We Keep Each Other Safe
Introduction
The threat of racist violence is not new. But in recent years it has intensified.
Far-right movements have moved from the margins to the mainstream. Hostile rhetoric from politicians has emboldened mobs on our streets. In summer 2024, racist riots erupted across the UK. In June 2026, families were violently driven from their homes in Belfast. [Read our statement on the Belfast pogrom]
Migrants, including refugees and people seeking asylum, are navigating a climate in which harm has become part of everyday life. And official responses have, time and again, failed to protect the communities most at risk. So, we have been working directly with communities.
About the project
This project was co-developed by Migrants’ Rights Network, Anaka Collective and the Participation and Practice of Rights, with the support of the UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) VISION consortium. Together, we have created a research-led workbook alongside migrants and migrant-led organisations, to identify the safety strategies communities are already using to protect one another.
A huge thank you to everyone who took part in the workshops and shared your knowledge, to the teams at Anaka and Participation and the Practice of Rights, Son and Nishma Jethwa for co-designing and facilitating the workshops and shaping the direction of this project, and to Andri and the UK Prevention Research Partnership VISION consortium and the Violence and Society Centre at City St George’s University of London for making this project happen. Thank you also to all the organisers and activists creating a world where safety isn’t determined by immigration status.
We also recognise that the immigration system [the Hostile Office] is fundamentally racist and designed to keep people unsafe. As we work toward its abolition, we want to name its daily harms and uplift the resistance and care already alive in our communities.
Because communities have always found ways to resist.
You are not alone in what you are experiencing; We Keep Each Other Safe.
Launch Video
To launch this research, we collaborated with award-winning filmmaker Tim Kelly and Hasan Kilani, a Palestinian-Jordanian writer, queer feminist activist, and specialist in Gender Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.
Hasan’s practice sits at the intersection of justice, identity, and storytelling, shaped by years of organising across the MENA region and the UK.
We created a short video to reach migrant communities – in English, with an Arabic video launching soon.
We hope to create videos in more languages, to reach more communities.
The Workbook: We Keep Each Other Safe
This workbook is a resource for migrants in the UK, with collective knowledge from migrant communities on their experiences of far right violence.
Inside, you’ll find:
> real scenarios on how people have navigated far right violence
> guides and tips for navigating moments of violence
> messages of solidarity
> supporting practices for mental and physical health,
> guidance on how to build up support and solidarity structures
> directories on how to get support and more information
The We Keep Each Other Safe workbook is one small offering toward our collective path to liberation.
By creating this workbook, we hope to highlight how many of us keep ourselves and our communities safe and well and explore further possibilities for the migrant justice movement together.
For it to be a tool that communities can use, adapt, and pass on.
📥 We Keep Each Other Safe workbook
Share this resource, help make it accessible
We want this workbook to reach as many migrants living in the UK as possible, and we need your help.
1. 🗣️ Help us translate
The workbook has been translated into Arabic and Dari.
We are also coordinating a second round of community translations across July, in collaboration with common languages. If your preferred language is missing, and if you can help us translate, please fill in the form below.
2.🤝 Pass this resource along
Please forward this to your friends, family, neighbours, group chats and community networks. Our strength comes from solidarity.
Remind someone that they are not alone in what they are experiencing; We Keep Each Other Safe.
Supporting Organisations
The Migrants’ Rights Network (MRN) is a UK-based campaigning charity that stands in solidarity with all migrants in their fights for rights and justice. We co-curate campaigns using anti-oppression practices to create transformational change, extending beyond the individual impact on migrants’ lives, to tackle oppression at its source.
MRN strives to create a situation in the UK in which:
- People are free to move because migration is, and has always been, an integral part of the human experience.
- Everyone, including all migrants, live in a society which is free from all forms of oppression and discrimination.
- Nobody’s access to safety, rights and security should be determined by their immigration status.
The Violence, Health, and Society (VISION) consortium is funded by the UK Prevention Research Partnership. We are a collaboration of epidemiologists, economists, data scientists, criminologists, evaluation experts, and clinicians working in collaboration with service providers, policy makers and people with lived experience of violence.
Our aim is to drive reductions in all kinds of violence and the associated health inequalities by better measurement, data linkage and new findings about the causes and impact of violence. Our research findings and policy recommendations are framed through a whole systems approach that includes looking at the wider context and structural factors. In the first three years of the consortium, we produced a suite of evidence reviews, violence research guidance and primary research from health and crime surveys, health service, police and domestic and sexual violence specialist services data.
The Violence and Society Centre is interdisciplinary and international. It engages across the Social Sciences, including Sociology and Politics and Law and Health. Violence wrecks lives and causes immense suffering and death. Violence is not inevitable, but shaped by society. The Centre aims to produce the evidence to build the theory needed to inform policy, politics and practice to move towards zero violence.
Anaka Collective is a community of women and their families who use their collective skills to educate, support, advocate for, and celebrate each other. We are led predominantly by people with living experience of the UK’s hostile immigration system and we aim to foster community and build collective power in the face of oppression and imposed isolation.
Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR) is a small human rights NGO with a big vision: to turn international human rights standards into grassroots tools for economic, social and environmental change.