A Narrative Study of social work with refugees in UK

By Charles Mugisha

Abstract

This is a study of the lives of fourteen asylum seekers and refugees who fled war and insecurity from the Great Lakes region of Central Africa to seek asylum in the UK. It has two modest aims: to investigate the effectiveness of narratives in social work with refugees and difficulties in disclosure during social work assessments. The second was to explore more systematically ways African refugee narratives are elicited and structured in exile.

Qualitative data from two sets of interviews with refugees and social workers are presented. One is based on the activities of African refugees at a day centre in South London where I was a participant-observer. This deals with actual testimonies and refugee experiences. The other is based on interviews I conducted with social workers addressing their direct work with asylum seekers and refugees. Stories in this study do not have a clearly defined beginning and end but they have boundaries between the “formal period of actual interviewing, where questions were asked and answers recorded, and the informal preliminaries, interludes and lengthy farewells which surround and cushion what some think of as the ‘actual’ interview” (Bozzoli, 1991: 7). The topic of a story and the manner in which it is relayed provide direct and indirect sources of information that might help social workers to both understand problems of refugees and formulate models of intervention. Rather than simply using refugee stories as a guide to understanding the needs of refugees and asylum seekers, the study recommends that social workers focus on the “story” as a medium through which change can be effected. This process involves moving from uncovering or deconstructing the narrative to externalising and creating an alternative narrative (Fook, 2002: Busch, 2007). The validation or deconstruction of the initial narrative depends on the setting and purpose of the interaction between the social worker and the asylum seeker (Fook, 2002).

Prologue to the study

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts (Salman Rushdie).

This research owes its conception to my experience of working with asylum seekers as an interpreter and community worker in Birmingham and London respectively. Asylum seekers I worked with had fled war, insecurity and genocide and had suffered a catalogue of losses. My role as an interpreter also involved working with social workers, solicitors and the Home Office. My experience revealed limitations of professional engagement with refugee families known to social services. It is these perceived gaps in direct work with vulnerable refugees and my interest in solving problems related to poverty, discrimination and human misery that initially attracted me to the social work profession. This emphasis led me to enrol on a social work graduate programme at a university in London and seek a career in social work. However when I qualified and started to practice in a busy children and families social work team, I became increasingly aware that social work too, despite its fanfare about equality and social justice - did not have a knowledge and theoretical base reflective of the diversity of UK population and some of the clients it sought to assist specifically (Schiele, 1997; Bamberg, 1997).

According to Jacobsen and Landau (2003), working with refugees is one area in which there are many complex ethical challenges that stem from a combination of the precarious situation of refugees combined with a risk that, for some researchers, the ends may justify the means, leading to ethical lapses (p. 187 & pp. 192-3). Jacobsen and Landau illustrate this point with examples of ethically very poor practice with refugees. Although there has been a considerable growth in research about and with refugee populations (Pittaway and Bartolomei, 2003), no specific studies have examined narratives of African refugees in the context of social work in the UK. In my experience, African refugees known to social services tend to present as vulnerable and powerless -highlighting the need for research in order to understand the range of issues they face and develop more appropriate and effective interventions (Hugman, et al. 2011). Several social work researchers have also advocated cultural grounding to tell stories of the people whom we serve, acknowledging their lived experiences, realities and ways of knowing (Schiele, 2000). In narrative research, the potential for marginalised refugee groups to rediscover and validate identities which have been previously unrecognised is known as identity politics (Fook, 2002: 136). Fook observed that the process of expressing, legitimating and creating a social identity for marginalised groups, using a narrative process is widely recognised as an important step in changing power positions. A narrative approach is seen as helpful in assisting vulnerable refugees who are regarded as voiceless – to articulate their own experiences (Fook, 2002). The narrative methods also enable vulnerable groups to participate in defining themselves in their own terms, rather than against norms determined outside their experience and culture (Fook, 2002; De Haene et al. 2010). In the present study, the narrative method is used as a theoretical framework because of its potential to mobilise participants’ voices and provide a space to give words to life histories within a broader social context (Gubrium & Holstein, 2002).

