Whose life matters? A call for social work action in response to a global humanitarian crisis

Abstract

In a few short weeks, the war in Ukraine displaced over four million people. As a human rights profession in the new global order, the social work profession has called for not only the support of social workers in Ukraine and their neighboring countries but also for pressure on all host countries to facilitate fast, efficient admission of asylum seekers and strengthening of resettlement services. Using Canada as a case study, we identify barriers that became apparent during the Syrian civil war and suggest ways all social workers can act in solidarity in the face of this global travesty.

Keywords

Displaced people global affairs humanitarian crisis international social work Syrian refugees

Introduction

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022, according to the UN News on 26 August 2022, 6.9 million refugees have re-located to Europe and 6.6 million people are internally displaced. Half of them are children, meaning that huge numbers of children are losing their homes. As of August 2022, altogether more than a third of the Ukrainian population have fled or been displaced (BBC News, 2022a; Yacoubian, 2022a). People around the world have become witness to children displaced, dying, and/or dead. Social and news media feature heart-breaking photos documenting the inhumaneness of the war, such as the photo of emergency workers carrying an injured pregnant woman who soon died with her unborn baby when the Russian forces bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol on 9 March (Maloletka, 2022) and another photo of 109 empty strollers lined up at the Lviv city hall, a symbolic record of the children killed in Ukraine since the war began (Reuters, 2022). Not long ago, we saw a photo of a 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s corpse lying on one of the Mediterranean beaches in Turkey, when a Turkish journalist photographed it on 2 September 2015. It went viral on social media after it was first posted on Twitter and then was picked up by European and North American media (Kurdi, 2018). As John Tagg (1993) explains, documentary photography provides the evidentiary truth, capturing relations of power and transforming ‘the flat rhetoric of evidence into an emotionalized drama of experience’ (p. 12). The realism of these photographs is beyond dispute: the reality of the tragedy unfolding in Syria and now in Ukraine has become undeniable.

On 10 March 2022, the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) announced the IFSW Action on Ukraine Crisis, detailing action for social workers for ‘the coordination of the professions and the community’s responses to the needs of refugees as they flee Ukraine’ and for ‘delivering assistance to people who remain in the country’. In addition, they called for standing with the ‘people of Russia who are starving and at significant risk from a regime’ that invaded Ukraine and ‘prevents them from advocating for peace’ (IFSW, 2022a). They urged that each national association should work with local refugee agencies and government departments to help the many refugees who are seeking safety through asylum. Indeed, we support this call to assist in this global refugee crisis. On World Social Work Day, 15 March 2022, IFSW (2022b) hosted a webinar, ‘Voices from the borders: Social work responses to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine’ to brainstorm how social workers can help in this crisis and what they can do, because ‘[R]espect for and the promotion and defence of human rights are fundamental to social work’ and ‘[R]esponding to the needs of people in vulnerable situations is also a core element of social work’.

Following this call for action, in this article, we consider some of the questions posed by Judith Butler (2006: 20) in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. She asks, ‘Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?’ Although this work was written in the wake of the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attack on the twin towers of New York City, she not only reflected on how mourning and violence could lead to solidarity and a quest for global justice, but she also questioned the unjust valuation of human life where some lives lost were deeply mourned and others that were being lost in the American counter attack were disregarded. We apply these questions to the context of the refugee crises and invite social workers to consider the relevance of these questions to our profession – how social workers should count every life as grievable and livable – and deeply commit to the glocal nature of refugee crises that are not out there in other countries but lives that deserve to be counted both locally and globally.

A critical feminist scholar Rebecca Mason (2011) notes that epistemic ignorance – ‘what is in our interest to know and what is in our interest to ignore’ (p. 294) – significantly impacts ways we understand, care, and practice. For example, there has been a long history of black feminist knowledge claims being ignored and rejected (see Collins, 2022; Dotson, 2012, for details). Also, in our own Canadian social work history, social workers’ ignorance of the democide of Indigenous people historically and ongoing is noteworthy (for details see Blackstock, 2000; Chrisjohn and Young, 1997; Clark, 2018). Mason urges that this ignorance/unknowing should be scrutinized and their actors who have power/privilege and been permitted to ignore social unrest should be accountable for their own ignorance. Guided by her work, we argue that the imagined division between us and them (e.g. deserved and undeserved, refugees and citizens) creates epistemic ignorance in us as social workers and unknowingly turning away from the inhumane refugee crisis globally which then permits another refugee crisis as we illustrate with the linkage between the Syrian and Ukrainian refugee crises later. We critically examine the politics that create and maintain its undercurrent (i.e. authoritarian nationalism) and its detrimental impact on global peace and the social work profession. Drawing from scholarship on glocalism (Livholts and Bryant, 2017), we argue for the rethinking of national borders and question how we can transgress borders to save lives, and resist reifying refugee crises as inevitable, and thus make all lives matter.

