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Is tide against "revolting" asylum seekers turning in UK press?

by Katie Nguyen | Katie_Nguyen1 | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Thursday, 20 February 2014 14:08 GMT

The ASD Mineo soccer team, attend a training session at the immigration centre in Mineo, Italy January 27, 2014. The squad is made up of African migrants who risked their lives to cross the sea - a journey that has killed hundreds of others. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Surveys show that the British press is now far less hostile to asylum seekers than it was a decade ago, good news for those seeking safety from persecution abroad

Last year, I wrote about why asylum seekers are so often given a bad press in Britain, how they're routinely accused of being "illegal immigrants" or "scroungers", who have come to live off state handouts.

So, imagine how pleased I was to come across some research by Asylum Aid that looked back at a decade of media coverage of asylum issues and saw reasons for cautious optimism.

At the turn of the 21st century, asylum seekers were associated with stealing the identities of dead children, making a mockery of British justice, creating water shortages and even stealing and eating donkeys, the charity says. It quotes a 2003 report by the Daily Telegraph that AIDS-infected asylum seekers were "overwhelming our hospitals".

Meanwhile, the tabloids ran headlines like: "Asylum seekers are revolting" (The Star, 2000); "Widow, 88, told by GP: make way for asylum seekers" (Daily Mail in 2003) and infamously, "Swan bake: asylum seekers steal the Queen's birds for barbecues" (the Sun, 2003).

Although the media onslaught against asylum seekers at the turn of the 2000s was sustained and hostile, public support for refugees and for the principle of asylum has endured, despite a decade of hostility to them, Asylum Aid says.

It cited the findings of opinion polls like a 2012 British Social Attitudes Survey in which 70 percent of people agreed that the UK should continue to offer a safe haven to those fleeing persecution abroad. Another poll, in 2011, showed that 73 percent of respondents were 'sympathetic' to people fleeing to Britain to escape conflict.

"These numbers are still more impressive given that they co-exist with some wild speculations about how many people are given protection in the UK every year," Asylum Aid researcher Russell Hargrave says.

For instance, 44 percent of those questioned for a Refugee Council survey believed that more than 100,000 people had been granted refugee status in the UK in 2009. The actual figure was 6,740.  

The survey showed that there were far fewer anti-asylum stories than there had been 10 years earlier, partly because there were far fewer asylum stories in general - about half as many in 2012 as in 2006.

Perhaps most encouraging has been the number of stories showing the human face of the asylum issue in traditionally anti-asylum papers in recent years.

Last year, the best-selling Sun tabloid ran a story about Rohid Zamani, an Afghan boy whose family had "fled the horrors of Al-Qaeda" when he was three and, 13 years after being granted refugee status in Britain, had won a scholarship to Prime Minister David Cameron's old school, Eton.

And when professional footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed with a heart attack during a match in 2012, much media coverage focused on his background as a child refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo

"Rohid is clearly an amazing kid, so it's hardly surprising that great swathes of the UK media wanted to talk about him. After years of brutal headlines attacking asylum seekers, all those articles were a timely reminder that newspapers will carry positive asylum stories, provided those stories are strong enough," Hargrave tells me.

"Not every refugee will go to Eton, of course, but some have reached the top of their professions in the UK, in sport and media and business. If we want to rebalance the way asylum issues are covered in the press, their stories are the best place to start."        

 

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