Social workers that participated in the study were not employed by the Refugee day centre but came from different local authority departments such as adult mental health services, children and families (CYPS) and learning or physical disabilities. The purpose of the research was to investigate the effectiveness of African refugee narratives and testimonies in the context of social work and difficulties in disclosure during social work assessments. Using narrative social work theory, this research also examines ways African refugee testimonies are elicited and structured when negotiating their existence in exile. Narrative social work theory suggests that clients start with a problem-saturated account that can be made to shift towards a strength-based narrative that is unique to the client (Busch, 2007: 9). Hollway (1984: 236) asserts that the goal of narrative social work as a model of intervention is to help co-construct a new story of a client’s dominant, problem saturated, and often self-pathologising, account, and a discursive-based evaluation that examines the change in the client. A narrative therefore is a temporally organised account that has a beginning, middle and an end (Reissman, 1993). In this case, narrative social work leads one to expect that each client or service user begins with a pathologising testimony or life story, the middle reveals the therapeutic social work through the process of externalisation and the end will reveal unique, strengths-based accounts by clients (Busch, 2007). Stories analysed in this study exemplify some of the complexities involved in seeking asylum.

In this study, the term “testimony” is used loosely to describe narrative accounts of life experiences, with attention to using a person’s actual words. Yudice (1991:17) defined a testimony as:

An authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g. war, oppression, revolution, etc.). Emphasizing popular oral discourse, the witness portrays his or her own experience as a representative of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present system of exploitation and oppression...

Warner (1998:75) observes that “although testimony is similar to life stories, there is usually a temporal bifurcation in the testimonial narrative.” She explains that individuals in refugee situations structurally divide their typical testimonial narrative between their lives in exile, life when seeking asylum, life during flight and the lives they led before being forced to seek asylum (p. 75). This research treats refugee stories as texts, imperfectly reflecting lives, and more accurately reflecting lives of African refugees in South London.

The study has not pretended that these refugee stories were “obtained through the sterile means of removing the interviewer as far as possible from any involvement in the interaction and turning them into the absent listener” (Bozzoli, 1991: 6). Additionally, my interviews do not have a clearly defined beginning and end but they have boundaries between the “formal period of actual interviewing, where questions were asked and answers recorded, and the informal preliminaries, interludes and lengthy farewells which surround and cushion what some think of as the “actual interview” (Bozzoli, 1991: 7). The study attempts to examine biographical narratives, which, if taken at face value, would qualify their tellers as “refugees.” From a legal point of view, however, in the UK a person does not decide that he or she is a refugee – they start off as asylum seekers and only after their application for asylum is accepted does one become a refugee – the status of refugee is in this sense “other conferred”(Dahl & Thor, 2009: 1). If the application for asylum is not successful, the applicant becomes a “failed asylum seeker.” Interestingly most of my informants referred to themselves as “refugees” or “asylum seekers”, acknowledging both personal and legal perspectives (Harrel-Bond, cited in Dryden-Peterson & Hovil, 2003:3). There is no impartial way of categorising my informants and therefore the study uses the term “refugee” and “asylum seeker” interchangeably. Other studies such as Fazel et al. (2005) also do not make a distinction between refugees and asylum seekers, as “refugee”is used to include asylum seekers.

I employed semi-structured interviewing but was flexible enough to ensure that our interaction was more conversational and non-threatening. Taylor and White (2000: 57-8) highlighted the importance of conversational strategies in research, which form part of people’s narratives in establishing the credibility of themselves and their stories. They note that any description of phenomenon represents a selection of descriptors, which is variable, and context dependent. Therapists (Epston and White, 1990) and social workers (Pitt, 1998) have written about storytelling’s healing and empowering capacities with respect to individuals and families. Labonte et al. (1999) examined studies that concentrated on storytelling as a method for challenging dominant social structures, improving community work practice and empowering the voiceless. Narrative researchers emphasize the process of storytelling in promoting social justice (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Groleau, Zelkowitz, & Cabral, 2009). The use of life history methods is also interwoven with a clear concern for social change and empowerment (De Haene et al., 2010). My intention in using narrative methods in research with refugees was to give voice to silenced lives and, thus, to counteract the marginalization of vulnerable African asylum seekers (Barbour & Kitzinger, (1999; Bochner, 2001; Tierney, 2000). Moreover, in facilitating meaning-making processes, the act of storytelling itself offered research participants pathways of psychological well-being (Behar, 1993; Fook, 2002).

