The need for contextualised trauma-informed perinatal mental health care in the UK for asylum-seeking and refugee women survivors of war and conflict-related gender-based violence to promote WPS values

We address the need for the United Kingdom’s Parliament to invest and develop contextualised trauma informed perinatal care for refugee women survivors of war.

We ground our submission in our existing published research, which is grounded in a critical gap in UK data and healthcare responses. There is a lack of distinction between ethnicity and immigration status in maternal health data. Asylum-seeking and refugee women survivors of war, and associated forms of conflict-related gender-based violence along with their psychological impact and narratives of war trauma, we raise this as a clear example of “epistemic injustice” within the UK’s WPS response. The data reveals systemic gaps in data collection, stemming from an erasure of the specific ways that women are harmed in war and experience war.

Furthermore, the lack of granularity perpetuates inadequate healthcare responses in perinatal mental health care. The ways that women suffer in war are not understood by healthcare professionals who do not receive training on women in war and the health impacts. Subsequently, by overlooking the spaces that women occupy in war, the trauma of women survivors of war is continued and bracketed from recovery pathways.

In parallel, the perinatal period can offer opportunities for transformation and healing for women survivors of war through the fulfilling of WPS values, such as promoting women’s safety, dignity, and wellbeing.

We argue that we need to improve transparency and co-creation of evidence of asylum seeking and refugee women who intersect with maternal health needs as a consequence of war and conflict-related gender-based violence. Therefore, we conclude with raising the ethical obligation and need the need for trauma informed responses for women of war in maternal health to fulfil the WPS values - how can there be fulfilment if there is inadequate healing? To achieve this, we emphasise the need to fulfil WPS values by recognising and addressing the intersection of gender, violence, and health, or more specifically maternal health and transcultural psychiatry, and to advocate for a UK policy change that would include disaggregated data collection in maternal health especially because of the vulnerability of BAME women in the UK in maternal mortality data, and the development of trauma-informed care guidelines for asylum-seeking and refugee women. Without healing there is no justice and the UK parliament through the WPS agenda has an opportunity to respond to the epistemic injustice currently inherent in refugee women’s maternal and mental healthcare.