Paper details

Paper authors	Tianne Haggar
In panel on	Everyday violence and resistance in Europe’s ‘migration management’ during the Covid-19 pandemic
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper aims to explore service providers’ perspectives on practices of exhaustion employed in the UK asylum process and the ways in which it affects sanctuary seekers’ mental and psychosocial health. A total of 18 qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals providing social, legal, medical or mental health services to sanctuary seekers in the UK. Interviews were analysed thematically.

The results show that the UK asylum process is perceived to exhaust sanctuary seekers through practices including a Home Office culture of hostility, deprivation, and long waiting times. Exhaustion was reportedly experienced as the wearing down of sanctuary seekers, harming their social networks and mental health.

The paper concludes that a politics of exhaustion is employed in the UK asylum process as an invisible mechanism of structural violence that harms sanctuary seekers’ health and wellbeing. Visibilising this pathway to harm is a call to uphold sanctuary seekers’ human rights in the face of increasingly restrictive immigration policy.

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