Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The contribution of social work research to promote migration and asylum policies in Europe
- 2 Participatory art in social work: from humanitarianism to humanisation of people on the move
- 3 Grasping at straws: social work in reception and identification centres in Greece
- 4 Migrant girls’ experiences of integration and social care in Sweden
- 5 “Come to my house!”: Homing practices of children in Swiss asylum camps
- 6 Transnational dynamics of family reunification: reassembling social work with refugees in Belgium
- 7 Open or closed doors? Accessibility of Italian social work organisations towards ethnic minorities
- 8 Refugee children and families in the Republic of Ireland: the response of social work
- 9 Sense of place, migrant integration and social work
- 10 “If not now, when?”: Reclaiming activism into social work education – the case of an intercultural student-academic project with refugees in the UK and Greece
- 11 EU border migration policy and unaccompanied refugee minors in Greece: the example of Lesvos and Samos hotspots
- Epilogue: Time to listen, time to learn, time to challenge … because there is hope
- Index
5 - “Come to my house!”: Homing practices of children in Swiss asylum camps
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The contribution of social work research to promote migration and asylum policies in Europe
- 2 Participatory art in social work: from humanitarianism to humanisation of people on the move
- 3 Grasping at straws: social work in reception and identification centres in Greece
- 4 Migrant girls’ experiences of integration and social care in Sweden
- 5 “Come to my house!”: Homing practices of children in Swiss asylum camps
- 6 Transnational dynamics of family reunification: reassembling social work with refugees in Belgium
- 7 Open or closed doors? Accessibility of Italian social work organisations towards ethnic minorities
- 8 Refugee children and families in the Republic of Ireland: the response of social work
- 9 Sense of place, migrant integration and social work
- 10 “If not now, when?”: Reclaiming activism into social work education – the case of an intercultural student-academic project with refugees in the UK and Greece
- 11 EU border migration policy and unaccompanied refugee minors in Greece: the example of Lesvos and Samos hotspots
- Epilogue: Time to listen, time to learn, time to challenge … because there is hope
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In her essay ‘We Refugees’, Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘We have lost our home which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world’ (2007 (1943): 264). What does ‘home’ mean for children and their parent(s) who live for months and years in transitional situations and the improvised community of a camp? Studies discussing camp life describe the structural conditions as gruelling for residents and staff. Jaji (2012) calls refugee camps ‘a form of human warehousing’ (p. 227). UNICEF (2017) describes growing up in German camps as ‘childhood in waiting’. A study by World Vision and the Hoffnungsträger Foundation (2016) showed that because of unregulated structures, cramped living conditions and restrictions of privacy, camps were ‘unsuitable places for children to stay’ (p. 49). In Switzerland, infants, toddlers, children and young adults, together with their parent(s) or adult siblings, live from several months to several years in communal accommodations/ camps before they may rent apartments. Waiting and uncertainty are the main structural and emotional elements of everyday life for thousands of people in Swiss cantonal camps.
In recent years, studies in the field of forced migration/refugee studies have demonstrated a growing interest in documenting the living conditions in camps (Fozdar and Hartley, 2013; Dilger and Dohrn, 2016; Hartmann, 2017; Fichtner and Trần, 2020). Ethnographical studies of refugee camps in the global South offer solid comparative evidence (see for example Inhetveen, 2010; Lutz, 2017). While certainly not all, some of the results are transferable to camp life in Europe. A commonality between these studies is that for refugees housed in camps, stagnation prevails for an indefinite period of time and provisional accommodation settings become permanent:
Refugee camps are places where one can live, but they are not a real home. The arrival is limited in its perspectives; the situation remains tense and uncertain, even after many years. Camps are planned only temporarily, for a certain period of crises and conflicts. If these persist, camps become vulnerable places of uncertainty. (Lutz, 2017: 376)
Werdermann (2016) demonstrated that German camp accommodation was a central element of the deterrence policy of the 1980s (p. 89f). Berthold (2014) examined camps as a ‘sanctioning device’, when, for example, families, because they do not want to cooperate in their deportation, live for many years in precarious circumstances.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Migration and Social WorkApproaches, Visions and Challenges, pp. 80 - 94Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2023