Refugee crises in Syria and Ukraine to reify well-orchestrated authoritarian power

Syria was part of the Arab Spring that changed many rulers in the Middle East and North Africa. A peaceful anti-government pro-democracy uprising in March 2011 was turned into a full scale civil war that lasted 11 years as President Assad chose to use harsh and excessive measures, including unlawful weapons, and was supported by the Russian army and Iranian-backed militiamen, when more peaceful resolutions to the unrest could have been used. The United Nations (UN) found evidence of the use of chemical weapons both by the Syrian Government forces and non-state armed groups (UN, 2018). What became a fierce civil war and the resulting authority gap in the country created a fertile feeding ground for terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS. According to the UN, over 350,209 people were killed between March 2011 and March 2021, and UN Human rights chief Michelle Bachelet reported 26,727 victims were women and 27,126 were children (BBC News, 2022). Syria had a pre-war population of 22 million people and more than a half of them have fled their homes – 6.9 million are internally displaced with more than 2 million living in tented camps with limited access to basic services as well as another 6.8 million are refugees abroad with 84 percent of them are hosted in neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey (BBC News, 2022a). According to the UN (2022), as of February 2022, 14.6 million people inside Syria were in a great need of humanitarian assistance and half a million children are chronically malnourished.

The political agendas and stakes in Syria and Ukraine are vastly different. However, what is similar is the impact on displaced persons and how both humanitarian crises have been framed by political tactics and the strategies of authoritarian Russian power. Mona Yacoubian (2022b), senior advisor to the US vice president on the Middle East and Africa, explains that Syria was a Russian ‘post-soviet success’ and has been used to frame a new ‘post-west’ world by changing the gamefield of a US-led international order. Initially honed in Chechnya and Georgia and using Syria as a springboard to leap upward, Russian forces claimed status as a dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean alongside other regional powers such as Turkey and Iran as well as ‘cementing ties to autocratic leaders in the Gulf and Egypt’ in pursuit of Putin’s aim to ‘re-establish a Russian empire’ (Yacoubian, 2022a) returning back to the Cold War era global power configurations.

Within this political turmoil and Russia’s ‘wilful disregard of international humanitarian law’, what the world has to witness are ‘brutal battlefield tactics’ such as widespread attacks targeting civilians in hospitals, schools, and resident areas as shown in the aforementioned photographs and besieging people to ‘starve or surrender’, leaving approximately ‘12 million Ukrainians currently living in besieged or heavily conflict-affected cities’ such as Mariupol, similar to eastern Aleppo and Damascus in Syria (Yacoubian, 2022a). Using people’s fear for life as a tactic of war, terrorizing them with the cutting off aid while mercilessly bombing, the mass displacement of people internally and externally as refugees has become a weaponized strategy in both Syria and Ukraine. When more than half of Syria’s population were forced into displacement, it was the most significant refugee crisis since the end of World War II until the Russian attack on Ukraine. By re-engineering Ukrainian demography by displacement and seizing of territory, political analysts expressed concern that the nightmare of the Syrian war would repeat its path in Ukraine and, according to Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, the outcome of the war would duplicate Cold War politics and result in the splitting of Ukraine into two just like North and South Korea (Yacoubian, 2022a).

What does all this mean for humanitarian workers and social workers? It means that we will witness refugee crises across the globe as the numbers of displaced people increase and new re-location destinations are sought. With the desperate wish not to ignore or repeat the inadequacies of the response to the Syrian displacement crisis, we critically re-examine the landscape of humanitarian work especially by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and we consider the refugee policies in countries near or far to Ukraine, so social workers can mobilize this critical information to make a difference in their local refugee policies and practices. We will use Canada as an example of a destination refugee country, and the family of Alan – the boy on the beach – as a case example of Syrian refugees in search of a home, for this critical examination. We chose this case in the hope that what we can learn from his story and that this might reduce such losses of Ukrainian families. Through a close examination of Alan’s family, we identify and enumerate barriers stemming from various levels of willful ignorance to saving the lives of refugees so that we can all work in solidarity to eliminate them.

The boy on the beach

Tima Kurdi, Alan’s aunt, who is now a Canadian citizen, wrote a book chronicling Alan’s short life. The family had a strong relationship with Damascus and never thought of leaving it until the war forced them to flee. Alan’s larger family is a traditional Syrian family giving great importance to collectivism, sharing, respecting elders, and family ceremonies. Alan was born in Khobani, his mother Rhenna’s hometown in Syria. The war made it impossible to survive in Syria as their family experienced bombing, kidnapping, torture, unemployment, poverty, scarcity, and the loss of family and friends. Alan’s father, Abdullah, decided to move to Istanbul to provide Alan and his elder brother, Ghalip, a better life. After the family arrived in Istanbul, Abdullah worked 16 hours a day with a meager salary. The living conditions were harsh as the Turkish government struggled to support the growing number of Syrian refugees. Alan and his family were unable to access health care and education and lived in sub-standard conditions in a refugee camp. As a result of these difficulties, Abdullah and Rhenna decided to immigrate to Europe to provide Alan and Ghalip a better future (Kurdi, 2018).

