Two UK charities have teamed up to give swimming lessons to refugees in order to help them get over “trauma” that they may have experienced while making the journey to the UK.
Reclaim The Sea, which launched in 2022, helps refugees and asylum-seekers to learn how to swim, surf, and paddleboard in Plymouth. The group has partnered with Refugees Welcome North Somerset to train eight refugee women in swimming at Weston-super-Mare’s Marine Lake for four weeks.
Rebecca Wetten, program lead and swimming instructor, told the BBC that the program offers “refugees and asylum seekers a chance to find joy and safety in the sea,” adding that “for refugees and asylum seekers, learning to swim or overcoming water-based trauma can be truly life-changing.”
The charity says on its website that the sea is a “sad, dangerous place” for refugees and asylum seekers. “The sea itself does not discriminate between people based on their passports, or their backgrounds. However, when hostile borders are drawn in the middle of the sea by state authorities, the sea becomes weaponized,” they claim.
“It becomes a place of trauma for many, as they are forced to experience difficult and dangerous journeys to seek safety and refuge. Reclaim The Sea aims to share tools to enable people to reclaim the sea as a safe space when it has previously been one of trauma.”
Reclaim The Sea has previously posted their support for “anti-raid groups,” with such actions endorsed by the Anti-Raid Network including physically stopping police vans from arresting and detaining illegal migrants. The charity also told the BBC that the UK government must provide “safe and legal routes” for refugees in order to avoid “trauma.”
As previously reported by The Publica, left-wing activists slashed tires on coaches that were meant to move migrants from hotels in London to the Bibby Stockholm barge in May. Some of the migrants were set to be deported to Rwanda, although none of them were, as the scheme was stopped following Labour’s victory at the general election in July.
Just this month, a teenage Afghan refugee who was promoted as an “integration success story” by North Yorkshire Council and his local cricket club, was charged along with another Afghan migrant with the horrific gang rape of a woman on the streets of York.
While in April, a Congolese migrant who had his deportation stopped by sympathetic crew of the Air France flight meant to send him back home, pled guilty to the horrific sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl, said to have been perpetrated with a “high level of dangerousness.”
