The research team scoured the Scopus database, one of the largest curated indexes of peer-reviewed literature, for publications on refugee and forced displacement issues in Southeast Asia published between 1975 and 2025. Using a structured search strategy paired with an explicit screening protocol against pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the authors filtered out records that were only peripherally related to the topic. The final corpus comprised 1,110 publications, a dataset spanning half a century of scholarship on asylum seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless populations. The analysis was conducted using a combination of bibliometric software: BiblioMagika for data processing, OpenRefine for cleaning and standardising records, and VOSviewer for constructing and visualising co-occurrence networks of author keywords.

Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative science-mapping technique that treats publications, citations, and keywords as data points rather than reading their content in depth. Performance indicators, such as annual publication counts, citation totals, and the productivity of individual authors and countries, describe the volume and impact of a field. Co-occurrence mapping, by contrast, reveals its conceptual anatomy: when two keywords appear together in the same article more often than chance would predict, they are drawn closer together in a network diagram, and dense clusters of connected terms expose the thematic pillars around which a discipline organises itself. This dual approach allowed the researchers to chart both the growth trajectory of Southeast Asian refugee scholarship and the intellectual architecture underpinning it.

The headline finding concerns timing. Publication output remained modest for decades but rose markedly from the 2010s onward, a surge that coincides with the intensifying international visibility of the Rohingya crisis after 2012, when sectarian violence in Rakhine State triggered renewed displacement and drew sustained global media attention. The authors are careful about what this correlation means. Because their data are descriptive, they interpret the association as suggestive rather than causal; the analysis cannot demonstrate that the Rohingya emergency itself drove the increase in publications, only that the two trends unfolded in parallel. Even so, the pattern is striking: a humanitarian catastrophe that unfolded largely within the region appears to have been accompanied by an expansion of the academic literature documenting and analysing displacement.

Equally revealing is what the performance indicators show about who produces this knowledge. Research output is concentrated among a limited group of author affiliations and contributing countries, indicating uneven participation in the indexed literature. This concentration matters for reasons that go beyond bibliometric curiosity. Scholarship on displacement is often produced by institutions far from the displacement itself, and the new study’s evidence of a narrow base of productive affiliations raises familiar questions about whose perspectives shape the research agenda, who has access to publication channels, and how the priorities of international journals interact with the concerns of local communities, host governments, and displaced people themselves.

The thematic mapping is where the study delivers its richest technical contribution. Aggregate author-keyword co-occurrence analysis identified nine coexisting thematic areas. The first cluster concerns refugee health and trauma, a lineage that stretches back to some of the earliest and most highly cited works in the corpus, including studies of trauma and survival among Burmese political dissidents in Thailand published in the mid-1990s and research on the functional health of Cambodians living in border camps. A second cluster addresses Rohingya statelessness and rights, while a third examines legal precarity and access to health services, reflecting the peculiar limbo in which most refugees in Southeast Asia live, since many states in the region are not parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol.

The remaining clusters extend the map across the full breadth of the displacement experience. One area covers asylum governance in the maritime corridor, evoking the irregular boat movements through the Andaman Sea and the policy responses they provoke. Another addresses camp-based displacement and identity, drawing on decades of research along the Thailand-Myanmar border. A sixth cluster concerns internal displacement, conflict, and disasters, encompassing both war-driven displacement and the upheaval caused by events such as the Aceh tsunami. Two further areas focus on women, children, and reproductive health, including studies of menstrual hygiene management challenges facing displaced girls and women, and on the international protection architecture itself, including legal scholarship on how politics shaped the outcome of the 1967 Protocol. The ninth cluster examines protracted displacement and education, including barriers to higher education faced by Burmese refugees in Thailand.

Together, these clusters suggest clear priorities for future research. The authors argue that the patterns point toward comparative studies that span multiple countries and displacement contexts, longitudinal designs that track displaced populations and policy changes over time, and greater methodological diversity across the field. They are equally candid about the limits of their own analysis: the keyword co-occurrence data do not establish how themes changed over time, and studies that fall below the keyword occurrence threshold are invisible to the network. The reliance on a single database, Scopus, also means that grey literature, non-English publications, and work in regional journals not indexed by Scopus remain outside the picture, a constraint the authors acknowledge given licensing restrictions that prevent public sharing of the raw bibliographic records.

