The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
OUT OF SIGHT OUT OF MIND
Only an hour from England, refugees near Calais live in squalor and fear. But what of the hidden anguish of the most vulnerable
‘We have a warehouse full of tents we are not allowed to give out because it might encourage refugees to set down roots’
Bibi and Sara* have only known each other for two weeks, but they cling to each other like limpets: broken but bonded, sitting on the edge of communal land in Calais that, for now, they must call home. They are difficult to spot initially in the woods and industrial estates near the former site of the Jungle, the point at which thousands of refugees from around the world have congregated to try to enter the UK by whatever means possible. In a sea of young men playing football and Connect 4, they have learnt to make themselves invisible. It is their superpower, if you will. It is t heir only power: the unseen girls of the refugee crisis, learning to survive by playing dead.
Their faces are blank, their eyes empty, their expressions those of battered dolls. Fifteen months ago, when Sara was 15, her mother sold their house in war-torn Eritrea so Sara could be smuggled out to a place of safety. It is unlikely that she pictured this for her daughter: a dirty sleeping bag in a tent in some woods, shared with 20 other refugees, most of them men who claim to be protecting the 17-year-old girl. Bibi is the only other female sleeping here – for four months, she was the only woman here at all. I ask the 23-year-old from Ethiopia what that was like.
‘Look at my face,’ she says. It is the face of someone defeated. ‘I came here for a better life, but it is almost similar.’ Bibi says she recently spent three days in hospital after a beating by the French police. ‘When they do it here,’ she says, placing her hands on both of her cheeks, ‘there is no problem. But when they do it here’ – she pats her abdomen – ‘it is not good.’
Sara admitted to a member of the refugee child protection team that she had been imprisoned and repeatedly raped while seeking passage through Libya, only escaping when she became so weak that her captors flung her out on to the street, like a discarded food wrapping.
When I arrive in Calais with the charity Help Refugees, it is suggested that I might want to talk to Sara for my story – if we can find her. The Jungle may have been squalid and at times dangerous but, as one volunteer puts it, ‘there was at least a sense of community. We could keep an eye on the children. We knew where they were and we knew if they had gone missing.’ Since the encampment was demolished last October, it has been almost impossible to keep track of the children and young adults who reside here in a sort of purgatory, refusing to lay down roots in a country they view as hostile due to the often heavy-handed actions of the riot police, but unwilling to return to their countries of birth for fear of even more punishing regimes or letting their families down.
Help Refugees estimates that a third of the unaccompanied minors in the Jungle are unaccounted for since the eviction f rom t he site. ‘Kids can be much more susceptible to making dangerous decisions proposed by people who prey on t heir yout h, inexperience a nd t he la nguage barrier, and claim to be able to help them,’ says Philli Boyle, from the charity. ‘The rumour mill can be ver y powerful and plays into the hands of ill-intentioned people.’ By that, she means traffickers.
Though the camp has been cleared, the migrant crisis has not gone away. It has simply been dispersed over a larger area, making it harder for the volunteers here to do their jobs. ‘We have a warehouse f ull of donated tents we a re not a l lowed to g ive out bec ause it might encourage refugees to set down roots and star t another “Jungle”,’ says Boyle. ‘And at the same time we are struggling to keep up with demand for blankets and bedding, because almost every morning the police are pepper spraying it to force people to get up and move on.’
Help Refugees estimates that there are 200 unaccompanied minors in the region, most of whom are trying to make it to the UK. The chances of them doing so are slim, given the decision by Amber Rudd in February of this year to axe the Dubs Amendment. This piece of legislation was named after Lord Dubs, the peer who campaigned for the scheme after his own experiences of coming to the UK from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the Second World War on the Kind er transport. The legislation promised that the UK would give sanctuary to the most vulnerable child refugees. When it was passed in May 2016, it was estimated that up to 3,000 would be helped – by the time it had ended less than a year later, just 200 children had been brought to safety. The last hope is Help Refugees’ challenge to the closure of this scheme, in a judicial review this month.
Today, even those who have a legal right to join a family member in the UK struggle to get their case heard. Marwan* is a 17-year-old boy from Mosul in Iraq. He has been waiting to join his uncle in Birmingham since November. The process is long and drawn out. He spends his days in an accommodation centre in Dunkirk, under the care of Safe Passage, another organisation that helps unaccompanied child refugees and vulnerable adults. He is not allowed to leave, lest he go missing and try to make the dangerous crossing over the border on his own.
Help Refugees knows of three children and one young woman who have died trying to make their way to England, even though they were entitled to join their families there and were already engaged in the legal process of doing so. Marwan himself has attempted to make the perilous journey several times. On one occasion he snuck into a refrigerator truck full of chicken: when the border police found him, his leg was frozen to a wall. ‘It is a bad, bad thing,’ he tells me. ‘I have been nearly a year here, and sometimes I can not believe that the road to England is only half an hour. You stay here for months and months and nobody talks to you. You are alone. You become crazy.’ His last roommate attempted suicide just days ago.
We meet the day after the terror attack in Manchester, which claimed 22 lives. What would he say to the politicians and people who believe that all those tr ying to claim asylum in the UK are t rouble? ‘I would say come on our jour ney, see what we are suffering.’ He pauses, looks at his plate. ‘I would say that we are running away from the same thing your children are running away from.’