Abdullah contacted and visited the UN branch in Istanbul many times asking for help and guidance to obtain refugee status and move to Europe, but the requirements were for identification documentation such as a passport (Barrier 1). Only more affluent Syrians who had such documentation before the war began could meet these requirements and for poorer families such as Abdullah’s this was not an option. Meanwhile in Canada, Tima made countless applications to the Canadian government to provide refugee status for Alan and the family, but the application forms fell on the deaf ears of the Canadian government. Refugees granted asylum in Canada were from private sponsorships from citizens and cost $28,000 for one family (Barrier 2). Once again, this huge cost for newcomer Canadians to assist their family members caught in the grips of a vicious civil war meant that only the wealthy could expect to gain assistance. As a result, in desperation Abdullah began negotiating with human smugglers to move to the West. Tragically only Abdullah survived the attempted crossing; his wife and two sons drowned (Kurdi, 2018).

Canadian context

Settler Canadian history of welcoming and accommodating refugee populations is uneven. Huge numbers of displaced persons became a global problem after World War II, and Canada attended to this global refugee issue under the leadership of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (1921–1930 and 1935–1948). Guided by the regulations of an illiberal and discriminatory immigration act, Canada refused assistance and sanctuary to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution between 1933 and 1948 (Arbella and Troper, 2012). The Department of Citizenship and Immigration produced a refugee policy on 31 December 1951, which was heavily influenced by Cold War politics at the time so that only refugees from Eastern European countries were accepted. The Department of Citizenship and Immigration restricted the definition of a refugee to a person who was displaced from one European country to another; or a person who left one of the countries listed as Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, East Zone of Germany, U.S.S.R., and Yugoslavia and had not been permanently re-settled (Vineberg, 2018). It was not until 1969 that Canada actually signed both the Refugee Convention (1951) and the Refugee Protocol (1969) which allowed for a less discriminatory approach.

Immigration Regulations Canada (1978) introduced the classification of refugees into two designated classes: Government Assisted Refugees (GAR) and Privately Sponsored Refugees (PSR). Regulations were devised surrounding these categories and annual quotas were applied to the GAR class. A Refugee Status Advisory Committee (RSAC) was set up to determine eligibility and an Immigration Appeal Board reviewed appeals to the Committee’s decisions. By 2008, there was a backlog of 62,000 claimants, and it took several years for a decision to be reached. In 2012, a new immigration act was implemented (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Regulation Canada, 2019) and this reduced the eligibility requirements for the GAR classification and allowed the UNHCR to recommend claimants based on the importance of resettlement. The intent was to reduce the backlog, but they were minimally successful in this. In February 2018, there were 47,451 claims and they were processing 2000 a month so the processing time was 2 years (Barrier 3).

Starting in November 2015, the Trudeau Government launched Operation Syrian Refugees, an initiative to welcome more than 25,000 Syrian refugees in 100 days (Government of Canada, 2019). The government worked closely with different organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and international partners to achieve their target. As of August 2019, Canada had received 44,590 Syrian refugees, the majority registered to Ontario (19,835), Quebec (9350), and Alberta (5145) (Government of Canada, 2019). According to Immigration Refugees and Citizenship of Canada (IRCC, 2019) records, the gender distribution was close with 21,720 females and 22,875 males, but when the age of these refugees are considered, almost half of them (21,545) were 17 years old or younger.

In Canada, in the Federal elections, party platforms often use policies on immigration, diversity, and multiculturalism strategically as these are policies which divide and mobilize different sections of the electorate. In the 2015 Federal elections, Justin Trudeau was the leader of the Liberal party and was campaigning to unseat the Conservative Harper government which had been in power for 10 years (2006–2015). Trudeau promised a progressive, diverse cabinet and leadership which would promote multicultural Canada (Jeyapal, 2018). Responding to the electric awareness of the global refugee crisis triggered by the photograph of the ‘boy on the beach’, Trudeau announced that Canada would accept 25,000 Syrian refugees as part of his 2015 election platform, a promise which gained him national and global approval. Janet Dench, Executive Director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, described this announcement as ‘uncommon’ and commented that ‘Canada has garnered a reputation as a world leader on refugee resettlement’. However, she noted that this stance was mostly successful because it compared favorably with the fact that the United States had fallen behind in recent years under the Trump administration. Characteristic of authoritarian regimes, Trump dismantled a refugee program which had been built up over four decades, lowering the admission quota, introducing stringent vetting requirements, and closing many reception agencies (for further details, see American Immigration Policy, 2021; Finnegan and Gittleson, 2021; Kanno-Youngs and Shear, 2020; Snow and Watson, 2020). Once the Trudeau administration reached the promised number of 25,000 Syrian refugees, federally funded sponsorship stopped, and more private sponsorship was encouraged. Gunter (2015) critiqued Trudeau’s Syrian refugee approach as the ‘PM’s feel good policy’ noting that if the same amount of money was sent as aid to countries bordering Syria, Canada could help 300,000 refugees in camps there, rather than just 25,000 immigrating to Canada. The federal program lasted until shortly after Trudeau was elected into power (Barrier 4).

