Domestic Abuse and the Immigration System: False Claims and Genuine Victims
by Pragna Patel
Project Resist deplores any exploitation of the Domestic Violence Rule route to settlement in the UK by unscrupulous so-called immigration advisers and organised criminal gangs.
False claims of domestic abuse harm the very people that organisations like ours support: the most vulnerable victims of abuse.
However, in its recent investigation report, the BBC has not attempted to ascertain the scale of this issue: neither how many such false claims are made nor how many are ultimately successful. Instead, the small number of cases they have identified are presented as a broader problem.
We know from our work and that of other women’s organisations that the vast majority of claims under the Domestic Abuse Rule are genuine, providing a vital lifeline for women with insecure status who are trapped in escalating and life-threatening forms of gender-based harm.
The Domestic Abuse Rule came about as a result of decades of campaigning to protect victims (mainly women) and their children from domestic abuse – including physical and sexual violence, imprisonment in the home, domestic servitude, restrictions on movement, deprivation of food and access to medical and financial support and threats of serious harm.
The route saves the lives of thousands of women and children and enables them to protect themselves and regain their dignity and autonomy.
We are fully behind the government’s efforts to clamp down on those who profit from manipulating the immigration system. Indeed, for many years, those of us working on the front-line have been complaining about the financial exploitation of vulnerable and desperate victims and have called for them to face the full force of criminal and immigration regulatory laws that are meant to root out fraudulent practitioners.
The BBC has also failed to mention that organisations like ours and others have also worked with the Home Office to develop tighter guidance for Home Office caseworkers (Appendix VDA) in order to ensure that the assessment of applications under the Domestic Violence Rule is as rigorous as possible. This new guidance sets out the range and types of evidence needed to prove domestic abuse. As a result, organisations working with domestic abuse victims will now have to provide information about their track record, qualification and experience in supporting such victims alongside evidence of risk assessments and the support provided. This should help to make it more difficult for fake claims to succeed.
We welcome Jess Phillips’ recognition of the need to protect genuine victims of domestic abuse and call on her to ensure that the abhorrent misuse of the immigration system will not result in yet another cynical attempt by the state to remove a flagship measure of protection for which we should rightly be proud.
We also call on her to work with us to discuss our concerns about the Earned Settlement Scheme which will deny many vulnerable migrant women the protection they so desperately need to survive domestic abuse. Restoring the integrity of the immigration system and maintaining public trust is not about demonstrating cruelty and indifference to migrants: it should be about ensuring that nothing is done to violate our legal and moral obligation to provide humanitarian care and human rights protection to the most vulnerable in our society.
For more information, email comms@projectresist.org.uk
