(Newswire.net — April 23, 2021) —
Over the past decade, Georgette Mulheir has seen the world experience the greatest number of people on the move since the Second World War. The global pandemic has slowed down the process, but the underlying problems causing millions to flee their homes have not gone away. In many cases, they have been exacerbated by the economic impact of Covid-19. As vaccines bring the hope of the world opening up, and as many of us dream of a return to normality, the USA is bracing once more for an increase in migration across the Mexican border. Referring to the Trump administration’s notorious family separation policy, the US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said, “the administration has inherited a broken system at the border, and they are working to correct that in the children’s interest. So this, again, is a transition from what was wrong before to what is right.”
Georgette Mulheir, a global expert in women’s and children’s rights, knows the new US administration has a challenge on its hands. Because doing what is right is rarely easy. In 2018, Mulheir led a response to the family separation crisis. She helped grassroots organisations, like Immigrant Families Together, accelerate successful family reunifications. And she worked closely with the American Bar Association on a ground-breaking programme to incorporate trauma-informed social work practices into their legal defence work. Mulheir also set up a programme to deal with the most complex cases – children in institutions whose parents had already been deported – tracing families in Guatemala and safely reuniting many children, where most people thought this was impossible.
The lessons Georgette Mulheir learned about the driving forces behind the migration crisis could be invaluable in solving the problems faced by the Biden administration today.
Responding to the Trump administration’s family separation crisis
All along the Texas border with Mexico, a vast network of ‘services’ exists to address the migrant crisis. Most are prisons. Some have cosy names, like Residential Centre for Families. But they are locked facilities that incarcerate people fleeing violence and terror. In the summer of 2018, the Trump administration began systematically separating children from their families as they crossed the border. Parents were incarcerated in prisons; their children in makeshift institutions, some housed in old warehouses and former supermarkets. The purpose of the government’s policy was allegedly to deter migration, but Americans reacted viscerally to the scenes of infants torn from their parents’ arms and children kept in cages, sleeping on the floor. Lawyers, non-profits, and activists mobilised rapidly to fight this assault on basic human rights.
“I witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of solidarity and support for families”, says Georgette Mulheir. “Many Americans were horrified and were determined to demonstrate the government did not act in their name.” But Mulheir noticed that the actions across the country, whilst highly effective, had some gaps. Unless these were addressed, she was concerned some children might be severely harmed. To find out more, and make sure she could provide the right assistance, Georgette Mulheir volunteered with a legal defence non-profit supporting asylum-seeking mothers and their children in a Texas prison close to the Mexican border.
“Even before I entered the prison, I was struck by its remoteness and isolation. As there was no public transport, I had to drive 70 miles from the nearest airport.” Georgette Mulheir’s experience of residential institutions globally suggested the location was not an accident. According to her, traditionally, residential institutions house the people excluded by society – children born outside marriage, people with disabilities, or those living with HIV. “They are like a shameful secret society wants to hide away”, she says. And it appears to be the same today with migrant children and their families.
Once inside the prison, the parallels continued. There was no way of providing individualised support. The regime was all about control and containment. But this differed from other institutions Mulheir has visited around the world. “Because the children were together with their mothers, most of them displayed normal development, whereas children separated from their families in institutions usually have developmental delays and particular behavioural difficulties.” One group was distinctly different: in a continuous heightened state of stress, they clung to their mothers, refusing to let them out of their sight. Following the outcry against family separation, the Trump administration had relented slightly. They gave some parents the option to reunite with their children, but only if they would waive their legal rights and accept remaining in prison, together with their children, beyond the legal limit of 20 days. This group of families had been reunited and incarcerated for months now, but the children still feared being separated again.
Mulheir’s observations confirmed what she already knew – that if vulnerable parents are given support, even in difficult circumstances, most of them provide the nurturing, love and protection their children need to develop healthily. “Despite definitive scientific evidence,” she says, “we still underestimate the long-lasting trauma caused by family separation. Even in refugee camps around the world, children living with their families are happier and healthier than unaccompanied children in orphanages.”
Inside the prison, Mulheir used her expertise in interviewing traumatised children, working alongside American solicitors, to prepare families for the legal processes that would decide whether they would be deported, or allowed into the USA to pursue an asylum application.
Most of the families came from the Northern Triangle Countries – Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. And although the crises in these countries are well-documented, most media reports label the people crossing the border as economic migrants. According to Mulheir, this was not the case with the families in prison. “I have seen a lot in my thirty years working on children’s and women’s rights”, she said, “but even I was shocked by the stories these families told.”
