Hostile Environment. Maya Goodfellow

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СКАЧАТЬ in the hope that no one would ever discover the mistreatment going on inside, there is one detention centre that has become a symbol of state cruelty. Alongside resistance and protest, report after report has made small holes in the bottle green barrier that surrounds Yarl’s Wood, helping expose fragments of what goes on inside this notorious detention centre. This has been a collective effort. Channel 4 has sent investigation teams there. Women detainees on hunger strike inside have claimed column inches in the Guardian to explain their protest. Periodically, campaigners from all over the country have made the trip out to Bedford, surrounding Yarl’s Wood, making as much noise as possible to show solidarity with people inside and demand its closure. And the Independent and the Telegraph newspapers have reported on the alleged abuse that goes on within its walls.²⁵

      But the coverage of what goes on inside Yarl’s Wood can too easily become disconnected from the anti-immigration politics – the kind which presents immigration first and foremost as negative – that makes such an institution a reality, and that is perpetuated by our press and our politicians.

      The former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt describes to me the culture at the tabloid newspaper that helps make detention acceptable. When he was at the paper, there was a constant pressure, he says, to find stories that fit in with a particular anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim narrative. The Daily Star was no insignificant player. In December 2011, the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABCs) figures showed that the Daily Star was the third most widely bought newspaper that month, below the Sun and the Daily Mirror and with a circulation figure of 616,498, almost double that of the Financial Times’.²⁶

      Peppiatt, who in a widely publicised letter to his boss, media mogul Richard Desmond, quit his job in 2011 after two years at the paper, recalls being sent to pursue a story about a family from Somalia who were seeking asylum in the UK and who had been put up in a luxurious townhouse in Chelsea.²⁷ ‘These stories seemed to pop up every week’, where the message would be ‘asylum seekers are basically getting the absolute run of the pitch and being put up in expensive houses,’ he explains.

      When he got there, every other right-wing tabloid newspaper had a journalist camped outside the house. ‘We could tell there was people in there,’ he says. ‘Quite an intimidating situation with photographers and journalists hanging about this house … putting notes through the door … the curtains would twitch occasionally and a photographer would try and flash off a shot to catch a picture of them.’ Unsurprisingly with all these journalists on their doorstep, no one from the family came out of the house. So, despite intense pressure from editors back at the Daily Star, Peppiatt left, along with all the other reporters, as the night was drawing in. The next morning in the newsroom, Peppiatt’s manager stormed over to him. ‘What the fuck is this, I thought you said they didn’t come outside?’ he said pointing at the Sun, which had a quote from the father. ²⁸ ‘I said’, Peppiatt recounts, ‘they didn’t come outside, 100 per cent, they didn’t come outside!’ The news editor responded, ‘You know what, you need to be a bit more canny.’ You can make your own mind up was what he meant by that.

      Journalism that humanises migration or shows the realities of the UK’s immigration rules – however harrowing, hopeful or challenging to the dominant discourse it might be – is not sufficient to entirely dislodge the public misconceptions about migrants. ‘You get a lot of these biographical stories and stories of individuals or individual triumph or injustice,’ Dr Gavan Titley, lecturer in media studies, says about coverage and understanding of immigration. ‘And fine, we know all of that and how that operates in terms of empathy, but it’s not necessarily a politics.’

      This is what Charles Husband and Paul Hartmann found in their study from the 1970s, which showed how the media had covered the racism that migrants faced in the UK, in doing so, performing a ‘valuable function’. But journalists of the day also depicted these people as a ‘threat and a problem’, ‘a conception more conducive to the development of hostility toward them than acceptance’.²⁹

      Once in a while a news story does seem like it might rip apart a long-established narrative. When a photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s limp body, face down on a Turkish beach having drowned at sea, made front-page news all around the world, it seemed like there might be a shift. The boy and his family – his dad Abdullah, his mum Rehanna and his five-year-old brother Ghalib – along with nineteen others, had been making the trip from the Turkish coastal town Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos, which at the shortest route are separated by a stretch of water four kilometres long. Reportedly carrying twice the number of people it could hold, the boat Kurdi was on capsized five minutes into the journey, throwing all of its passengers – including Alan and his family – to the mercy of the unforgiving Aegean Sea. Alan, Rehanna and Ghalib were among the people who died that morning.

      The attention Alan Kurdi’s picture received sparked action in some countries, including the UK, Germany and Canada, who agreed to admit more refugees. But after momentarily softening their stance toward refugees, EU politicians competing with the far right wanted to show they retained a tough stance on refugees. Domestically and at the frontiers of fortress Europe they continued to reinforce and make sharper the many methods used to keep people out. Within months, if not weeks, tabloid newspapers that were outraged by Kurdi’s death resumed normal service, running an endless stream of anti-refugee scare stories. Hostile coverage punctuated by compassion, positivity, pity or outrage – whether about detention or deaths – isn’t going to fundamentally change policy or the myriad of negative ways immigration and asylum are represented, even if there is a shift in public opinion. A year after his son’s picture became world news, Alan Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, said, ‘Everybody claimed they wanted to do something because of the photo that touched them so much. But what is happening now? People are still dying and nobody is doing anything about it.’³⁰

      Nora knows better than most about the brutality of the UK’s immigration regime. Arriving in the UK at the age of just seventeen with her younger cousin, thanks to tickets their families bought by selling off their valuables, the two were helped out of a country in north-east Africa in 2001, escaping violence in the region with the aim of securing an education and with it a better life.

      Nora’s first asylum rejection was followed by another four. When her final appeal was refused, Nora, who by now had turned eighteen, was told she was no longer eligible for state support. ‘They said I could go back … since I was an adult and they wouldn’t help me anymore with my application … that was a bit confusing for someone who had just turned eighteen, not knowing what to do, where to go, how to get help.’ Worried about disappointing her family back home and with no one to turn to, she was at a loss as to what she should do.

      In 2005, while New Labour prime minister Tony Blair was claiming that the government was ‘dealing appropriately with the issues in asylum and immigration’, Nora was sleeping rough.³¹ She would continue to do so for the first ten years of her adult life. ‘I started hiding. Social services couldn’t look after me anymore because I was an adult so I was kicked out of the hostel we were living in,’ she explains. ‘I started staying with friends, sometimes on a bus. I was jobless so I couldn’t work because I didn’t have a work permit and no forms of identification. So it was pretty tough, for ten years I lived that way, sleeping on streets and in tube stations.’ Things got so bad that after nearly five years of being homeless, Nora decided to go back home. She went to the embassy of her home country, only to be told that with no proof she had come from there, they wouldn’t let her go back. Nora was left in limbo.

      Having to live on the streets for ten years took its toll. Sitting across from me in an almost empty coffee shop is someone who looks like they’ve got it together; Nora seems quietly self-assured. But as Christmas songs blare out from nearby speakers, she explains what happened after she eventually got her papers. ‘I missed out on a lot, I mean without … documentation you don’t have access to any form of higher education so after … I turned eighteen СКАЧАТЬ