‘The Media Is Silent About Female Asylum Seekers – Yet Fixated About Men Arriving in the UK’

Kim is an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe. She lives on about £7-a-day while supporting her small child and is not allowed to work. So, when she received a £10,000 NHS bill for giving birth, she penned the only proposal she thought she could make work, requesting a repayment plan of one penny per month.

Kim’s story made one headline this week — in the Guardian, which consistently provides what little proof there is in the mainstream media that women seek asylum at all.

“All the immigrants that we have are MEN!” exclaimed one riled-up TalkTV guest, in a segment titled: ‘This Is Going To Make You Choke On Your Cornflakes’. In it, ‘health and wellbeing expert’ Monica Price seethes about asylum seekers receiving “priority” NHS care, demanding: “Where are all the women and children?!”

This article is not about the straightforward reasons that elude our media regarding why men disproportionately risk long asylum journeys (far more women and children would starve to death in overcrowded camps, were it not for the funds young men in their families risk their lives to send them).

This article is about the women who break that trend, and the fact our media is as disproportionately silent about female asylum seekers as it is disproportionately noisy about male asylum seekers.

“They’ll be showing videos of men on the television that are crossing the Channel, saying, ‘oh it’s only men’” objected our guest this week, Kim, the 34-year-old mother whose healthcare debt prefaced this column, “but when we sought asylum, it was an all-female group — but that media coverage, it wasn’t there.”

It is true that some two-thirds of asylum seekers arriving in the UK are men, but the media’s fixation on this group, which they have deemed the most problematic and easiest to demonise, means the thousands of female asylum seekers also arriving get almost no coverage at all.

Like Kim, who went from destitution to debt for giving birth with the NHS.

In theory, asylum seekers should be exempt from the ‘NHS cost recovery’ programme, first introduced by the 2015 Conservative Government to target migrants and overseas visitors. But it is frequently misapplied, explained Judith Dennis, policy lead at Maternity Action, which has documented substantial caseloads with devastating effects.

“Rules are misunderstood, people move around, not of their own volition. One of the things that we need to think about is the mismatch between what people are eligible for and what’s actually happening.”

Maternity Action is seconding a campaign by the National Childbirth Trust (NCT) to urgently review NHS charging. The campaign has managed to overturn Kim’s mistaken charges, but many women are not so lucky, and disappear from the asylum system into the far-darker undocumented world, for fear of being deported over their debt.

It is just one example of the ways gender and displacement interact to make refugee women as disadvantaged in our society as they are invisible in our media.

When she first became pregnant, Kim delayed seeking medical care for fear of being deported. “It was putting the pregnancy at risk,” she told Media Storm, “but I was so scared”.

Her initial asylum claim had been rejected after two years (she later appealed). But pregnant, mid-pandemic, and facing prosecution in her home country, Kim did not know where to turn. “If I go back there, I will face prosecution! Why are you not believing me, or are you not caring?”

A performer and political critic, Kim was touring in the UK when she learned the police had come looking for her in Zimbabwe. Her activism coincided with then President Robert Mugabe’s vicious crackdown on dissent, an ongoing practice in the south African nation that has been condemned by Amnesty International. “We don’t have human rights,” she told us. “It’s the government’s way, or the police way, or nobody’s way.”

In the eight years since she claimed asylum, Kim has been “displaced to five houses in different areas,” and is currently living in a three-bathroom house with a total of 16 mothers and small children. “There’s cockroaches everywhere, nothing helps, no matter how much cleaning. One time, the light and ceiling just fell down”.

Here, she challenges another common “myth” in the mainstream media. “We are not living in luxury like people say.”

“The biggest issue really for women in the asylum system is where they’re accommodated,” Dennis emphasised, “often housed in hotels, they can’t cook for themselves and their children, they don’t have any choice about where they’re living, so it’s really a lottery”.

But policy improvements come slow when faced with a tabloid media that takes offence at any meagre graces afforded to anyone (often erroneously) dubbed “illegal immigrants”.

Take, for example, the policy behind the cornflake-choking TalkTV segment in which Price (the self-described ‘health and wellbeing expert’) questioned: “Where are all the women and children?!”

The story was based on one NHS Trust in London and its outreach programme for vulnerable individuals, ‘exposed’ by a Telegraph article titled: ‘Inside the priority NHS service for migrants’.

GB News echoed TalkTV’s outrage at “asylum seekers handed preferential medical treatment”. Aside from the fact the service was not specifically for asylum seekers (nor even migrants, rather anyone deemed at-risk of avoiding healthcare because of A&E waiting times, including homeless people and people suffering from addiction), it had in fact been founded in response to evidence that certain groups experience significantly poorer health outcomes, and higher death rates, due to risk-factors including poverty, violence and complex trauma.

The story was not about a ‘priority migrant service’, as the Telegraph dubbed it, so much as a correction service seeking to level-up health inequality. Yet the media has contorted it into proof that asylum seekers — far from being exceptionally disadvantaged — are exceptionally privileged when it comes to healthcare.

Kim addressed the falsehood head-on: “Before [applying for UK asylum], I had already paid an NHS surcharge. So, it’s not like I decided, oh, there is free or better care. I didn’t even know that there was better care, I only knew that circumstances didn’t allow me to go back home.”

“We can understand why the stories are difficult to tell—they’re difficult to hear,” said Dennis, affording the media some grace in its underreporting of the harsh realities for women seeking asylum. “But it’s really important that we bring those stories to the public eye, because telling those individual stories helps the public to understand the policies.”

Media Storm’s latest episode, ‘Female asylum seekers: Healthcare, housing, and the hostile environment’ is out now.