The timing of this mapping exercise could hardly be more consequential. UNHCR’s Global Trends reporting continues to document record levels of forced displacement worldwide, and Southeast Asia remains both a source and a destination region for people fleeing persecution, conflict, and disaster. Recent legal scholarship, cited in the study, analyses Thailand’s national screening mechanism as a case of partial acculturation to international refugee law, illustrating how host states in the region are incrementally, and unevenly, building domestic structures for managing asylum. A consolidated evidence base of the kind this study provides gives policymakers, humanitarian agencies, and researchers a shared map of what is known, and just as importantly, of where the gaps lie.

What makes the study notable within bibliometrics itself is its methodological transparency. The authors describe a structured search strategy, an explicit screening protocol, and a documented pipeline through BiblioMagika, OpenRefine, and VOSviewer, with derived datasets available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. No custom code was developed, and the study involved no human participants, requiring no ethical approval. By systematically mapping the knowledge structure of refugee and forced displacement scholarship in Southeast Asia, the team has converted five decades of scattered publications into an organised intellectual geography, one that future studies of regional migration governance and protection regimes can navigate, interrogate, and extend as the forces that displace people across the region continue to evolve.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia from 1975 to 2025

Article Title: Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions

Article References: Muis, A. M. R. A., Hajimin, M. N. H. H., & Paulus, A. A. (2026). Refugee and forced displacement research in Southeast Asia (1975–2025): a bibliometric analysis of trends and future directions. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 542. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01855-1

Keywords: refugee studies, forced displacement, Southeast Asia, bibliometric analysis, Rohingya, statelessness, internal displacement, asylum governance, refugee health, VOSviewer, Scopus, migration governance

The study, published in PLOS Medicine by a research team led by Kanna Hayashi of Simon Fraser University and colleagues including Thomas Kerr, drew on two harmonized prospective cohort studies of people who use drugs in Vancouver. Participants were followed through semi-annual interviews between December 1, 2021 and May 31, 2025, a window that captured a period of intense municipal enforcement activity in the city. The researchers focused on a specific and measurable question: among people who were homeless at a given study visit, did those who reported that municipal authorities had confiscated their belongings become less likely to report that they were no longer homeless six months later?

The analytical approach was deliberately rigorous. Because people who experience sweeps differ systematically from those who do not—in drug use patterns, health status, and exposure to other social and structural risks—the researchers used proportional hazard marginal structural modeling, a statistical framework designed to handle time-varying confounders that are themselves affected by prior exposure. This method allowed the team to adjust for a wide range of shifting factors, including demographic characteristics, evolving drug use patterns, health conditions, and other social and structural exposures, thereby isolating the association between enforcement actions and housing transitions more credibly than a naive comparison would permit.

The numbers themselves tell a striking story. Among 235 participants who were unhoused at baseline, 59, or 25.1 percent, reported that authorities had confiscated their belongings. Over the course of follow-up, 128 participants, or 54.5 percent, stopped reporting homelessness, corresponding to an incidence rate of 55.6 cases per 100 person-years, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 46.4 to 66.1. In other words, in this cohort, roughly half of unhoused people who use drugs did manage to exit homelessness within the observation period—making the divergence between those who experienced sweeps and those who did not all the more consequential.

When the statistical models were applied, the association was unambiguous. Experiencing confiscation of belongings was negatively associated with transitioning out of homelessness, with an adjusted hazard ratio of 0.35 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.13 to 0.94, a result that reached statistical significance at p equals 0.036. In practical terms, people whose possessions were seized by municipal authorities were about two-thirds less likely to stop being homeless during follow-up than comparable people who did not report such confiscation, after accounting for the full battery of time-varying confounders.

The researchers also conducted a secondary analysis that broadened the exposure beyond confiscation. Between June 1, 2023 and May 31, 2025, they examined municipal government-enforced forced displacement, which may or may not have involved the seizure of belongings. Among 154 participants in this analysis, 50, or 32.5 percent, reported forced displacement at baseline, and 62, or 40.3 percent, stopped reporting homelessness during follow-up. The association here was even stronger: forced displacement carried an adjusted hazard ratio of 0.07, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.02 to 0.20 and a p value below 0.001. People who were forcibly displaced were, in this model, more than ninety percent less likely to exit homelessness during the follow-up period than those who were not.