In the woods surrounding a highway in
Dunkirk, an overnight camp has just been clea red by r iot pol ice. Ref ugees mill a round let ha rg ic a l ly, wait i ng for t he evening, when they can attempt to cross the border under the cloak of darkness. Every day is the same here, an almost neverending cycle of hope and despair: will this be the night that they make it to the UK without being discovered by sniffer dogs? The people here are reliant on smugglers and traffickers; they live on charity handouts and rumours of fellow migrants who have made it across the Channel.
I f ind a young preg nant Iraqi ly ing underneath a tree with her husband. Like a modern-day Romeo a nd Juliet, t hey were threatened with death by their families for falling in love across tribal lines. The 21-year-old woman lost her first baby in labour while trying to reach Europe – she is now around four months pregnant wit h her second child, a nd clea rly not well, though she refuses to go into sheltered accommodation in Dunkirk for fear of being made to seek asylum here.
The couple tell me that, a few nights before, they hi do na truck for several hours without water. The dogs found them at the final checkpoint. ‘The British officers were kind but the French police were not,’ says the man. ‘When my wife asked to go to the toilet, they refused her. We have thought about settling in France but it is such a bad situation here. We expected to be treated humanely in Europe, but it is no better than in Iraq. There, if they want to kill you, they just shoot you. Here, they slowly beat you down. We have lost everything. We are losing our minds.’
This is the reason so many refuse to seek asylum in France – their only experiences of the authorities have been negative ones. ‘It is like a bad fair y tale,’ says Michael Mchugh, the coordinator of the Refugee Youth Service’s Child Protection Team .‘ These are future citizens who should be nurtured, but instead the police try to break them with batons and tear gas. I’ve heard of the authorities taking children’s shoes and footballs just for the sake of it. They are living with normalised violence from the police. The UK system is much harder to get into, but it is fairer and more child-focused. They see Britain as their Willy Wonka golden ticket.’
At 4pm every day, volunteers from charities including Help Refugees, Refugee Community Kitchen and Gynécolog ie Sans Frontières travel to the ‘distribution centre’, a piece of scrubland near the site of the former Jungle. They hand out food and provisions to the estimated 700 migrants still in the area, including young families living in dilapidated shipping containers. It is here that we finally find Sara and Bibi.
They are wary of strangers, and don’t want to talk to us. We hand them bags of toiletries and hygiene products donated by Superdrug. Suddenly they are swarmed on by male refugees who try to take the toiletries away. The translator stops them. The photographer and I move closer, show Sara and Bibi what is in the bags – sanitary towels, toothbrushes, strawberry-scented shower gel. Finally, on the condition that their faces are not shown in photographs, they agree to speak.
Both girls have paid in the reg ion of €7,000 to smugglers to make it this far – their parents sold all their possessions in the hope of getting them to the UK. Neither girl knows what has become of her family. Both have experienced FGM.
Bibi has taken on the role of protector – she worries about Sara. ‘I know about boys,’ she says to me. ‘I was married when I was 11. At 14, I lost my baby. I have experience since then. I know that they are dangerous, that they are animals. But Sara is only 17.’ Her f r iend stares blankly into space, picking at the grass. ‘All men are ver y dangerous,’ repeats Bibi. I tell her that isn’t true. ‘Your husband is only good because you had his baby,’ she says, sadly. ‘But here, some of t he ot her boys, t he police, they all make me sleep with them.’
I am astonished by this claim of rape at the hands of the police, but am told by volunteers that ‘protection sex’ is common, whereby a woman consents to sex with someone (either a French policeman or a fellow refugee) so that she is not raped by others. Young boys are also at risk of this. It is not uncommon for young girls to claim that traffickers are their protectors, their older brothers. It seems almost inconceivable that all of this is happening just an hour’s train journey from the UK.
Both Bibi and Sara want to start a new life in the UK. They too refuse to go into sheltered accommodation nearby, afraid of being made to claim asylum here – all they have seen of France is violence. They ask if they can show us where they are currently sleeping, and ask us not to reveal their location .‘ We will be beaten for it,’ t hey explain. The girls show us the filthy tent in the woods that they share with around 19 boys. ‘We protect them,’ one boy says to me, as we wade through litter and discarded underwear, but I am not sure I believe him.
As the afternoon wears on, it becomes clear that the girls are not safe here. The team at Gynécologie Sans Frontières tell us they can offer them three nights in a safe house, but only on the condition that they do not tell anyone where they are going and agree to turn off phone tracking on the mobiles distributed by Refugee Youth Service. ‘Traffickers often find them this way,’ explains a volunteer.
We ask Bibi and Sara if they will consider going so that they can rest safely in a proper bed with the protection of a roof and a door. The girls start to cry. ‘We will go but we will not give them our fingerprints,’ weeps Bibi. These are tears of both relief and fear. Later, I am told that the girls spent just one night in t he safe house before leaving to try to reach England.
Should Bibi and Sara get to the UK, what awaits them? A warm home, a friendly welcome, a new life? Most likely, they will end up unaccounted for, their fates erased by traffickers. They will not see their families again. They will not find safe passage. If they are very lucky, they will continue to have each other. But this is not a definition of luck most of us would recognise.
As we watch them go with Gynécologie Sans Frontières, the riot police arrive with baton sand guns. They are here to clear the area, to force the refugees back into the woods. Out of sight. Out of mind.
‘In Iraq, if they want to kill you, they just shoot you. Here, they slowly beat you down. We’ve lost everything. We’re losing our minds’