Global humanitarianism: the UNHCR

Even though displaced persons has been a part of the story of humankind for centuries, it was in the 20th century in the wake of World War I that the first global discussion on the issues surrounding displacement took place. The High Commission for Refugees was established by the League of Nations in 1921, with its primary mandate to respond to refugees fleeing the Russian Revolution. It was after World War II and the subsequent formation of the UN that the UNHCR was set up. Initially it was to be for 3 years to respond to the European displaced persons from World War II but after being renewed every 5 years, in 2003 it was made permanent until the refugee problem was resolved (Hanhimaki, 2015). The UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) defined a refugee as a person who:

Owing to well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside of the country of his nationality, and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the production of the country; or who not having a nationality and being outside the country of his habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UN, 1951: A(1) (2))

In 1967, a Protocol was issued which fine-tuned the scope of protection for refugees and stated that refugees could not be discriminated against, penalized, or returned to their country of origin if there was threat to life or freedom (UNHCR, 2010; for details on these international agreements, see website at www.unhcr.org). By December 2008, 147 countries had signed onto this document including Canada. A major difficulty with these provisions is that distinguishing between voluntary economic migration and forced migration is not always easy as ‘motivation’ is sometimes unclear, so the national processes for distinguishing ‘deserving’ from ‘undeserving’ can be ineffective and politically charged (see Author et al., 2020, for details on US immigration and refugee policy analysis) (Barrier 5). The bureaucracy which has developed in different countries and regions to respond to these issues has provided fertile ground for the development of human smuggling operations (Barrier 6). Faced with unmanageable bureaucratic regulations and rules, desperate migrants often use organized international networks of human smuggling to try and reach sought after destinations (Crisp, 2007).

Largely dependent on voluntary funding, the complexity of the task facing the UNHCR has continued to increase (Barrier 7). Whereas in its inception they were responding to predominantly European populations, this expanded to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the latter decades of the 20th century. Establishing and maintaining refugee camps with limited funding and resources has been further complicated with seeping partisanship where humanitarian aid was diverted into arms purchases and assistance funded by the main Cold War rivals fuelled domestic conflicts (Hanhimaki, 2015). While the UNHCR relies on the co-operation of other UN agencies (e.g. UNICEF and WHO) dealing with human security, they also rely heavily on 600 nongovernmental organizations who work with them to assist refugee populations (Hanhimaki, 2015). The former UNHCR official and refugee policy expert Jeff Crisp stated that the UN refugee agency was insufficiently funded and lacked the political clout to protect refugees as it promised (Crisp, 2018). The United States, which contributes almost 40 percent of the UNHCR budget, has declared that they plan to reduce their support, which has forced the organization to seek alternative sources of funding and diplomatic support from the European Union (EU) and its member states (Barrier 8). This is an uphill battle as Europe has a high popular preference to halt the arrival of refugees (Crisp, 2018). Neighboring countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey that host 5.7 million Syrian refugees have struggled to manage with one of the largest refugee exoduses in human history (BBC News, 2022b). Turkey has declared that it cannot handle the refugee crisis anymore and would not prevent the refugees trying to move to the West from Turkey (Amnesty International, 2020). After this declaration, Syrian refugees started to move to the Greek borders where they experienced violence and humiliation at the hands of the Greek soldiers (Amnesty International, 2020). Even though this is a violation of both European law and international law, and people were aware of this brutality, there has been no preventive action and the noted multiple barriers already identified in this article have been pervasive with little action taken to stop the border brutality by the EU and the leaders of the European countries.

Social work responses to global humanitarian crises

Before discussing how social workers can address the identified barriers to help Syrian and Ukraine refugees, we introduce a brief history of our profession to contextualize how social work has been situated amid global crises and unrest.

International social work and global unrest

To define international social work is challenging as there are numerous connecting concepts. Healy (2008) says it refers to ‘comparative social welfare, international practice, cross cultural knowledge and understanding, intergovernmental work on social welfare, concern and action on global social problems, a worldwide collegiality among social workers, professional exchange activities, and a general worldview’ (pp. 7–8). The profession of social work developed in the wake of the industrial revolution which swept Europe and North America in the 20th century. In its early years, it was female dominated, voluntary, and faith-based. Professionalization which introduced university training, secularism, and modern evidence-based approaches began in Western countries toward the end of the 19th century (Author 1; Jennisson, 2008). Attended by 2000 members, the first International Conference in Social Work was in 1928 in Paris, France. It was from this meeting that the predecessors of the IFSW, International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), and International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW) were formed. The three leading international social work organizations have developed regional associations which have key roles within the regions. Individual schools, social workers, and NGOs act together at the state level within national associations (Cox and Pawar, 2006). The initial commitment was to world peace as these female-dominated organizations had recently won suffrage rights and many subscribed to a gender-based version of feminism where they believed that female leadership would result in less war (Author 1, 2015). Over time, the shared commitment of all three organizations broadened to promoting human rights and social development and to accomplish this by representation on the UN NGO Commissions and Committees (Healy, 2008).