The mechanism behind such a powerful association is not difficult to reconstruct, and the study’s authors point to the ways in which sweeps can undermine the fragile pathways that lead from the street to housing. Identification documents, medications, contact information for housing workers, shelter referrals, and the basic equipment of daily survival are all routinely lost when belongings are confiscated. Each lost item can stall a housing application, sever a connection to a case manager, or force a person back into survival mode that consumes the time and energy needed to navigate bureaucratic systems. Displacement also disrupts the geographic stability that outreach workers rely on to find and support clients, meaning that the very services designed to end homelessness may lose contact with the people they are meant to help.

The findings arrive amid a broader North American trend in which encampment clearings have intensified, often accompanied by legal battles over the rights of unhoused people and by public debate over whether enforcement or services should dominate municipal responses. Prior research has already documented a range of health-related harms associated with sweeps, including increased overdose risk, loss of harm reduction supplies, and deterioration in physical and mental health. What this study adds is a direct estimate of the impact on the central outcome that housing policy ostensibly pursues: whether people actually stop being homeless. The answer, in this Vancouver cohort, is that enforcement appears to push that outcome further away.

The authors are careful to acknowledge the limitations inherent in observational research. The study design cannot establish causation with the certainty of a randomized trial, and the researchers note that the rates of transitioning from homelessness may have been overestimated in their sample. Residual confounding remains possible despite the sophistication of the marginal structural models, and the cohort’s focus on people who use drugs means the findings may not generalize to all unhoused populations. Still, the consistency and magnitude of the associations, particularly for forced displacement, are difficult to dismiss as statistical noise, and the prospective design with repeated interviews substantially strengthens the evidence relative to cross-sectional studies.

The policy implications are pointed. The authors conclude that the confiscation of personal belongings and forced displacement might undermine pathways to housing, and they call for approaches that prioritize access to dignified and affordable housing rather than practices that perpetuate homelessness. They also flag an important direction for future research: assessing the quality of the housing that unhoused people are eventually placed in, and examining how that quality relates to returns to homelessness. As cities continue to grapple with visible encampments and mounting political pressure, this study offers a quantitative warning that the broom may be a more powerful obstacle to housing than the tent itself.

Subject of Research: The relationship between municipal encampment sweeps and persistent homelessness among unhoused people who use drugs in Vancouver

Article Title: Encampment sweeps and persistent homelessness among unhoused people who use drugs in Vancouver, Canada: A prospective cohort study

Article References: Hayashi, K., Sayre, E. C., McDermid, J., Marsh, S., Shane, C., Milloy, M.-J. S., P.O.W.E.R., & Kerr, T. (2026). Encampment sweeps and persistent homelessness among unhoused people who use drugs in Vancouver, Canada: A prospective cohort study. PLOS Medicine, 23(9), e1005033. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1005033

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1005033

Keywords: homelessness, encampment sweeps, forced displacement, housing policy, Vancouver, people who use drugs, prospective cohort study, marginal structural modeling, public health, PLOS Medicine, harm reduction, social determinants of health

The scale of the problem is difficult to overstate. Conflict and instability across the MENA region have produced enormous numbers of refugees seeking protection in adjacent nations, often in countries that are themselves under economic and infrastructural strain. Unlike refugees resettled in high-income Western countries, those who remain within the region frequently encounter compounding adversities: social isolation, limited access to basic amenities such as clean water, shelter, and healthcare, and exposure to sexual and gender-based violence. Each of these stressors can significantly impede access to protection and psychosocial relief, creating a cascade in which the conditions that drive psychological distress also block the pathways to recovery. The review emphasizes that trauma, separation from family members, and loss of loved ones, homeland, and livelihood affect a large proportion of displaced people, and that these experiences interact with ongoing hardship in ways that Western clinical models were never designed to capture.

Trauma-informed care, the central concept of the framework, rests on a simple but transformative premise: services should be organized around an understanding of how trauma shapes behavior, trust, memory, and the body’s stress physiology. Rather than asking what is wrong with a person, trauma-informed systems ask what has happened to them. In practice, this means avoiding re-traumatization during intake and treatment, giving survivors genuine choice and control over their care, building safety and predictability into every interaction, and recognizing that symptoms such as hypervigilance, avoidance, sleep disruption, and emotional numbing are adaptive responses to extreme danger rather than signs of weakness or pathology. For refugees who have fled war, bombardment, or persecution, a clinical encounter that ignores this reality can itself become a source of harm, triggering the same threat responses the person has been struggling to escape.

