Asylum Interview as a Fork on the Road – from Asylum Seeker to Irregular Migrant (original) (raw)

Psychological Applications and Trends 2019

Many asylum seekers have encountered various types of violence in their lives including physical and verbal harm, but also emotional violence. This paper evaluates yet another type of violence, namely epistemic violence, which asylum seekers may encounter when they arrive to a country seeking asylum. Epistemic violence is a failure of hearers to understand and acknowledge the speech of speakers in linguistic exchanges causing a negative impact on the speaker. Thus, epistemic violence is indirect and non-physical, yet it might have extremely severe legal and psychological consequences, such as a negative decision on an asylum request and the trauma caused by the decision and the situation in which person encounters the fork on the road: "Should I stay in Finland, or should I go?". In 2015, Finland received an eightfold number of asylum applications compared with the previous years. Finnish authorities were not well prepared for the increase and in 2016 laws and regulations regarding immigration and legal aid were amended. According to the amended law, the legal assistance in the asylum interview is in practice no longer possible unless there are particularly serious reasons. In this paper we report findings from interviews with 70 former asylum seekers regarding their experiences of their asylum interviews. We illustrate that many former asylum seekers did not experience to have been able to tell their story in such a way that their realities would have been understood and now they are irregular migrants. Irregular migration is a timely phenomenon. Furthermore, it is highly multidisciplinary phenomenon requiring a holistic evaluation and discussion gathering academics from various disciplines including (but not being limited to) psychology, geography, sociology and law. Epistemic violence needs to be avoided as much as possible in European immigration and social policies as it might increase irregular migration. Moreover, most importantly, it increases unnecessary agony and psychological stress for individual asylum seekers. Epistemic violence, as any other violence, has significant psychological effects through the negotiation of individual's self-esteem on a moment in which many experience to have lost the direction of the life. Consequently, we stress that the decision makers ought to acknowledge the possible side effects of the chosen social policies as those side effects such as an increase in experienced epistemic violence, might have extensive impact on living conditions and the quality of life of people in the society.