While it has Western, colonial, and local origins, social work is evolving in broader contexts. Social work has the potential to contribute to the alleviation of global problems, and according to Cox and Pawar (2006), this should be a concern to a larger section of the international social work community. While international social work began by focusing on practice or policy issues affecting more than one country, it has expanded to global social problems and policy issues, comparative social policy, international professional organizations, and social work practice. Currently, the main focus of international social work is on the development of human rights, migration, child labor, the needs of displaced persons, human trafficking, or HIV/AIDS (Healy, 2017).

To address the global commitment to respect human dignity and rights as the center piece of social work, the three main global bodies representing the social work profession established the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development in 2010 (hereafter the Global Agenda: for details of the Global Agenda history and reports, visit https://www.ifsw.org/social-work-action/the-global-agenda/). In the call for 2010–2020, social workers pledged:

We seek renewed commitment to the peaceful prevention and resolution of conflict and adherence to international agreements which can reduce violence and its consequences. We will work with our partners to challenge violent state responses to actions by people in defence of their rights. We will advocate for the right of people to move between and within countries and for the right of documented and undocumented migrants to have access to social services. We will support measures to reduce and eliminate human trafficking. (Truell, 2012: 3)

In 2018, Rory Truell, IFSW Secretary-General, called social workers to contribute to the 2020–2030 Global Agenda to set priorities for the profession where Truell explicitly noted ‘one of the biggest social challenges’ was ‘the election of authoritarian leaders that seek to undermine people’s rights and basic democracy through military or police control and by corruption, manipulation and lies’ (p. 756). The interim report of the 2020–2030 Global Agenda addressed migration and refugees as a core global social problem, stating that 1 percent of the world’s population (1 in 97) was forcibly displaced and 68 percent of them fleeing internal disputes in Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar and in turn there were five countries who hosted the majority of these persons: Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan, Uganda, and Germany (Jones, 2020; UN, 2018).

While they report that ‘social workers are one of the key professional groups engaging with displaced people, helping to build better relationships between local people and migrants, working to foster better mutual understanding and supporting migrants to find forms of employment’ (Jones, 2020: 11), they also note that there is unprecedented hostility toward migrants and refugees in Europe paralleling the rise of authoritarian populism. Indeed, hostility toward migrants, particularly refugees, is also evident in Australia, North America, and South Africa. Truell cited the case of Turkey where many NGOs have been closed down, many of which were providing vital services for Syrian refugees. On 2 November 2020, three international organizations – IASSW, ICSW, and IFSW – announced the 2020–2030 Global Agenda for a Social Work and Social Development Framework, ‘Co-building inclusive social transformation’:

Fostering the active participation of all voices, particularly those often marginalized, is at the core for the profession of social work and social development and is essential to co-design and co-build inclusive social transformation. This would include the development of new social agreements between governments and the populations they serve that facilitate universal rights, opportunities, freedom and sustainable well-being for all people nationally and globally. (IFSW, 2020, italics in original).

As the first theme between 2020 and 2022, they announced ‘Ubuntu: Strengthening social solidarity and global connectedness’. Ubuntu means ‘I am because we are’, and it underscores the significance of solidarity and social workers’ joint construction of a socially just world. According to Giroux and Filipakou (2020), authoritarianism deadens democratic values and humaneness as we have witnessed in the atrocities done to Syrian and Ukraine refugees. In the midst of the global crisis, Ubuntu captures how social workers can take a stance in addressing the identified barriers to saving lives of Ukraine refugees in flight. Ubuntu is a philosophy which prioritizes the importance of respect, reverence, and commitment for all lives.

Call for social work actions: Initiatives in response to the Ukraine refugee crisis

Social Work for Peace (SW4P: https://www.iriss.org.uk/news/news/2022/03/23/social-work-4-peace) is a network led by internationally renowned social work scholar in disaster work, Lena Dominelli, Professor at the University of Stirling in Scotland, the Director of the Disaster Interventions and Humanitarian Aid Programme, the Chair of the Disaster Interventions Committee of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW), and Chair of the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) special interest group (SPEDI). This network is a Virtual Helpline for Disasters that social workers have been activating during different natural disasters since 2010 and is now set up to support the Ukrainian social and community workers. In her report of calls to social work action, Dominelli (2022) says,

I am in contact with brave social workers in Ukraine striving to meet basic needs, re-establish livelihoods and communities, restore people’s human rights, secure social and environmental justice, and build peace while enduring curfews and Putin’s military ordinance.