What distinguishes the new framework is its insistence that trauma-informed principles cannot be transplanted wholesale from Western contexts into the MENA region. The authors argue that care must also be culturally responsive, meaning that it accounts for the values, family structures, religious beliefs, idioms of distress, and help-seeking patterns of the populations it serves. In many MENA communities, psychological suffering is expressed through somatic complaints, framed in spiritual or religious terms, or managed within extended family networks long before, or instead of, any contact with formal mental health services. Stigma surrounding mental illness can be intense, and the very concept of psychotherapy may be unfamiliar or mistrusted. A service model that ignores these realities will fail not because its clinical techniques are wrong, but because it never earns the trust required for people to walk through the door.

The review also highlights a structural blind spot in the research literature itself. While a plethora of past work has addressed refugees in non-Western contexts, comparatively fewer studies have focused on the mental health and psychosocial needs of refugees settled within the MENA region, even though the majority of the world’s displaced people from the region remain there rather than resettling elsewhere. This imbalance matters scientifically as well as practically. Most diagnostic instruments, prevalence estimates, and treatment protocols in trauma psychology were developed and validated in Western populations, and their assumptions about individual autonomy, disclosure, and the therapeutic relationship may not transfer cleanly. The authors position their framework as a corrective: a conceptual foundation built from the synthesis and interpretation of existing literature, designed to guide both future research and frontline practice in the settings where the need is greatest.

Technically, the framework operates at the intersection of several strands of psychological science. Trauma psychology contributes an understanding of post-traumatic stress, complex trauma, and the neurobiological consequences of chronic threat, including dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the heightened vigilance that shapes attention, learning, and social behavior. Migration and health research contributes the recognition that displacement is not a single event but a prolonged process, with distinct stressors at pre-departure, flight, transit, and settlement stages, each capable of compounding the last. Cultural psychiatry contributes the insight that idioms of distress, explanatory models of illness, and culturally sanctioned coping practices, including religious and communal rituals, can either support or undermine formal treatment depending on whether providers engage with them respectfully. The framework weaves these strands into guidance that is explicitly evidence-informed and culturally grounded rather than imported from any single tradition.

The practical implications reach well beyond the clinic. The authors write that the outcome of their work equips mental health providers and policymakers with strategies to address the psychological and psychosocial needs arising from forced displacement and migration in the region. That includes training frontline workers, many of whom are paraprofessionals or community members rather than licensed clinicians, to recognize signs of traumatic stress and to respond without judgment. It includes designing services that are accessible within camps and host communities, that respect gender norms while still protecting survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, and that coordinate with education, housing, and legal protection systems, since psychosocial stability depends on more than therapy alone. It also includes building family-centered and community-based interventions, reflecting the collectivist orientation of many affected communities, in which an individual’s wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of the household and the social group.

The timing of the framework is significant. Displacement across the MENA region remains one of the defining humanitarian challenges of the era, and host countries have absorbed populations at a scale that strains even the most committed health systems. Mental health is often the last component of the humanitarian response to receive funding, yet untreated trauma carries long-term costs: impaired parenting, disrupted schooling, reduced economic participation, and, in some cases, the transmission of stress across generations. By framing trauma-informed care as a system-level requirement rather than a specialist luxury, the review makes an economic as well as an ethical argument. Early, culturally attuned psychosocial support, the logic runs, is far less costly than the downstream consequences of its absence.

It is worth noting the nature of the evidence behind the framework. The article is explicitly a theoretical and conceptual paper, based on the synthesis and interpretation of existing literature, and it did not involve human participants, human data, or intervention trials. That means the roadmap it offers is a starting point rather than a finished product: its principles will need to be tested, adapted, and refined through empirical studies conducted in the region, ideally in partnership with refugee communities themselves. The authors received no external financial support for the work, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons license, making it freely available to practitioners, students, and policymakers throughout the region and beyond.

