Researching Empowerment in Practice: Working with a Women’s Refugee and Asylum Group

Abstract

This chapter examines the case for community-development-based approaches for working with refugees and asylum seekers, contrasting practice that sets out to empower women to speak up for their rights with provision that starts from a perception of asylum seekers as individualised victims in need merely of services and assistance. The research upon which this is based explored the benefits of collaborative awareness raising for disrupting prejudice, challenging discrimination and fostering solidarity in the host population. Collaborative awareness raising was, in addition, examined in terms of the potential contributions to building refugees’ own resistance to the debilitating impacts of racism and the consequences of what have been described as ‘the withdrawal of humanising practices … lack of welcome … and a heightening of the adversarial approach to those who seek to make their lives in the UK’ (O’Neill, 2010: xiv), which has characterised the asylum system for more than a decade.