Interventions in Disability Politics, 7th June 2023.
The UK asylum system includes multiple restrictions that limit access to the services and support needed for physical and emotional health and wellbeing. At different stages in an asylum claim, people are systematically denied access to such necessities as housing, financial support, and sense of safety. These restrictions are not the result of oversights but of deliberate policy designed to create a ‘hostile environment’. The social model of disability highlights the disabling impact of barriers imposed on people with impairments. Similarly, restrictions imposed on people subject to asylum conditions, result in a system that is actively and deliberately disabling. This is not to negate the emotional and physical pain inherent in some forms of impairment or in being forced to flee one’s home, however effective resistance must challenge the socially constructed, and therefore changeable, injustices.
Drawing on material from my forthcoming book about the knowledge and experiences of disabled people seeking asylum, I argue for a ‘social model of asylum’. This would bring together the insights and experiences of the disabled people’s movement, people in the asylum system, and a wider population seeking to resist the hierarchies of human value underpinning current injustices.
Rebecca Yeo is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Bristol: Refining and promoting a ‘social model of asylum’ as a tool to transform responses to disability and forced migration in the UK. Her work draws on her involvement in the disabled people’s movement and what she has learned from disabled people in the asylum system.