Even so, the contribution fills a conspicuous gap. By naming the specific adversities faced by refugees within the MENA region, by insisting that trauma-informed and culturally responsive care are inseparable goals, and by translating both into a framework that providers and policymakers can act on, the review shifts the conversation from whether refugee mental health matters to how it can realistically be served. For the millions of displaced people navigating life in the countries next door to the conflicts they fled, that shift, from being mainly ignored to being properly attended to, is not an academic nicety. It is the difference between services that see them and services that look past them, and it may shape the psychological recovery of an entire generation.

Subject of Research: Trauma-informed and culturally responsive mental health care for refugees in the Middle East and North Africa

Article Title: Trauma informed and culturally responsive practices for refugee care and support in the Middle East and North Africa

Article References: Abo Hamza, E. G., Al-Krenawi, A., Elbedour, S., Hamid, A. A. R. M., Al-Leheabi, S., & Moustafa, A. (2026). Trauma informed and culturally responsive practices for refugee care and support in the Middle East and North Africa. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00828-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00828-y

Keywords: refugees, mental health, trauma-informed care, MENA region, forced displacement, cultural responsiveness, psychosocial support, post-traumatic stress, migration and health, humanitarian response, Trauma, informed

Türkiye hosts millions of forcibly displaced people, which makes social integration a national priority rather than an abstract policy goal. Schools occupy a pivotal position in this process, because they are the primary arenas where young people from different origins encounter one another daily and where the cognitive seeds of either social cohesion or intergroup conflict are sown. Despite this, comparatively few studies have directly compared how Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students conceptualize the term refugee within the same educational settings. The research team, Orhan Ünal and Murat Bayram Yilar of Ondokuz Mayıs University and Yıldıray Karadağ of Süleyman Demirel University, designed their investigation precisely to fill this gap by examining the cognitive structures of children enrolled in schools with high enrolment of forcibly displaced students.

Methodologically, the study employed a multi-stage descriptive design. The Word Association Test asks participants to produce the words that a given stimulus concept evokes, and it is prized by researchers because it bypasses deliberative self-presentation and surfaces underlying perceptions and perspectives. In this study, the technique was applied to students in the 10-to-15 age bracket, a developmental window during which social attitudes are actively consolidating. The researchers then subjected the resulting word pools to descriptive analysis, determining frequency distributions and statistical cut-off points for the associated words, and to thematic analysis, which organized the semantic content of those words into coherent conceptual categories. A comparative layer of analysis then identified the similarities and differences in conceptual structures across the three participant groups, while correspondence analysis tested whether the thematic profiles of the groups differed in statistically significant ways.

The results show that for Turkish students, the themes of Security and Threat, Country and Geography, and Negative Perception, Blaming, and Othering carried substantial weight in their perceptions of refugees. In other words, the concept activated associations with borders, belonging, and perceived risk, together with attributions of fault and processes of social exclusion. These associations are characteristic of a majority group’s perspective, in which the displaced population is construed primarily as an external collective whose presence requires explanation, management, or judgment. The prominence of threat-related content in children’s mental maps is particularly noteworthy, because such cognitive structures, once entrenched, are known to predict intergroup anxiety and support for exclusionary social policies in adulthood.

Yet the Turkish students’ cognitive maps were not monolithically negative. The analysis also surfaced themes of Positive Perspective and Attributes, together with Sadness and Compassion, revealing a genuine undercurrent of empathy and solidarity among host-community children. This duality is analytically important: it suggests that the concept of refugee in these students’ minds is contested ground, where exclusionary framings coexist with humanitarian ones. For educators and policymakers, the coexistence of both clusters within the same cognitive structures represents an opportunity, because interventions can amplify the empathetic associations rather than needing to construct prosocial attitudes from nothing.

The profiles of the Syrian and Iraqi students were qualitatively different in ways that reflect lived experience. Their associations centered on themes bound up with forced displacement itself: Poverty and the Struggle for Survival, Violence and Death, and Physical and Emotional Pain. For these children, the term refugee is not an external social category but a compressed autobiography, a linguistic container for memories of conflict, loss, deprivation, and the physical and psychological costs of flight. The research also found that Syrian and Iraqi students associated the concept with a search for hope, indicating that even within profoundly painful semantic fields, displaced children maintain a forward-looking, aspirational dimension to their self-understanding.

