Announcing the publication of her draft Modern Slavery Bill in 2013, British Home Secretary Theresa May wrote, “Traffickers and slave masters exploit whatever means they have at their disposal to coerce, deceive and force individuals into a life of abuse, servitude and inhumane treatment. This is simply unacceptable in modern day Britain”.
Talk of slave masters calls to mind transatlantic slavery, an inhumane system that not only treated human beings as objects of property and authorised their violent control, but also tore the enslaved from their kin and community, wrenched apart husbands and wives, parents and children, and stripped them of independence, power, honour and dignity. As sociologist Orlando Patterson famously put it, the enslaved were biologically alive yet socially dead. Is the treatment of some human beings as socially dead “simply unacceptable in modern day Britain”? My research with Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the UK suggests that it is not.
Like many asylum seekers escaping politically repressive regimes, my Zimbabwean interviewees were parents who had not managed to bring their children with them when they escaped to the UK. They imagined that, once in a safe haven, they would be able to arrange for their children to join them. Yet on arrival, they discovered that the UK asylum system treats parents as asylum seekers first and parents later (if ever). As a result, many parents are forced to endure separation from their children against their will as they struggle through the long and torturous process of asylum claims and appeals. As one 45 year old father of two told me:
