Apostolos Andrikopoulos, University of Amsterdam

“Why do you want to marry a Nigerian?”, a visa officer at a European embassy in Nigeria asked Helen while her partner was interviewed in a nearby room. “I’m asking this more as a father than an officer,” the man added.

“Because I love him,” Helen answered.

Marriages with non-European nationals, such as that of Helen and her Nigerian partner, are often suspected of being “sham” and subjected to strict controls. For immigration authorities, a “sham marriage” or a “marriage of convenience” is one that’s contracted with the purpose of enabling the migrant spouse to obtain a visa or a residence permit.

The officer seemed to accept that Helen and her partner were in a relationship and planned to get married. But he was still doubting the motives of her Nigerian partner. “Do you see that?” he asked Helen, pointing with his finger to a building opposite the embassy. “Yes, I do,” she replied.

Well, a Nigerian man is capable of selling you this building today and tomorrow you realise that the building has never actually existed.

A few weeks later, Helen and her partner received the news that their visa request had been rejected. The reason given was there were doubts about whether the marriage motives of the Nigerian man were “genuine”.

This story was recounted to me by Helen while I was conducting research into the issue of the role marriages play in gaining entry to European countries. Over the past decades most have started investigating marriages involving foreign spouses. Restrictions and controls to marriage migration, which may result in keeping the spouses apart, are often justified as necessary measures to protect women from bad marriages. The reasons given is that they are “sham”, “forced” or “arranged”.

Such claims provide legitimacy to European countries to intervene in the intimate lives of couples. Immigration authorities deter all but “love-based” marriages. In this context, love becomes a tool for migration control and for protecting the position of married women (as seen by these authorities).

The differentiation between “sham” and “genuine” marriage is based on the assumption that motives of love and interest are separate from each other. In a recent article I argue that this dichotomy is simplistic and misleading. I question the idea that love is by default good for women, especially when love is understood as unrelated to interest.

The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I did over the course of a year in the Netherlands, Greece and Ghana on the marriages of West African migrants with European women. The fieldwork included interviews with couples, lawyers and immigration officers.

Sham versus genuine

I challenge a fundamental assumption in the debate on “sham” versus “genuine”, which is that love and interest are mutually exclusive. Evidence suggests they are not.

As my research shows, marriages between African and European nationals are motivated both by interest (papers, money) and feelings (love, care, sexual enjoyment). The entanglement of romantic feelings with material gains does not make these marriages different from the ones of non-migrant couples. On the contrary, I argue that they are very similar.

Think, for example, of couples who formalised their relationship for reasons such as tax purposes, inheritance and social security. Feminist and kinship scholars have also pointed out that marriage always involves exchanges of various resources and services between spouses – sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. These include care, financial security, love, sex and domestic work.

An additional factor is that norms of love differ for men and women. The expectation to demonstrate love for family through self-sacrifice is more common for women than for men.

The paradox

Immigration policies are designed on the assumption that love cannot co-exist with exchange. European countries justify deciding against cross-broder marriages on the grounds that they are using the ideal of love to protect women. But here lies the paradox: this ideal may deprive women of their bargaining power in marriage and their quest for recognition in a relationship.

For this reason, the dichotomies of love and interest and of “sham” versus “genuine” marriage are not only inaccurate and misleading. They are also potentially disempowering, especially for female spouses.

Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Amsterdam

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Caroline Bressey, UCL

The sound of the water flowing from the fountain that now stands towering in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall creates a calming softness in contrast to the cold, hard concrete floor on which I sit trying to take in the 13-metre-tall monument before me.

The sculpture is both calming and distressing: presenting painful histories of the black Atlantic slave trade in the “delightful family-friendly setting” of a public art museum. The characters of Venus, The Captain and Queen Vicky stand or sit around the monument’s plinth. A mother directs her young son’s gaze up to the water gently pouring down from above them. She does not point to the trunk of a tree planted on the side of the monument where these characters do not rest. It is not so pretty, not so easy to delight in. It is a tree without life: no branches, no leaves, only ghostly bodies hanging from an empty noose.

Painted on the Turbine Hall wall, the text for Kara Walker’s sculpture, Fons Americanus, calls visitors to “Gasp Plaintively, Sigh Mournfully and Gaze Knowingly” at her recasting of the Victoria Memorial which stands outside Buckingham Palace. This monument featured in my own undergraduate dissertation. In that, I explored representations of black British women’s history in London’s urban landscape by walking the city.

