Aya's Story
Scenario 1 of 8
Egypt and the unknown
You, your sister and your mother have now all arrived in Egypt. Applying for asylum under the parameters of the UNHCR you can move about freely in the city. Initially receiving the Yellow Card, you are merely considered an asylum seeker, legally stateless and displaced, unable to be resettled. To be granted refugee status, you need to be granted a Blue Card. Processing can sometimes take years. Your path ahead is filled with uncertainty.
Did you know that more people are now forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations than at any time since the end of the Holocaust and WWII?
As of 31 December 2015, more than 65 million people were forcibly displaced. Of these, 21.3 million were refugees and 3.2 million people were seeking asylum. More than half of the world’s UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)-mandated refugees come from just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. In addition, more than half of the people displaced are children.
For many refugees, resettlement is a highly appropriate solution. However, there are far too few resettlement places available. Fewer than 1% of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate get access to resettlement each year. Of those identified conservatively by UNHCR as being in need of resettlement, more than 85% are not resettled.
For more information, see here.
Quote from Aya:
“In Egypt, my sister and I were best friends. We enjoyed playing games together and watching English TV shows. My sister has an intellectual disability, but despite that she is picking up English from the TV shows. She is bubbly in attitude, beginning to develop numeracy skills. However, when we became asylum seekers in Egypt, she began to retreat and develop signs of depression.”
Scenario 3 of 8
Arrival in Australia and ambiguity
You move in with your Aunt and your cousins. The generosity of your Aunt during the first six months allowed you to save and apply for housing. Your other aunts and cousins also assisted you in locating services, as your sister wasn’t allocated a case worker or social worker because of the humanitarian program you had arrived on.
Quote from Aya:
“We were lucky we had a large family to support us”
Did you know that people seeking asylum and refugees face particular barriers when they try to access safe, secure and affordable housing?
People who are seeking asylum and refugees in particular face significant barriers to finding a home after arriving in Australia. A person’s ability to access housing services is often dependent on being a citizen or permanent resident. This can exclude people who are on temporary visas, some of whom may have been living in our communities for years. To access many services, a person must have an independent income or meet minimum income requirements. This excludes people who are seeking asylum and refugees who do not have work rights and have no or limited access to government income support.
Additionally, state and territory housing services are largely regulated by policies and guidelines that are not found in legislation. These are often difficult to find and change frequently. The relevant law and policy is complex. It is often extremely difficult for people accessing housing services – and at times people delivering them – to know what the housing rights of people seeking asylum and refugees are. This has led to housing being one of the top three concerns among refugees in Australia, with specific challenges including shortage of low-cost housing, competing in the private rental market, limited access to support services, financial hardship, discrimination in the housing market and family size. In turn, all of this contributes to a high risk of homelessness among people seeking asylum and refugees. Accessing strained homelessness services is difficult for anyone. However, these challenges are amplified for people seeking asylum because they are uncertain about their rights and there is a lack of appropriate and culturally sensitive support.
For more information, see the Rights Advocacy Project's report: States of Refuge: Access to Health, Housing and Education for People Seeking Asylum and Refugees in Australia.
Your new home resembles your previous home, filled with other East Africans. Typically, refugees re-settled by the UNHCR receive free health checks, temporary short term accommodation and a social worker. However, with the humanitarian program you arrived on, access to these benefits were limited and random.
Due to your restricted access, certain areas of your life are impacted. Click on the words which represent the areas you think will be most affected.
- Health
- Mental Wellbeing
- Social Inclusion
- Sense of Independence
- Sense of Motivation
Your sister’s condition is unstable during your first year in Australia, on the one hand she is optimistic about education opportunities, and on the other she is struggling greatly with her depression.
Support services become available to assist with the caretaking of your sister. However, the support is only for two hours every fortnight, and no other education or social opportunities are available. Your fear of strangers interacting with your sister is increasing, particularly as she does not speak and you fear that she may not be able to warn you if bad things that are happening to her.
Quote from Aya:
"There was an incident in the past when my sister was followed by a car and harassed on a bus and was terrified."