Correspondence analysis, a statistical technique that visualizes the relationships between categorical variables in a shared space, confirmed that the thematic divergence between the Turkish group on one side and the Syrian and Iraqi groups on the other was statistically significant. This formal confirmation matters because it rules out the possibility that the observed differences were merely anecdotal or the product of random variation in word choice. Instead, the data indicate two meaningfully distinct cognitive geographies of the same concept: one organized around the vantage point of the receiving society, oscillating between threat and compassion, and the other organized around the vantage point of displacement, oscillating between trauma and hope.

The psychological implications of this divergence extend well beyond the classroom. Cognitive structures of the kind captured by the Word Association Test function as interpretive lenses through which subsequent social information is filtered. When host-community children’s mental maps foreground threat and blame, everyday interactions with displaced peers risk being encoded through suspicion, reinforcing stereotype and fueling a self-perpetuating cycle of othering. Conversely, when displaced children’s associations are dominated by pain and loss, their sense of belonging in the school environment may remain fragile, particularly if the peer environment validates exclusionary narratives. The study suggests that these two cognitive worlds currently operate side by side in Turkish schools, with limited semantic overlap between how the host and displaced groups understand who a refugee is.

The authors argue that the findings make a direct case for targeted educational interventions designed to reduce stereotypical and exclusionary associations and to strengthen empathy, perspective-taking, and shared human values. Because the Word Association Test exposes the raw material of children’s conceptual thinking, the same technique can serve as a diagnostic instrument before and after such interventions, allowing educators to measure whether exclusionary word clusters shrink and empathetic ones expand. The researchers specifically recommend that schools and educators use these insights to challenge exclusionary narratives, promote inclusive peer relations, and create supportive environments that foster the inclusion and well-being of children from forced-migration backgrounds. In practice, this could involve structured contact programs, collaborative learning, and curricular approaches that reframe the refugee concept around common humanity rather than difference.

As displacement continues to reshape societies across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond, this study offers a rare quantitative glimpse into the earliest cognitive layer where integration succeeds or fails: the associative networks children build around a single word. The contrast between Turkish students’ security-laden but partially empathetic maps and Syrian and Iraqi students’ trauma-tinged but hopeful ones encapsulates the central challenge of diverse classrooms. The same term that evokes borders and burden for one child evokes graves and survival for another, and only deliberate educational design can bridge that gap. Published as open-access research with ethics approval from Ondokuz Mayıs University and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki with parental consent and children’s right to withdraw, the study provides both the evidence and the methodological toolkit for educators willing to begin that work, transforming the mental map of refugee from a marker of division into a shared terrain of understanding.

Subject of Research: Cognitive structures and perceptions of the concept of refugee among Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi secondary school students

Article Title: The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students

Article References: Ünal, O., Karadağ, Y., & Yilar, M. B. (2026). The mental map of the concept of “refugee”: a comparative analysis of the cognitive structures of Turkish, Syrian, and Iraqi students. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05688-8

Keywords: refugee perception, word association test, cognitive structure, Turkish students, Syrian students, Iraqi students, social integration, inclusive education, forced displacement, child psychology, intergroup relations, Türkiye

The research, led by Maureen Seguin of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine together with colleagues including Olha Fokaf, Tina Deinekhovska, Bayard Roberts, Caroline Sanders and Matt Egan, followed 19 forcibly displaced Ukrainian women through repeat semi-structured interviews. Initial interviews were conducted between April and July 2023, with follow-ups completed between March and October 2025, allowing the team to trace how housing trajectories and coping strategies evolved over years rather than weeks. From a larger group of 44 participants, the researchers selected those who had experienced insecure housing, defined as multiple involuntary, forced or reactive moves driven by poverty, encompassing temporary and emergency accommodation of many kinds. The scale of the problem is stark: forcibly displaced Ukrainians in the UK are more than four times more likely to experience homelessness than the general population, and as of October 2025, 12,260 Ukrainian households in England had asked their local authorities for help to prevent homelessness.

To interpret their data, the researchers applied Strong Structuration Theory, a framework that distinguishes between external structures such as laws, policies and institutional procedures, and the internal structures of knowledge, perception and disposition that individuals carry with them. This lens allowed the team to connect the macro-level machinery of English homelessness policy with the intimate, lived experience of women navigating it. The external structure in question is imposing. Local authorities owe a ‘prevention duty’ to eligible people who are homeless or will become homeless within eight weeks, followed by a ‘relief duty,’ and, for those judged to be in ‘priority need’ because they have dependent children, a disability or particular vulnerability, a ‘main housing duty’ to provide longer-term accommodation. Because long-term housing is scarce, temporary accommodation such as hotels, hostels and shared houses fills the gap, sometimes for years on end.