And she provides ‘a list of support activities we can provide to these courageous professionals so they can continue serving those in need’:

Asking for donations to purchase food, clothing, water, shelter, medicines such as insulin, painkillers, oxygen and power generators that run on diesel or petrol, through organizations including the Ukrainian Red Cross, British Red Cross, and Ministry of Social Policy of Ukraine

Creating a space where people who wish to speak about the impact of Putin’s war on them can be heard in confidence and be referred to other services

Preparing various countries to welcome Ukrainian refugees with understanding, respect and dignity, and assisting them to living in another land and culture, an experience that will vary from person to person

Assisting refugees to settle down, adjust to being away from home, and learn how to access the services they need

Helping people demanding an end to Putin’s war through their elected representatives

Securing scholarships (donations needed please) for students from the Ukraine

Obtaining bilingual speakers who speak Ukrainian

Responding to other requests for help that arise

She encourages social workers to volunteer within SW4P to support this ongoing crisis in Ukraine. In a personal conversation, she also encouraged social workers to work together to prepare people in their own countries (where appropriate) to receive refugees from Ukraine.

This article is one of our responses to this call to prepare social workers and residents in Canada and other countries to re-think how we welcome Ukrainian refugees without repeating the wrongdoings that resulted in losing the lives of Alan and his family. Next, we discuss how not to ignore or repeat but to end the persistent and active barriers facing Ukraine refugees moving into Canada, as an example.

Removing barriers in supporting Ukraine refugees

We identified eight areas which worked as barriers for Alan’s family safely seeking asylum in Canada. The initial five barriers – (1) the requirement of identification documentation such as a passport; (2) Canadian family sponsorship costing $28,000; (3) its claim processing time approximately 2 years; (4) selective types of refugee supports due to politics such as the ‘PM’s feel good policy’; and (5) a political discretion of deserving or undeserving refugee claimants – underlie the governmental policies in the immigration and refugee claimant border-crossing practices. On 10 March 2022, in Poland, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Polish President Andrzej Duda, who noted that his country has absorbed about 1.5 million people out of roughly 2 million people who had fled Ukraine at that time. Duda made a direct plea for Canada to eliminate as many barriers as possible for incoming Ukrainians, saying that ‘Try and introduce some very, very, very simple procedures, . . . visas . . . to move this process’. They discussed airlifting to expedite the process, and Trudeau announced an investment of $117 million in an effort to speed up refugee applications (Brewster, 2022). According to Government of Canada (2022), as of 1 April 2022,

Canada has committed $145 million in humanitarian assistance to respond to the needs of people affected by the situation. With this contribution, our partners will provide emergency health services, protection, support to displaced populations and essential life-saving services such as shelter, water and sanitation, and food.

Instead of spending humanitarian funds to allow very limited numbers of refugees to cross the borders from Ukraine to Canada like the ‘PM’s feel good policy’ for Syrian refugees in 2015, the humanitarian assistance was promised to be sent to the war zone to address the most urgent and basic needs at the sites to support more displaced people, in addition to some changes to expedite the receiving process of Ukraine refugees in Canada. Although it is reassuring to see the Canadian government is active in supporting Ukraine refugees by their attempt to remove the barriers, all these promises are ‘plans’ rather than actual ‘doing’ as underlined above. It is critical for social workers and non-social workers to become witnesses to how these promises are implemented, such as the promise of committed dollars, and how the family sponsorship cost is to be addressed. Since arriving in Canada, many immigrant families have been exposed to precarious employment and experienced ongoing settlement issues related to economic and social injustice. Without concrete plans around how to address the established and ingrained systemic procedures to expedite the admission of Ukrainian refugees, and how to resolve and dismantle discretional guidelines that divide deserving refugees from undeserving, these promises are unhelpful for Ukrainian refugees and the people who support them. Also, the resettlement process of Ukraine refugees to Canada is barely mentioned. Once they arrive in Canada, they need basic services to survive and heal from war trauma. This fundamental matter should be discussed to identify and mobilize resources for Ukrainian refugees, which social workers are well equipped to do and to press the government to do as well.

As noted in Barrier 6, human smuggling and the vulnerability of human trafficking for Syrian refugees are also urgent issues to address if we want Ukrainian refugees to safely arrive at their destination country and if we do not want to have another boy on the beach. James Elder, spokesperson for the UN Children’s Fund, highlighted that 90 percent of the people fleeing Ukraine are women and children and warned that as they arrive in new places while being displaced, they become prey to traffickers:

To give a sense of the border that I used to visit – the main border, Medyka, Poland to Ukraine – it is scores of people standing around buses and minivans calling out names of capital cities – or at least it was a week ago – people getting onto those . . . The vast, vast majority of course are people with wonderful intentions and great generosity, but there is no doubt given what we understand of trafficking in Europe, that that remains a very, very grave issue. (UN News, 2022)