The narrative methodology developed in this study therefore attempts to integrate the transformative power of storytelling (Busch, 2007). By emphasising the transformative power of narration, both in voicing marginalized lives and in enhancing participants’ personal well-being, narrative inquiry thus locates social purpose at the heart of its research process (De Haene et al., 2010). With this model, research deontology “moves beyond the principle of nonmaleficence to a clear ethic of benefit” (De Haene et al., 2010:1). The British Association of Social Workers (BASW) Code of Ethics (BASW, 2012, paragraph 4.4.4.b) is closely based on De Haene et al., (2010) work. The BASW code states that social work researchers should “seek to ensure that the research in which they are engaged contributes to empowering service users, to promoting their welfare and to improving their access to economic and social resources.” Morris (2006: 189) on the other hand argued that the researcher’s task is to report what “voiceless” populations believe and wish to communicate about their condition. Hugman et al. (2011) observed that voiceless service users should be involved in research as “active participants or co-researchers and not simply constructing them as sources of information” (p. 1276). Some critics, such as Beresford (2003) go further and argue that research that does not have service users as active participants is harmful.  And for Lofland and Lofland (1995: 12) the researcher’s voice, should be very “front and centre” in research reports.

Recognising the co-construction between participant and researcher, a researcher journal was maintained throughout the process to enhance reflexivity by monitoring the research process, and to bracket personal ideas (Streubert & Carpenter, 1995; Yardley, 2000). In his article on self-reflection, Bell (1998) suggests that critical theory researchers should always reflect on their personal context, their social context and the complex environmental context of the research setting when analysing data and reflecting on a research project (p. 22). Fook (2000: cited in Alston and Bowles, 2003) argues that “the reflective approach rejects the scientific, positivistic and rational approaches in favour of more emancipatory and participatory approaches” (p. 173). A self-reflective practitioner will acknowledge the “power differentials inherent in practice, will note the contextual issues” and will view the client not as some marginalised ‘other’ but as the expert in their own right (Alston and Bowles, 2003: 173).

Critical researchers begin their investigations having declared their assumptions so that no one is confused concerning the epistemological and political baggage they bring with them to the research site (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2000). Lofland and Lofland (1995: 23) assert that the researcher should “start where you are” which is what I have done in this research. As the researcher in this process, it is important that I acknowledge my own position as a black African man, with an interest and commitment to the empowerment of refugees and asylum seekers. However, I acknowledge that as a consequence of my own ethnicity and professional background, I may have been perceived by respondents to have particular views on refugee experiences.

Whilst being an African black male may provide partial “insider” knowledge (Wainwright 2009) this term is such a generic description of ethnicity, that any understanding I may have of a potential participant’s experience will be very limited. This becomes even more evident when multiple identities are considered for instance concerning language and nationality (Anthias, 1998). It is because of these multiple identities, which change temporally and spatially, that I may be considered by respondents to be simultaneously an “insider” and an “outsider” (Wainwright, 2009). An “insider” because of the commonality of being an African, yet, an “outsider” because of the myriad identities that the respondents have that may not be the same as my own (Merton, 1973 cited in Wainwright, 2009). Being an “insider” may have provided the opportunity for respondents to achieve a mutual trust in trusting me with their life stories. In contrast, being an “outsider” may have been particularly significant especially if I was perceived as a researcher who is also a gatekeeper for the Home office. Additionally female respondents may have experienced my research through a prism that refracted gender as a central signifier of difference, either of more importance or inter-connected with ‘race’ and ethnicity (Hill-Collins, 2005). Thus, my identity may have provided the potential for reticence from some participants in feeling able to talk openly with me (Wainwright, 2009). Alternatively, my presence as a black African male may have encouraged the respondents to ‘racialise’ their answers (Gunaratnam, 2003). In other words, to appear more ‘African’ or radical in their responses than perhaps they would in other circumstances. I attempted to address this by emphasising the voluntary nature of participation. In addition, it was stressed that the questions asked in the enquiry were aimed at eliciting knowledge based on their experiences; there were no right or wrong answers. However, whatever my subjective positionality in relation to my “African” presence, I tried to be reflexive and professional when considering issues of commonality or difference (Gunaratnam 2003).