Telling tales of torture: repositioning young adults' views of asylum seekers

This paper explores the changing attitudes of a group of young adults towards asylum seekers in the UK. Based on the experience of sixth form students attending a workshop hosted by a former refugee from Pinochet's Chile, it argues for the importance of personal stories and their wider contexts and suggests that each is necessary to enable understanding of the other. The paper addresses the ways in which these students were enabled to confront and contest the populist anti‐asylum discourse prevalent in the UK. The deconstruction of socially constructed barriers that had filtered their perceptions of communities beyond their own immediate environment was central to their shift from initial hostility through sympathy to greater understanding. This is analyzed in terms of risk. The paper concludes by acknowledging the power of the dominant discourse on asylum seekers and by suggesting that time must be made for tolerance.