There are a couple of structural issues that contribute to Ukraine refugees being even more vulnerable to human trafficking and exploitation (Peseckyte, 2022). For example, even before the war, Ukrainians were among the most common victims of trafficking into the EU. According to the UN Office on Drugs on Crime (UNODC) Global Database findings in 2018, Ukrainian victims were trafficked to 29 countries, and over half the destinations were identified in the Russian Federation and a quarter in Poland, which has received the highest number of Ukraine refugees since the war began. Ilias Chatzis, Chief of the UNODC section on human trafficking, noted that many European countries swiftly acted to allow refugees to cross borders safely and receive humanitarian visas that offer temporary protection, which significantly reduced the devastation from migrant smugglers sacrificing lives like Alan’s family. Ylva Johansson, the bloc’s home affairs commissioner, noted that a network of national anti-trafficking coordinators in all EU member states was activated during the first weeks of the war, working with national police who are checking cars and homes, yet there is still a need for vigilance. Another structural issue is a lack of registration for children in an EU-wide registration system. Out of 4 million refugees at the end of March 2022, half of them are children, yet only 23,000 were registered as unaccompanied minors in an EU-wide registration. Johansson notes that ‘registration is key when it comes to avoiding missing children but also to help to reunify families that might have been split during the journey’. Issuing humanitarian visas to expedite the fleeing process and registering children would significantly prevent children and women from human trafficking and smuggling (Peseckyte, 2022).

The last two barriers such as limited humanitarian aid funding for the increasing complexity of the humanitarian tasks (Barrier 7) and its sources relying on authoritarian governments who in fact ignite domestic and global conflicts (Barrier 8) are serious ongoing concerns as described in the UNHCR section earlier. As SW4P’s call for action states, donating and volunteering humanitarian aid organizations would be critical for both social workers and non-social workers and pushing for our governments to support them rather than cutting back the funding. In teaching social work students in both clinical and structural courses, we often experience resistance when we share global issues and suggest how social workers locally can support global crises, with comments such as, ‘we have enough problems to deal with in our country and their issues have little to do with our work’. We argue that this belief results in a position of epistemic ignorance as the information on the humanitarian crisis is in the public domain and choosing to ignore it is an example of willfully separating what is in our interests to know from what isn’t (Mason, 2011) and that this position grants space for another refugee crisis such as the circumstances resulting in Alan’s death, all over again.

Examining state policies on globally forced migration of people, Masocha (2017) argues that only focusing on local responses to asylum seekers reifies ‘othering’ discourse in social work practice. We agree with Masocha that social workers should move beyond the local focus toward a glocal position where we work collectively across national borders to advocate for the human rights of displaced people. In fact, local and global issues are related. Livholts and Bryant (2017) note that ‘the merging forms of interconnectivity between place, experiences and realities’ (p. 9) around the world construct a situated body politics of social work as a profession and they propose developing a knowledge base for social work in a glocalized world that is local, international, and global. They further articulate that ‘One of the most multifarious and complex contemporary human rights issues for social work is that the epitome of glocal forces, contexts and conditions is associated with the re-settlement of asylum seekers’ (p. 12). In this regard, paying close attention to what happens in Ukraine and to displaced Ukrainians is closely related to what we as social workers should act on. In his book on war, violence, and social justice, Kamali (2015: 14, italics in original) proposes to replace ‘global social problems’ with ‘glocalizing social problems’ in order ‘to address the complexity and multi-edged nature of social problems’ which ripple out and affect us all. In a global world, events ricochet into local/glocal locations, and this underscores the importance of embodying glocalised pedagogy. It is critical for social work scholars to frame ‘local and global community connectedness in relation to social responsibility, justice and sustainability’ (Patel and Lynch, 2013: 223, cited in Livholts and Bryant, 2017: 11). This article is one such effort to make the glocal connection where all lives matter for humanity and social justice, so we should not ignore what is happening in Ukraine and displaced Ukrainians.

Implications for social work

In his Younghusband lecture, social work scholar Jim Ife (2018) addressed the topic of social work as a human rights profession in the new global order. We agree with his observation that social work needs to operate at both the local and the global levels and concur with his conclusion that many social workers fail to see internationalism and globalization as relevant to their day-to-day practice: ‘The problems of our clients are caused as much by global forces as by national forces, and we cannot understand local problems without reference to global economic, political and cultural circumstances’ (Ife, 2018: 124). Furthermore, he points to problems of,

a powerful and cynical global arms trade, driven by profit alone, that creates markets for weapons of death and sells guns to anyone who will pay for them, a culture of violence that approves and promotes violent solutions to any problem, and values macho aggression, and a weak human rights regime which is powerless to prevent such abuses, and which has yet to convince the world that the rights of children should be taken seriously. (p.124)

When these problems are understood as being linked and viewed as both national problems and common problems which might have some shared solutions, we can be more instrumental in making changes to support millions of displaced people locally and globally.

The IFSW policy on refugees (1998) emphasizes the importance of addressing the particular needs of refugee children, women, elderly, and disabled persons. Given that 40 percent of the Syrian refugees were children, and 73 percent are women and children (Yassin, 2018) and half of the Ukrainian refugees are estimated to be children, this is particularly pertinent. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) was ratified by Canada in 1990 and states that discrimination on the basis of race, nationality or status is prohibited. Article 22 specifically addresses the rights of refugee children and states that they have the right to protection and assistance, and Article 39 lays out that they have the right to treatment and recovery following torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, or armed conflict (Lyons, 2012). Helping the Ukrainian refugees should not be designated as only ‘international social work’ or ‘disaster social work’ but as social work!

