JOURNALISM
AFGHANS, ASYLUM AND THE 2015 LEGACY
Whatever happened to all those refugees who trudged across Europe in 2015? Did they get asylum? Did they go back? For more some time now, I’ve been following the lives of a few young Afghan men who arrived in Austria five years ago. I published something about their current situation in the biannual IWM Post.
December 1, 2020
Austria has become a top European destination for unaccompanied Afghan children seeking asylum` since 2015, only Greece received a larger share of such asylum applications last year. Lucy Ashton relates some tales of former unaccompanied Afghan minors in Austria and the asylum system they face.
More than 5500 unaccompanied Afghan children claimed asylum in Austria in 2015, 68% of all unaccompanied arrivals there. Afghans continue to be the most common nationality amongst unaccompanied minors, though the number of arrivals has dropped substantially since 2015 to around 600 a year.
Why do Afghan teenagers go to Austria?
See p21 here to continue reading.
COVID - AFTER THE LOCKDOWN LIFTS
As lockdown’s lift I’ve been thinking about our experience of the danger COVID presents and how the ebb and flow of our fears about Corona affect our compliance with the ‘rules.’ Here’s what I had to say on the Institut für die Wissenshaften vom Menschen blog where I was recently a Visiting Fellow.
May 19, 2020
Austria’s lockdown has lifted. The chances of infection just now are extremely low, the virus is a phantom. We should trust that. But as I cycled down Mariahilfer Strasse, Vienna’s main shopping street, I didn’t feel very trusting. There were people everywhere, some masked, most not, no one keeping much of a distance. And long queues for the banks and larger shops.
Daftly, in hindsight, I had chosen to go to a small shop and exchange two presents that didn’t fit my boys. They were bought way back in early March and I thought I wouldn’t have much chance to exchange them if I waited longer. Inside the shop, hands sanitised, my unease did not abate. The shop assistant started rifling through drawers showing me sizes that would fit – all ugly – pressing me to decide.
Slow down I inwardly mouthed. Another drawer. Am I allowed to touch, what is the etiquette now? She’s too close, I thought. My mask was itching, I was hot from the ride, confused by the exposure and demands of a stranger. I took the first things that looked reasonable and got out.
I shan’t go shopping like that again for some time.
Click here to continue reading
SPARE CAPACITY - CHILD REFUGEE SPACES LEFT EMPTY ACROSS EUROPE
This article was written for the London Review of Books blog page but was spiked by Corona and didn’t make it to publication. Instead I posted it to my blog.
March 18, 2020
With violence spiraling on the Greek islands and refugees piling up at the Turkish-Greek border, a handful of states seem to have consented finally to relocate around 1600 of the 2000 or so unaccompanied children stuck on the islands. How many children will actually be moved, we wait to see.
Greece and then UNHCR have been increasing pressure on the EU to do something about these children since the autumn but until now only one state responded. Hundreds of beds for refugee kids have gone unused this winter, while many governments have been busily shutting down the refugee support structure that they so painstakingly built in 2015 and 16.
Of course it is not as simple as taking the number of empty beds and just filling them with kids in search of safety, such a suggestion rides rough shod over the politics and policy of who gets to be a refugee, but when you have cold, hungry, desperate teenagers, some prostituting themselves to survive, at some level it is that simple.
Click here to read further.
PODCAST: BBC WORLD HACKS
Making glasses for Malawi
June 3, 2018
Good Vision Glasses is one of the best thought out projects we found while living in Malawi for three years. They are a social enterprise, their production is not disrupted by the persistent power cuts and they provide good jobs to school leavers, encouraging them with performance-related pay.
First broadcast on 22 May 2018. Click play button below to listen.
BBC WORLD SERVICE: NEWSDAY
SUSPECTED 'BLOODSUCKERS' LYNCHED BY MOBS IN MALAWI
20 October, 2017
Vampires are not uncommon visitors to Malawi, where for most, witchcraft is a ready explanation for personal tragedy and untimely death. When rumours of vampires - or bloodsuckers - resurfaced in September 2017, at least ten people were accused of being one and killed by vigilante mobs. The security forces had to bring in a curfew to restore order. The previous major outbreak of such violence occurred in 2002. In both cases, the trigger was unknown, but it has been interpreted as a spike in socio-economic stress and frustration being felt by many Malawians. Lucy was the only international journalist reporting from inside the country. You can listen here to one of several reports she filed for the BBC, the day the violence reached its peak.
Mob violence on the streets of Blantyre
PODCAST: The Mystery of a Mass Fainting
June 20, 2017
Collective behaviour can be distinctly disorienting and disturbing, particularly when it seems to be unconscious. History is peppered with tales of mass fainting epidemics, typically involving young women, and sometimes linked to the Occult. Such events have largely disappeared in Europe and the United States, no one is quite sure why, yet in many other nations, mass psychogenic illness as it is now more properly known, happens not infrequently.
For many months a group of about eighty girls have been fainting regularly in remote Malawian village. Lucy’s podcast explores what’s been going on.
Click on the play button below to listen.
BBC WORLD SERVICE: NEWSDAY
LEGAL LANDMARK: INDUSTRIAL-SCALE LOGGERS SENTENCED
11 May, 2017
In May 2017, thirty-five illegal loggers were sentenced to prison for destroying more than 2000 hectares of protected woodland. It was a seminal case for Malawi's legal profession and a triumph for wildlife conservationists, but the true heroes were the seven, poorly equipped and vastly outnumbered National Park Rangers who risked their lives to round up the loggers and millions of dollars of equipment.
Click here to listen to the report.
BBC MAGAZINE
17 November, 2016
In August 2016, the BBC’s aired a radio documentary called Stealing Innocence in which an HIV+ Malawian man named Eric Aniva claimed he had had sex with pubescent girls as part of a "‘cleansing ritual’. Aniva’s admission caused international outrage and condemnation. Much to the dismay of the Malawian legal profession, the President of Malawi bowed to international pressure and ordered Aniva’s arrest although no victim had actually accused him of a crime.
Feeling that the BBC’s report lacked local context, Lucy followed up the story to find out what Malawians themselves thought about the trial and the outlawed cultural practices known as kusasa fumbi and kuluwa kufa.
The full article is available here.