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Dr Maria Abranches, School of Global Development, discusses her research into families' lived experiences of reunion after going through the asylum process. Here, she explores how women were affected by the experience.
How did motherhood affect the experiences of women involved in your research?
Motherhood affects women’s experiences of displacement, regardless of whether there was a period of separation from children. Upon arrival, children often experience depression and a general sense of illbeing manifested through ceasing to talk or eat, disturbed sleep, and difficulties adapting to school. This shapes their mother's experience of post-reunion life as more physically and emotionally painful. Moreover, the absence of a support network increases the feeling of being stripped of their connection with society – an experience described as “becoming nothing”, which follows the loss of previously held jobs, degrees, and “social position” in countries of origin.
"Participants in our study chose to emphasise their strategies for coping with challenges rather than the challenges themselves."
However, while post-reunion life continues to be on hold with the demands of everyday activity and caring, participants in our study chose to emphasise their strategies for coping with challenges rather than the challenges themselves. As part of the study, women participants chose to represent their lived experience through photographs that convey a positive experience, such as walking in nature, cooking and sharing food, making coffee, and a nursery that helped a child recover from trauma.
In your research, you state that "the feminisation of the asylum process reinforces inequalities". Please could you explain this critique?
The feminisation of the asylum process refers to the idea that the long and traumatic waiting involved in the process of seeking asylum creates a passive experience of immobility, associated with an understanding of femininity that contrasts with the active and mobile stereotypes associated with masculinity. This perspective on how refugees and asylum seekers endure the injustices of administrative processes, marked by "time theft" (complex legal procedures that prolong their temporary, precarious status and strip them of rights), risks overlooking how women actively navigate and resist their imposed marginality and forced compliance, even amidst loss and disruption.
How do the experiences of the female spouses who arrived in the UK after their family reunion compare to those who arrived before their family?
All women continue to experience challenges one-year post-reunion. Rebuilding relationships with spouses after separation takes time and, when children are involved, women also take on the responsibility of ensuring their adaptation to their new life. Yet differences can be observed in our study. On the one hand, for those who arrived to reunite with their family there is the experience of “survival guilt”, generated by the difficult decision to join their husbands in detriment of staying close to “their own” families in the countries they've left.
Women who travelled first and were separated from their children, on the other hand, experience the trauma of separation alongside the challenging task of navigating the legal requirements for the children to join through family reunification. This leads to a prolonged condition, where they feel “tired and weak” and note “very bad” mental health. In both cases, however, women in our study were able to start finding “their place” post-reunion, claiming to “regain [a sense of self-worth] slowly, each thing at a time”.
What were the key differences between the men’s and women’s experiences?
During the life period we looked at – one or more years post-family reunion – both women and men were able to start making plans and thinking about the future. Retraining, continuing education, finding a job, or starting a business were some of the projects mentioned by participants in the study.
"Challenges amongst women are exacerbated by what they describe as a sense of ‘fatigue.’ "
Yet, while both women and men face obstacles in formalising these plans, challenges amongst women are exacerbated by what they describe as a sense of “fatigue”, that denotes not only mental exhaustion but also physical illbeing. This fatigue is seen by women as resulting from institutional pressure, whereby they are required to, as one of them expressed, “do all [that] at the same time”. Ineffective job centre appointments, unsuitable accommodation, compulsory “one size fits all” English language courses, and the responsibility of having to respond to requests from the children’s schools were given as examples of the array of institutional demands which they still faced more than one year post reunion.
However, in the longer term, women also experience more opportunities to develop personal interests and take up hobbies, which they see as resulting from the “quietening” that comes with not having to respond to everyday obligations towards the extended family as they did at home.
Read Time and displacement: Changed temporal experiences of refugee families after reunion in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Dr Abranches is a social anthropologist and migration scholar, working at the intersection between migration and development. She specialises in international and forced migration; internal mobility; migration, food, and land; cultural heritage and material culture. The project on which these findings are based – When the Dust Settles – focuses on the lived experience of refugee families after reunion (British Academy funded), and other recent and current projects address heritage and coastal transformations in the East of England (ESRC funded), and community-led health behaviour change in areas of high socio-economic disadvantage (NIHR funded).
