very ‘thirsty for blood”.
This quote from an interview with a worker in a Muslim women’s refugee community organisation explained how a lack of understanding, and an inherent distrust of evidence, combined with opposing cultural frameworks, could lead to difficulties for women in constructing plausible testimonies. In the words of the director of an international NGO:
“She said words to the effect that ‘all his men raided the house and tried to drag away my child, but then they went away’. The statement didn’t make sense, because there were only her aged and infirm parents there and if a feudal gang came to take your child they would have taken him…. In Pakistan you can’t have a truckload of people coming to someone’s house without there being a whole hullabaloo without the entire neighbourhood knowing… because it sounds like an outrageous thing to claim, but when you understand the context it makes sense”.
The extract below from an interview with a legal practitioner demonstrated these points succinctly, in particular how the concept of dis/honour and its relationship to familial integrity was not credible to the Home Office:
“I think the actions that are taken by men in defence of their honour are sometimes seen as quite incredible by the Home Office, they think ‘is it conceivable that a father or brother or husband would actually kill a woman because of this notion?’”
Participants remained of the view that this culture has contributed to women’s reluctance to describe events at interviews, and often under cross-examination in courtrooms, which women still perceived to be hostile environments:
“Sometimes women disclose sexual abuse very late, there are reasons for that which are documented, sometimes…they wouldn’t disclose very personal or upsetting, or what they would see as the more offensive aspects of the abuse they have received. They might later tell their solicitor who then has to explain why they didn’t mention it before…if you’ve got a male Home Office employee or it’s a hostile environment then it is unlikely you would want to disclose such information.”
Furthermore, some participants drew attention to how these cultural frameworks for assessing evidence had led to insensitive and inappropriate comments made by immigration officials during, for example, a removal:
“The woman was being treated by a psychiatrist for her mental health issues and they aren’t supposed to remove someone under those circumstances, but they got round that by putting a doctor on the plane with her. When I asked the immigration officials about it, and I said removal was not in the best interests of the children, they just said that her case was very weak and they told me that she had said that schools were good here.”
In the following extract, a legal practitioner described the comments of an immigration judge during the course of submitting evidence on a woman’s experiences of trauma:
“I’d like to look at their training because in the course of the cases they sometimes make comments that you think they shouldn’t be allowed to make as a judge. I know of one example of a psychiatrist’s report dismissed, which said the woman had depression, and the judge just dismissed it saying ‘I know about depression, my wife’s depressed.’”
Not all participants considered judges to be ‘hostile’. However, the concern of legal practitioners focussed on more generalised discrepancies in the way in which judges acted and pessimistic outlooks on whether change could be implemented:
“I’ll go into court and sometimes I’ll know when I see the judge what the outcome will be, many are not like that, but there are some where you can pre-determine the outcome. There are more women than there were and I think the quality of judges has improved, more instructing solicitors are now sitting and they know the law which is a real issue ... judges could come from area of the law and are not necessarily immigration specialists. If they’ve come from a background of criminal law they can be working from a very high standard of proof and you want to tell them it doesn’t work like that, it’s not ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. There’s a lot of regional variation as well, I’ve heard that in North Shields it is very hard to win a case for example. Whatever viewpoint of the world and of immigration and asylum they come in with, it’s not going to be changed by doing the job, some people…it just hardens their attitude and no amount of guidelines will change that.”
The following chapter examines how participants described the consequences of these issues in service provision for women and children in the UK.
Hamida’s case
Hamida’s parents died when she was about three or four years old. She was brought up by her maternal aunt and uncle who themselves had five daughters and two sons.
Hamida started work from the age of seven. Since then she has been dressing as a boy. She said she had to do this because it is the only way to survive without being harassed. She was treated very badly by the family and was not provided with any food despite handing over all her wages.
In 2005 Hamida tried to commit suicide because she felt unloved and unwanted. While at the Rawal Dam, Hamida met a man who talked to her and asked about her, she told him she wanted to commit suicide. He explained that committing suicide was a sin and took her to see his wife who tried to persuade her to return to her family.
Hamida refused to return home and the couple then decided to send her to a friend’s house in Abbotabad where she could be properly cared for.
A few months later she saw her photo published in the newspapers by her maternal family claiming that she had been kidnapped. In order to protect the family she was staying with Hamida returned to Rawalpindi and reported to a Police station. She explained that she had not been kidnapped and that she had left home of her own accord as a result of being mistreated by her aunt and uncle.
She said that initially the Police were sympathetic but then became quite aggressive and slapped and kicked her. Hamida was kept overnight at the station without any food or drink. Some Police officers were asking for bribes.
Hamida appeared in Court the following morning after refusing to return to her maternal family. The Judge granted her bail on the condition that she would return to her family. He told her family not to mistreat her and asked Hamida to return to court after ten days to see how she was getting on.
When Hamida returned to court again she told the judge about the abuse from her aunt and uncle since her release. The judge referred Hamida to a Dar ul Aman. She wants to be discharged from the shelter but cannot leave until the court order is granted. Hamida wants to work and support herself.