US regulations allow people to enter the country and seek asylum if they have a ‘credible fear’ of persecution in their home country. When Mulheir and the solicitors worked to prepare the families for their interviews with immigration officers, they found that mothers initially hid the real reasons they had fled. When asked why they had come to the USA, most would say “I just want to make a better life for my children”. In those circumstances, it is not unreasonable to assume they meant they wanted to escape poverty and were, therefore, economic migrants. But by taking time and care with each family, Georgette Mulheir found that, gradually, the women and children started to disclose the experiences behind their decisions to leave. And of the thousands of families who came through this prison, 97% were assessed as having a credible fear.
“One mother, Catalina, told us her husband had been killed years before”, said Mulheir. “She lived with her nine-year-old daughter, Ana, in a community controlled by one gang, whilst she worked in a community controlled by another. Both gangs extorted her for money. Every month, the amounts increased, but her salary did not. Finally, she did not have enough to pay, and the gang broke into her house. They held Catalina against the wall and forced her to watch as, one by one, they raped Ana”.
In another case, Mulheir says, a 14-year-old girl, Daniela, had been targeted by a gang member as she left school. From that day on, he raped her every day on her journey home. Her mother only found out months later when Daniela eventually refused to go to school. They could not go to the police, who were in league with the gangs, so they had no alternative but to leave. They travelled hundreds of miles on foot to reach safety.
The stories didn’t come easily. Mothers were afraid to tell, in case they would be forced to testify against the perpetrators. They were terrified the gangs would find them and kill them, even in the USA. They did not want their children to have to relive their terrifying experiences. They were ashamed of what had happened. They wanted to be able to forget and to build new lives in safety.
The same week Georgette Mulheir listened to these women’s stories in the Texas prison, Christine Blasey-Ford gave evidence to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, regarding the soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh. Her testimony of sexual assault was immediately attacked by then-President Trump and other public figures who questioned why it had taken her so long to speak out, why she had not reported it at the time. Hundreds of thousands of women responded on Twitter, explaining the feelings of shame, fear and powerlessness that underpin their silence around the violence they suffer. The actress Alyssa Milano said at the time, “This is what every survivor goes through. Telling our stories means being vulnerable to public attacks and ridicule when our only “crime” was to be assaulted in the first place.”
As she listened to case after case of unspeakable sexual violence, Mulheir says, “I was struck by the resonance with #WhyIDidntReport. The women and girls came from communities where legal redress was impossible. Many had family members who had been killed by gangs. Their fears of reprisal were real.”
Georgette Mulheir, an expert on violence against women in war and peace
Mulheir also saw the parallels with her experiences in the former Yugoslavia. At the end of the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, Georgette Mulheir authored a book on violence against women in war and its spill-over into peacetime. Her research uncovered the terrifying scale of sexual violence as a tool of war, used to suppress any dissent and control populations, and how some soldiers continue to use the same methods with their families when they return home from war.
“Most women who survived the mass-rape camps in Bosnia kept silent”, says Mulheir. The scale of violence against women during the Yugoslav war was almost impossible to comprehend and women feared they would not be believed. Since then, there has been a growing recognition that targeting women and girls for sexual violence is often used as a tool of war. And, correspondingly, many women and girls seeking refuge from war and community violence are likely to have experienced sexual assault. Still, few women are likely to report and, as a result, government responses to women and girl asylum-seekers are inadequate. According to Georgette Mulheir, “this is, in part, due to a systemic failure to recognise the scale of violence faced by women and girls even outside situations of war and community violence”.
As the UK reels from the murder of Sarah Everard, allegedly by a serving police officer, feminist activists are raising their voices to remind the government that most women have experienced some form of sexual harassment or violence. That only a tiny percentage of rapes are successfully prosecuted. That, even though most violence takes place in the home, many women are hypervigilant on the streets. That fear of violence is a way of life for most women, even in societies that are – at least officially – at peace.
In countries at war, or where law and order have completely broken down, Mulheir says, women and girls fleeing violence literally have nowhere to run. “In these circumstances, it is no wonder that some courageous women find a way to escape to a place of relative safety.” When developing the right response to migration across the Mexican border, Georgette Mulheir hopes the US administration will stop underestimating the vast scale of violence against women and girls. With the right care and support, they can be empowered to report the real reasons they left their homes. They can be granted the asylum they need. And then the healing can begin.