Quote from Aya: “I remember a time before coming to Australia, when a teacher had said something to my sister and she came home upset. She struggled to articulate it but at least she managed to explain to us what had happened so that we understood her. However, my sister is now unable to speak. This created in me a new fear. A fear that if something happened to my sister when we are not around, she will have no way to tell us. There was an incident in the past when my sister was followed by a car and harassed and was terrified. I worry that this kind of incident could happen again, and my sister would have no way of telling me.”
In light of this increasing fear you have two options:
Scenario 4 of 8
Care-taker role
Your sister’s depression had eased since arriving in Australia. Initially, she was optimistic about the idea of going to school. However, she is denied entrance into Special Needs schooling due to her age, and is rejected from TAFE Courses and various other educational platforms. Her excitement begins to fade away, and her mental health becomes worse. Your sister’s limited English skills means she has very few social interactions and she is becoming increasing frustrated.
Did you know that those who are on asylum seeker or bridging visas who want to study at university cannot access funding schemes such as FEE- HELP, HECS-HELP or Commonwealth Supported Positions (CSP)?
People who are seeking asylum are often prevented from accessing university or other higher education due to the prohibitive cost of international student fees. This has the effect of stopping people from improving their education and job prospects while in Australia.
A report by the Refugee Council of Australia, published in December 2015, Barriers to Education for People Seeking Asylum and Refugees on Temporary Visas, provided a number of recommendations to Commonwealth, state and territory governments in response to barriers to education faced by people seeking asylum and refugees on temporary visas. Many of these recommendations have still not been taken up, and significant difficulties still exist for these prospective students.
For more information, see the Liberty Victoria Rights Advocacy Project report “States of Refuge: Access to Health, Housing and Education for People Seeking Asylum and Refugees in Australia”.
Quote from Aya
“After many months of trying and being rejected, we were finally able to find a placement for my sister in a TAFE Course, a year after we arrived. However, it soon became clear that it wasn’t a great fit for her. Everyone in the class spoke English, so my sister wasn’t able to engage with her classmates socially, resulting in alienation and loneliness. It was really difficult for me to see my sister feeling so isolated and alone. A few months later, we were allocated a settlement worker and they attempted to get my sister Individual Support Package funding for more educational and social support. (Now replaced by NDIS)”
Scenario 5 of 8
Dilemma
Your sister’s condition is worsening as she becomes unresponsive to treatment. The necessity of a psychiatrist and medications emerges. The long process of dealing with depression and its treatment, and her existing intellectual disability makes it increasingly scary and difficult.
Did you know it can be difficult for a refugee or person seeking asylum to access even basic healthcare in some instance, even if they have lived in the community for years?
Eligibility for Medicare for a person seeking asylum is dependent on whether or not the particular visa they hold entitles them to work. The conditions around bridging visas held by people who are awaiting a decision on a protection visa application are administered by the federal government. The system is complicated, difficult to navigate, and will differ for each individual.
Where a person is not eligible for Medicare, the decision of who can access hospital, primary healthcare and subsidised ambulance services rests with the state and territory governments. One way in which that decision is often made is on the basis of what type of visa class a person holds, and whether the holder of that visa should be billed at overseas patient rates. In many cases, the bridging visas held by people seeking asylum are considered ‘temporary’ and so the holder will be charged a significantly higher rate for even critical care. This situation fails to take into account the reality that lengthy processing times means a bridging visa holder may be in the community for a significant period of time before their application is decided.
Linked to this, the cumulative effect of not addressing health issues early on means that those denied access may eventually present only at a later stage, often in emergency circumstances, where the costs of treatment will be even higher. States and territories have been more or less successful at realising this and adjusting rights for bridging visa holders accordingly. Nevertheless, the situation is not uniform across Australia and so often remains unfair and inaccessible.
The wait for disability support from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) turns from months into years. You even have an extremely frustrating phone call with the DHHS where the case worker questions whether your sister’s condition is permanent! Someone from DHHS arrives taking down details for a support package and day programming. However, the support never arrives because of the upcoming arrival of the NDIS in the next two or three years, to which they plan to move your sister. The predicted impact is unknown and the timeline for getting support is painfully slow. What do you do?
