Description
Scholarship in migration studies is becoming increasingly concerned with how vulnerability is constructed at Europe’s borders, and how discourses of vulnerability are used to justify the use of push backs by agencies like Frontex (Sachseder, 2024; Bird, 2022; Freedman, 2015; Gray and Franck, 2019). This paper contributes to this growing area of research by considering how this same process is unfolding at UK shores, and the way in which gendered and racialised ideas of vulnerability are used to frame the issue of so-called ‘small boats’. Taking an intersectional approach, this paper uses discourse analysis to examine how gendered and racialized language in UK asylum legislation and debates represents female asylum seekers as vulnerable, while male asylum seekers are constructed as threats. Alongside this, analysis of parliamentary debates which correspond with the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan (2021) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022) is undertaken to consider how vulnerability is constructed in the context of conflict, and in the context of European and non-European refugees. Findings show how the label of ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe, 2014) is used most frequently when discussing vulnerability. This label elicits an almost guaranteed sense of empathy (Gray and Franck, 2019) but it relies on perceptions of the female ‘other’ as inherently vulnerable and as “an object of protection from her own kind” (Spivak, 2010, p.52). Indeed, female refugees are often identified as being threatened by other male refugees, rather than the restrictive and violent asylum system which asylum seekers must navigate. In this way, gendered and racialised language represents asylum seekers as both the victim and the threat (Douzinas, 2007), a duality that serves to construct refugees as inherently different from ‘us’, thus justifying restrictive asylum legislation.
