On Thursday the 16th of April, I attended an event at the University of East London which was announcing the launch of the ‘United Against Inhumanity’ manifesto, which calls for ‘humane treatment of people on the move’. The focus of this event, alongside the announcement of this launch, was how to improve the “mental health and psychosocial wellbeing” of refugees and asylum seekers.
The treatment of people on the move within Europe is an issue I had encountered throughout my academic career but is an issue that is often reduced to numbers on a page. Yet nothing in that theoretical grounding prepared me for what I encountered at the ACAA. Hearing directly from those with lived experience (including ACAA Founder and Director Dr. Nasimi) whose story carries the full weight of personal suffering, stripped away the abstraction entirely. The event wove together these deeply human accounts with sharp expert analysis. This created something rare; a space where the emotional truth of this crisis and the urgent need for informed, meaningful action existed side by side.
Dr. Nasimi was invited to speak as part of an esteemed panel of guests with an incredibly impressive array of experience. From Dr. Martin Barber, who has almost 50 years’ experience working with refugees (for the UNHCR, the Refugee Council, and other organisations) to Reverend Marten Johannes, who established a safe house for refugees in Calais and has offered a supportive, community-based environment for people there for the last ten years.
It was an honour to attend the event as a guest of Dr. Nasimi, in my capacity as a volunteer at the ACAA. The experience opened my eyes to how ACAA’s core mission of advocacy for the humanity of refugees and asylum seekers fits within a wider system of truly inspirational organisations who are committed to supporting these people.
My path to the ACAA began through their partnership with the University of Exeter, but it was their mission that truly drew me in. Their holistic, human-centred approach to supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable people, built on decades of experience and genuine compassion, spoke to something I had long wanted to be part of. To contribute, even in a small way, to work of this kind is a profound privilege. The ‘Action against Inhumanity’ event served as a powerful reminder of precisely why that work matters, and why it cannot stop.
A key theme that ran throughout the evening was the importance of humanising the ‘refugee’. As Professor Dinesh Bughra (an Emeritus Professor of Mental Health and Cultural Diversity) discussed, the term ‘refugee’ has become a politicised one and this has served to dehumanise the people who exist under this identity. He suggested replacing the term ‘refugee’ with the term “people seeking refuge”.
His reasoning for this distinction felt very powerful to me. He discussed how people are not easily quantifiable, and within us all exists many “micro-identities” which we draw upon and adapt throughout our lives. This is of course true of “people seeking refuge”, and this term acknowledges the humanity and lived experience of each individual.
Whilst changes in terminology alone may not produce positive systemic change, they represent a potential for attitudinal change that can serve to humanise refugees and asylum seekers in the eyes of policymakers and the public.
Another speaker, Dr. Claire Marshall (doctor in counselling psychology), focused on the psychosocial support being offered to those seeking refuge within the UK. Dr. Marshall has experience working within detention centres, as well as in active humanitarian disaster zones. Her experiences form the foundation of her critique of the current psychosocial support and assessment of people seeking refuge. I found there were two key takeaways from her talk last night that related to this.
The first issue is the inescapable bureaucracy of the current immigration system. Dr. Marshall discussed a case where her patient felt their life had been “put on pause” inside the system, and they were waiting to feel like a person again. The constant insecurity means many people do not have space to be the ‘person’, complete with their personal micro-identities, whilst living within the immigration system. This story is one of a countless number from people escaping danger and suffering, only to face a different form of pain once they reach supposed ‘safety’.
The second is that current psychosocial support does not incorporate the systems of knowledge that exist for people from other cultures. This imposition of a dominant, Western psychological framework therefore fails to accurately assess and understand the psychological issues faced by those seeking refuge.
The co-existence of these two issues creates an inescapable cycle for many within the immigration system. The results of this are tragic, and wholly avoidable, cases of death and disappearance of people who have escaped some of the harshest material conditions but cannot survive the oppressive bureaucracy of the immigration system.
To me, Dr. Marshall’s talk demonstrated the true value of the work being done at the ACAA. The sense of community created by projects such as the football team, alongside the integration support that facilitates an escape from suffocating bureaucracy, represents a holistic, humanising solution to the two main issues Dr. Marshall highlighted.
Overall, the event gave me hope. Listening to the incredible work being done to combat the inhumanity created by our current system has made me believe, beyond the bleak reality of today, that change is possible. It is clear that this change must be centred on the experiences of ‘people on the move’ within the current system, and the humanity of people who are suffering must be fought for on every step of the journey.
By Michael Crawford