The only representations I found around the city placed imaginary women of “Africa” at the base of columns which celebrated Britain’s empire. I don’t think I particularly noticed then the absence of references to the slave trade. I focused on bringing to light the presence of the black Victorians who were nowhere to be found in the memorial fabric of the city in which I walked and this has remained the focus my research ever since.

Tate curator, Clara Kim, hopes that the work will stimulate a debate around the representation of difficult British histories in the urban landscape. It is a conversation that is sorely needed, but has been called for for some time.

In 1807, the Act for the Abolition of the British Trade in Slaves from any part of the coast or countries of Africa was enacted. As the bicentenary approached in 2007, discussions about how this bicentenary would and should be commemorated – rather than celebrated – heightened.

Memorial 2007 launched a campaign to memorialise not the white parliamentary abolitionists, but the Africans who were victims of and fought against the institutions of British slavery. The intention was for the sculpture, chosen by public competition, to be unveiled during the bicentenary year in 2007. Twelve years on, Walker’s intervention at Tate Modern is a stark reminder that no such memorial on a national scale has yet found a place in the capital.

Chaired by Oku Ekpenyon, Memorial 2007 has been campaigning since 2002 to raise funds to complete its mission, but that campaign is now nearly out of time. The group have secured planning permission for a space in the Rose Gardens in Hyde Park, but this expires in less than a month, on November 7, 2019.

Every prime minister since the group formed has been asked to support the memorial, but no funds have been forthcoming. Although Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, hosted an unveiling of a statuette of the memorial sculpture at City Hall, letters to Number 10 since he became prime minister have been met with silence. A petition to ask the government to fund the memorial before the deadline has been gaining momentum.

The state’s failure to acknowledge the pain and suffering of the victims of the British transatlantic slave trade through memorialisation is reflective of its failure to acknowledge the legacies of enslavement in contemporary Britain; its legacies of financial and social capital for those who benefited from it and the ongoing marginalisation of the descendants of those who were enslaved, as the recent Windrush Scandal painfully exposed. For Ekpenyon, the campaign to bring a memorial into being has been an exhausting 17 years of frustration, disappointment, anger and sadness.

Read more: Black history is still largely ignored, 70 years after Empire Windrush reached Britain

When I visited Tate’s Turbine Hall, visitors were walking around Walker’s fountain, craning their necks skyward to its peak, angling to get as much as possible of it in frame for a picture. I stood alone looking into the stricken face that appears from the sculptured folds of the Shell Grotto at the hall’s entrance. Here, the flowing water is a silent, steady stream of tears.

Caroline Bressey, Reader in Historical Geography, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Stephen Rocks, University of Oxford and Apostolos Tsiachristas, University of Oxford

In 2016 the then health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, declared child mental health services the “biggest single area of weakness” in the NHS. He might have added that it is also vastly underfunded. The mental health of children and young people accounts for less than 1% of all NHS spending.

That is despite the significant burden that mental health problems impose on individuals, their families and society; despite one in eight young people having a mental health disorder; despite rising rates of self-harm and the fact that suicide is the leading cause of death among young men; and despite problems being serious enough to prompt the UK government to introduce a minister for suicide prevention in 2018.

Effective treatments exist, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and family therapy, and the sooner treatment is started, the more effective it is likely to be. Yet most young people don’t get help.

Read more: New ways to treat depression in teenagers

In England, two in three young people with a mental health problem do not receive support from specialist services. There are long waits for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and thresholds for entering care are high.

There is a clear disparity between the needs of young people and the resources dedicated to their mental health. Indeed, CAMHS accounts for around 7% of the NHS mental health budget even though children under 18 account for 21% of the population.

Why child mental health loses out

England has a decentralised system for providing healthcare, which means local areas commission most of their own health services, such as emergency services, hospital care, rehabilitation and mental health. NHS England assigns a budget based on how much it estimates an area needs, but it is up to local organisations called “clinical commissioning groups” to decide how to spend it.

Clinical commissioning groups spend widely different amounts on CAMHS, even after differences in population are accounted for. Our latest research shows that differences in spending can be explained not only by variation in the needs of young people but also by spending decisions in other areas.

Simply put, there are trade-offs. The NHS, like many health systems across the world, is under pressure. To increase spending on one area (CAMHS, for example) commissioners must decrease spending in another. That might result in someone waiting longer for surgery or to be seen at A&E. These are difficult decisions.

