Eileen Pittaway: Innocent victims, Illegal migrants or political pawns‪?‬ Refugee Conference 2011

Refugees escape from persecution, conflict, death threats and
torture. The majority of refugee women and girls survive rape and sexual
abuse in transit and in camps. Boys and girls are taken as child
soldiers. Refugee camps are dangerous and services are inadequate to
fulfil basic needs. Despite this, refugees fight to maintain their
dignity, their families, their communities and their culture. They do
this in the face of often insurmountable problems. Refugees bring an
enormous and diverse range of skills and capacities to camps and on
resettlement, but the structure of service provision often ‘de
capacitates’ rather than recognise this. The rhetoric of self
sustainability is empty when refugees are denied the right to work, and
the most fundamental civil rights.

Little of the refugee experience is known in the developed world. The
discourse of “border protection” silences their voices. Instead of
compassion, and the recognition of their rights they are treated as
pariahs, as illegal immigrants. We will examine the implication of this
for countries such as Australia. We will suggest how this can be
reversed so that refugee rights and dignity can be upheld and host
countries can benefit from the skills and capacities which refugees
bring with them. We will discuss how the work of the UNSW Centre for
Refugee research is contributing to this change.