Scenario 6 of 8
Self Reliance
By the fourth year of waiting for access to disability supports, your sister’s mental health gets worse, and she is hospitalised for months. After she is discharged she begins to start speaking again but struggling a lot. She begins to revert back to her old self, but still clings onto her family.
Quote from Aya:
“Where I had lived in East Africa, the notion of social services was non-existent. As a result, I understood that as a family, we had a caretaking role for my sister. We needed to find a solution to her problems. We understand that self-reliance is a necessity.”
Did you know that the information that refugees and people seeking asylum need in order to know their rights is often difficult to find or understand?
Information about the rights of refugees and people seeking asylum to access basic services is not consistently available to those who need to access it, including the health and community workers who provide services to them.
While this information is sometimes clearly available online, there is a risk that their rights could be altered without the government even passing legislation. Sometimes the information itself is not easy to find because it is contained in a government policy that is not publicly available. Other times, the information available on line is not up to date. These obstacles make it difficult for people seeking asylum and refugees to have a clear picture about what rights they have and how to access the services they need. Not only are people’s rights and entitlements subject to change, but they can also depend on where a person lives. For example, whether a person seeking asylum pays to go the hospital or can access social housing can depend on which state or territory they live in.
For more information about how people seeking asylum and refugees encounter significant barriers in seeking information about their entitlements, see the Rights Advocacy Project's report: States of Refuge: Access to Health, Housing and Education for People Seeking Asylum and Refugees in Australia.
Scenario 7 of 8
Self Actualisation
Personally, your opportunities since arriving in Australia have been pleasantly surprising. Within the first year, you apply for a Graduate Degree in Health sciences at University.
Aya is very self-motivated, worked hard and completed her degree. She now works full time within the health sector and feels accomplished in her role"
You highly value the importance of receiving an education in Australia as your prior study and work experiences were considered inadequate for Australian workplaces. You are very self-motivated, and you work hard to complete your degree. At University, you still gravitate towards the international students as they are the ones that provide comfort and familiarity. After the first year, your studies can be accessed online. Thankfully, this allows you time to take your sister to appointments, and to assist your mother, who has become a full-time carer with no other support.
Click on the words you believe most accurately describe how you would feel if you succeeded in accessing Education
- Excitement
- Meaning
- Challenge
- Success
- Perseverance
- Motivation
- Opportunity
Quote from Aya:
“Despite the difficulty of studies, I enjoyed the content and the productivity and feeling engaged and that I was learning”
Australian educators should specifically encourage migrant and refugee families to fully participate in the educational experience of their children at school. There are many helpful resources which set out some of the best practice methods for doing this, such as the Open the School Gate teaching resources.
Scenario 8 of 8
Volunteering
A few months after you begin your studies, you begin to volunteer for a refugee organisation through which you assist other refugees in their many social support projects.
There are many ways for any Australian be an ally to refugees and people seeking asylum. For example, if there's an event for a refugee or asylum seeker community happening in your city or town that invites people to join and show solidarity, join. If there’s an event on for cultural diversity week, go along. You can even show support by doing something simple: if you know it's an important religious or cultural day for someone you know, show interest and ask them if they can teach you about it.
Quote from Aya:
“I transitioned into social support services within the refugee organisation and began to support newly arrived refugees, helping as much as I could. Most cases came to me with people having difficulty accessing services. My personal experience in being a refugee allowed me you to understand what obstacles they may face and how to work through them. This was very rewarding work.”
Quote from Aya:
“I now work full time within the health sector and I feel accomplished in my role as it is rewarding and challenging and there is an inclusive mate culture at work.”
Message to Australians
Quote from Aya:
“I have experienced racism in Australia, even though it is sometimes more hidden and harder to detect than in Egypt. Most of all, I fear for my sister who is vulnerable. I worry that she’ll be mistreated or abused because she wears a headscarf. To make our world a better place, I believe it’s up to ALL OF US to be more tolerant of each other. To appreciate our differences as our strengths, and celebrate our common humanity.”
Quote from Aya:
“Many Australian people have a welcoming mate culture, which you see in the strangers on trams, people you meet when you study, work, go out - this beautiful easiness with which people speak to you and laugh with you, bit by bit makes it feel like home.”