There are three fundamental roles of importance in a social work response to refugee children (Kohli, 2007): First, social workers should be humanitarian helpers focusing on practical assistance and advocacy; next, we should be therapeutic witnesses to children emerging from war and trauma; and finally, we should be confederates who support the strength and resiliency of children. The recommendations by SW4P clearly laid out that social work actions should begin by allying with humanitarian helpers to address practical support and advocacy. For the second role, we need to address the delicate balance between a trauma-informed approach and anti-war and anti-oppressive approaches. Trauma-informed services are widely used specifically to prevent re-traumatizing and to build resilience for people who have been exposed to trauma and violence, and need to be widely applied to assist refugees to succeed in their resettlement goals (Miller et al., 2019). However, UNHCR Senior Mental Health officer Pieter Ventevogel (2017) states that in fact most refugees cope with adversity and treating millions of refugees as if they are suffering mental health (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder) would be impractical and if one issue could be prioritized it would be loss and grief. He continued,

I strongly believe that some of the most powerful mental health interventions are not medical, but are related to empowering people and strengthening support within refugee communities. We shouldn’t forget that refugee communities are to some extent artificial communities. They are brought there by chance, by accident. So they need support to recreate social connections.

While a trauma-informed approach is desirable, it does not actually address the impact and continued suffering from mass violence which would need to be approached specifically with relational and ongoing therapeutic attention (Herman, 2015). Rather, the intervention should include grieving their loss of loved ones, ruptured life trajectory, homes, and country rather than forcing them to move on for settlement or dismissing ‘what happened there’ as if their lives were ungrievable (Butler, 2006).

In their study of Syrian refugees in Alberta, Canada, Drolet and Moorthi (2018) note that broader systems can contribute to secondary trauma through structural violence, such as experiencing discrimination such as racism, sexism, and ableism. A survey of newly arrived refugees (Drolet and Moorthi, 2018) found that 67 percent felt supported; however, some reported hostility, anger, and exclusion. They noted that responding to stigma and discrimination was a significant challenge for this group, but discussion of solutions for this experience was not expanded. Amid inhumane war and displacement, perpetuating another level of violence through racism and xenoracism would be detrimental for refugees fleeing from Ukraine and future settlement periods. A professor at the University of Melbourne, Bina Fernandez (2022) reports that

African and Asian people were forcibly prevented from boarding trains and buses leaving Ukrainian cities, as priority was given to white Ukrainians. Those who finally reached the Polish border (some even on foot) found that again white Ukrainians were prioritised entry. Some African, Asian, and Middle-Eastern nationals were met by verbal and physical abuse on arrival.

Fernandez notes that this is not a new phenomenon occurring during the refugee crisis. Given the increasing authoritarian nationalism in Poland and most of Europe and given the ongoing power struggles between the US/NATO and Russia for a white supremacy world order, witnessing ‘this institutionalised racism and imperialism’ has been ongoing. She further notes,

Recognising the wider context of institutionalised racism would allow us to connect the current racist treatment of African and Asian migrants in the Ukraine crisis to deadly European border policies over the past decades. These policies have led to increasing numbers of migrants mostly from Africa and the Middle East, reported as missing in the Mediterranean since 2014.

As of 6 April 2022 the Missing Migrant Project (https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean) reported 23,801 people dead or missing in total. In 2015, when Alan’s body reached the Mediterranean shore, there were 274 children like Alan dead in the Mediterranean. In addition to war attacks on life and the endless challenges of being displaced, structural racism at the borders literally pushes people into the hands of human traffickers.

As social workers, we come across Syrian refugees at hospitals, schools, and other institutions providing human services in Canada. We should question how social work (re)produces racial discrimination and we should remember that we have a particular responsibility to challenge it (Yassine and Briskman, 2015). Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) immigrants in Ukraine are now racialized refugees and face racial and/or xenophobic global responses. Many Syrian children have witnessed extreme violence, may have lost their relatives, have been injured, and may have been at risk of becoming ill because of malnourishment and privation. Seventy-nine percent of Syrian families have had a death in their family, witnessed violence, and/or become victims themselves, and this experience of trauma may have future health consequences (www.cmascanada.ca). Ukrainian refugees could tragically be in similar situations. As one of the main service providers in mental health and community service settings, social workers are on the frontlines to serve refugees. It is critical that social workers are informed about the Ukraine crisis and actively engage in supporting Ukrainian refugees before we come across them in various help settings, so that we can accurately hear their sufferings, become honorable witnesses of their grieving process, and join the fight for humanity and social justice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Marjorie Johnstone

Eunjung Lee

Emel Seven Bozcam

Author biographies

Marjorie Johnstone is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University with research interests in social work history, mental health, and globalism.

Eunjung Lee is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto with research interests in social work praxis and theory, cultural competency, and globalization.

Emel Seven Bozcam is a PhD student in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfred Laurier University with research interests in humanitarian refugee responses, internationalism, and social work praxis.

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