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In this chapter, we wish to advance the knowledge of the workings of Britain’s hostile border regime by unpacking the financial dynamics involved. To do so, we will primarily focus on one aspect: the privatisation and expansion of Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs). We argue that, not only these spaces by their very nature coercive and violent, but they also benefit from migrant misery as a business model. Therefore, the attention on outsourcing of migration control helps us understand the profits attached to the forced confinement of racialised and criminalised bodies, profits that are generated through human suffering, while simultaneously diminishing accountability and unmediated (often hidden) state-corporate violence. Moreover, once we scratch the surface of bordered profiteering we find that a double standard exists: whilst successive governments decry migrant labour in the UK, the same governments are more than willing to engage with multi-national corporations and thus become answerable to foreign capitalist interests elsewhere.

Rape and sexual violence have long been acknowledged in feminist literature as a silenced social problem which requires long term strategies for prevention, prosecution and support. Social sciences more generally, however, have had a more ambivalent relationship with the theoretical and conceptual development of research in this area. Outside of feminist sociology and criminology there has been little engagement, yet sexual violence remains a prevalent social problem in all regions of the globe. The latter half of the twentieth century saw quick and significant changes to the structures of states as the result of localised and international conflicts, many of which continue or are experiencing post-conflict transformation that has resulted in global growths in refugee populations as a result of forced migration. Alongside this has been an increasing globalisation of rights based approaches related to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the development of United Nations Resolutions and the establishment of the International Criminal Courts. Focussing on Merseyside as a case study, a main area of dispersal in the UK, this thesis critically examines domestic responses to women's asylum applications and support for women survivors of conflict related sexual violence. Using qualitative activist methodologies from a feminist standpoint perspective, it explores support available through interviews with local governmental and non-governmental organisations working within sexual violence support, asylum, and/or women's organisations before applying a structural analysis of long term impacts of sexual violence through an oral history with Hawwi, an Ethiopian rape survivor and asylum seeker in . . Merseyside. It concludes that, despite international developments, women's rights continue to lie marginalised in these arenas within and outside of academia. As such, important gaps in response exist with regard to sexual violence in conflict, but also in Merseyside. It concludes that, like rights based developments, considerations for applications continue to overlook the gendered experience of conflict, particularly with regard to the widespread perpetration of sexual violence. As such, limited resources for support exist for women survivors in Merseyside which can have detrimental effects on women's emotional, psychological and physical health as well as having wider social impacts beyond the individual.

For centuries, Afghan men have been driven from home by poverty, and more recently by various forms of persecution. Khosravi (2018) has described the time stolen from migrants, but in this paper we describe the time stolen from those they leave behind. For centuries, Afghan women have waited for fiances, husbands, fathers and sons to return. In recent decades, they have waited to be sent for, to join male family members in exile, to begin a new life abroad. As described in Afghan poetry, and in recent interviews with Afghan families, during this period of waiting, life is suspended as brides, mothers and daughters focus hopes and plans on an uncertain, unknown future. However, whereas in earlier times this period of waiting was largely dependent on the beloved’s capacity to earn money, it is now systematically governed and prolonged by alien structures focused on excluding their menfolk and their families. For a significant minority of these ‘waiters’, these years are wasted when it ends in deportation and disappointment. This paper draws on research conducted in 2016–2018 to explore the costs in terms of time to those left behind.