Viva Brighton Issue #85 March 2020

FEATURE
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Rachel Larkin
Helping female migrants find a voice
“I didn’t know her name, or her
country of origin, and I knew nothing
about her life experiences.”
Rachel Larkin is remembering the
moment when, as a social worker
on the south coast, she became
responsible for the care of a teenage
girl found abandoned at a UK port.
Despite her professional training
and years of experience, Rachel felt
ill-equipped to work out how best to support
this young woman in the care system.
“The majority of migrants coming to the UK
are young men,” she says. “Their journeys
and experiences are likely to have been quite
different from unaccompanied females under
the age of 18, who may have been trafficked or
sexually exploited.”
When she realised that their voices were underrepresented
in guidance for social work practice,
Rachel took action.
She returned to the University of Sussex, where
she had studied for her Masters in Social Work
in the 1990s, and began doctoral research into
the experiences of both the unaccompanied
young females – who account for just a quarter
of those seeking asylum – and the social workers
tasked with helping them.
Through interviews and by encouraging both
the social workers and the refugees to do “free
drawing” to express their thoughts and feelings,
Rachel and her PhD supervisor Professor Michelle
Lefevre began to understand some of the
underlying issues.
“Creative methods help people to express those
thoughts that they find difficult to verbalise,”
she says. “For example, one of the social workers
drew a boat with migrants and a
question mark because she found it
hard to understand why the young
woman she was helping wasn’t more
traumatised by her dramatic boat
journey. She found herself doubting
the story.”
And far from identifying as passive
and vulnerable, one adolescent with
aspirations to be a doctor (an ambition
denied her in her own country) drew her
social worker as a protective tree, and herself as
a series of trees – with the last being taller than
that of her social worker.
“Having spent their early lives in spaces where
being young and female was constructed in
particular ways, their notions of what was
possible as a young woman were shifting,”
says Rachel. “But in the UK they feared being
viewed through fixed lenses that they could not
influence and which might affect their support
and care.”
She found that, from the refugees’ perspective,
it was critical for them to be seen as individuals
rather than victims, and to have consistency of
contact with a social worker who could get to
know them.
Rachel, co-editor of the social work practice text
book Social Work with Refugees, Asylum Seekers
and Migrants, is continuing to feed her findings
into social work practice.
“This is a critical time to understand these
refugees,” she says. “The climate crisis is likely
to create greater numbers and we’re seeing a rise
in hate crimes. To make sure that social workers
can provide appropriate care, we need to hear
the voices of these teenagers.” Jacqui Bealing
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