But CAMHS has been called the “Cinderella of the Cinderella” services, with many convinced that it is consistently overlooked. We think there are several reasons why child mental health may lose out to physical health when commissioners take spending decisions.

Rule of rescue. Spending decisions may be biased towards the “rule of rescue”, which predicts that spending will go towards immediate, life-threatening cases and away from prevention or early intervention – such as resolving a mental health disorder at a young age.

Lack of data. NHS targets have traditionally focused on things like A&E waiting times. With little data and, until recently, no targets for CAMHS nationally, commissioners have had less of an incentive to invest in these services.

Stigma. A lower level of awareness or stigma around mental health may have contributed to lower prioritisation of CAMHS in the past, and today’s decisions are constrained by the previous pattern of spending.

New technologies. Patients, doctors, private companies and even researchers may all have reasons to want new technologies to be adopted in healthcare. The lobbying for and adoption of new technologies may favour innovations, such as surgical instruments and drugs, over treatments that are labour intensive, such as talking therapy.

Read more: Key to lifelong good mental health – learn resilience in childhood

More, please

Things are improving. NHS England has started to collect new data, introduced a target to increase the number of young people receiving help and allocated extra funding to help local CAMHS transform (we are also trying to understand how much of a difference the transformation of local services makes). But a target of 35% of people in need receiving support is alarmingly low and many young people are still waiting too long for help.

Meanwhile, austerity in the UK is known to have hit children and lone parents particularly hard. Many services previously available to young people, such as children’s centres, have been cut following substantial reductions in local government budgets. This is expected to result in more young people needing support from specialist services.

The chance to intervene early is fleeting. Doing so requires a sea change in funding for young people both from within the NHS and other budgets.

Stephen Rocks, Researcher, Health Economics, University of Oxford and Apostolos Tsiachristas, Senior Researcher, Health Economics, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Real Reason Jonathan Prevented Us From Rescuing Chibok girls —Ex-UK Prime Minister

A former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, says former President Goodluck Jonathan was “sleeping on the wheel” while terrorists were busy abducting schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State.

Cameron further stated that Jonathan prevented British forces from engaging in rescue efforts as he seemed to see the entire incident as cheap politics.

The former UK leader’s claim comes two years after the Observer newspaper reported that Nigeria shunned international offers to rescue the girls. While Nigeria welcomed an aid package and assistance from the US, the UK and France in looking for the girls, it viewed any action to be taken against kidnapping as a “national issue.”

In his recently published memoir, ‘For the Record’, Cameron, who was in office at the time of the abduction, said British troops traced the location of some of the victims and offered to help but Jonathan refused, The Cable reports.

Cameron wrote, “In early 2014 a group of its fighters entered the government secondary school in the village of Chibok, seizing 276 teenage girls. They were taken to camps deep in the forest. The Christians among them were forced to convert to Islam. Many were sold as slaves, entering the same endless violent nightmare the Yazidi women suffered.

“As ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaign spread across the world, we embedded a team of military and intelligence experts in Nigeria, and sent spy planes and tornadoes with thermal imaging to search for the missing girls. And, amazingly, from the skies above a forest three times the size of Wales, we managed to locate some of them.”

Cameron said he expected Jonathan to handle the Chibok issue better

“But Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan, seemed to be asleep at the wheel. When he eventually made a statement, it was to accuse the campaigners of politicising the tragedy. And absolutely crucially, when we offered to help rescue the girls we had located, he refused.”

Jonathan’s spokesman, Ikechukwu Eze, could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

However, the former President had said in an interview on BBC last year said that he could not be held responsible for the abduction of the Chibok girls.

Jonathan said rather, Boko Haram should be blamed for the abduction of the girls in 2014 because as a President he could not go to the battlefield to fight insurgents.

He said, “I cannot take responsibility for the abduction, I don’t control Boko Haram. They are criminals. But as a President, of course you know it is not the President that goes to the field. You have security and intelligence officers that do the work.

“Let me admit that yes, maybe they did their best but their best was not good enough for us to recover the girls. That I cannot say I am right or I am wrong. That does not mean I am trying to remove myself from any blame.

“I may not be blamed for the action but I could be blamed that my security intelligence system was not strong enough to rescue the girls. If I as a politician could tell the whole world that my political ambition for any office is not worth the blood of a single Nigerian, how would I be happy that girls have been kidnapped? I am not that kind of character.”

The former President also lamented the way the Chibok issue was politicised.

He wondered why a First Lady of the United States would take part in carrying a ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ placard