The interviews show how women fell through the gaps of this system. Tamara, arriving in Manchester with her son under a Homes for Ukraine placement, was told on day one that her host posed a danger and had to be moved immediately. Over the next 39 days she was relocated repeatedly, and after her brother was killed in combat and her home in Ukraine destroyed, she and her son spent 494 days in temporary accommodation and a homeless shelter where belongings were stolen and unqualified staff conducted what she called ‘health checks.’ She described the psychological toll in raw terms: sleeplessness, flashbacks, anxiety and exhaustion that recalled the beginning of the war. Only when the council finally provided a flat did she describe a return of calm, calling the simple fact of stable housing a happiness. Her account illustrates a central finding of the study: housing insecurity does not merely accompany distress, it actively compounds trauma carried from the war itself.

Other participants who diligently ‘followed the rules’ fared little better. Nika, aged 73, and her daughter Kateryna applied for social housing eight weeks before their hosting arrangement ended, exactly as instructed on their council’s website. On the morning of their move-out date, with no communication about next steps, they waited all day at the council offices until a security guard escorted them out at closing time. Kateryna recalled that at that moment she felt truly homeless. Nika was moved through three hotels over 157 days before being offered a room in a care home, a process she found nerve-wracking and destabilising for her care needs. Albina, who has a disability and a disabled school-age son, received no response to her housing application, breached her agreed move-out date with her host, and then endured months in a hotel while the council refused to reveal the location or move-in date of the social housing it had promised. She described the period as horrendous and said the gap between expectation and reality provoked a new level of depressive apathy.

Women judged not to be in priority need faced a different but equally damaging pathway. Irma, a single woman in her early forties, was placed in a homeless hostel for nine days after her hosting relationship broke down, an experience she described as frightening and depressing. A company then offered her a flat she believed was free, but the accommodation was ‘supported accommodation,’ a sector whose rents, because they are exempt from standard benefit caps, can run to more than double the market rate. After working full-time for four months, Irma was informed she owed half her rent retroactively, promptly quit her job, and negotiated repayment out of her universal credit. She said the arrangement pressed on her every day and made her want to return to the moment she was homeless so she could refuse the offer. Zoryana, deemed ineligible for support, spent more than a year in an asylum-seeker hostel with a broken window and mould-covered walls, while Kira slept on a neighbour’s old sofa for nearly 40 days after fleeing a conflict with her host, having been told by the council she did not qualify for help.

Across every housing status, the study found that pervasive uncertainty was the defining psychological stressor. Women in temporary accommodation had no idea how long they would stay or where they would go next; some reported attending council offices every fortnight simply to learn whether their hotel stay would be extended. Insomnia, agitation and a sense of being lost were common. Abrupt, unannounced moves disrupted children’s schooling and made employment impossible, and some women refused to unpack their belongings, keeping them ready for the next move they could not predict. Participants described feeling anxious, angry, depressed, powerless and stripped of self-esteem, emotions the authors link to a broader literature showing that repeated displacement and uncertainty consistently erode refugee well-being. Notably, the researchers point out that while Ukrainian visas grant the right to work, the financial penalties built into supported accommodation effectively prohibit work, and upcoming visa expirations in 2028 may further discourage employers from hiring this group.

Yet the women were not passive. The study documents a repertoire of coping responses that grew more assertive over time. Some became forceful self-advocates, challenging council staff over their rights; Albina’s pointed insistence on being told the address of her promised housing changed an official’s tone and produced the information. Others built support systems, drawing on charities such as Citizens Advice, sympathetic landlords persuaded to waive guarantor requirements, former hosts who stored belongings and vouched for them, and family members who steadied them emotionally. Irma eventually escaped supported accommodation when a housing charity found her a small flat, negotiated with a landlord, paid her deposit and cancelled her debt; she described the move as the difference between prison and freedom. Others coped cognitively, focusing on gratitude, identity-preserving work such as Albina’s remote lecturing job in Ukraine, or a garden planted outside vermin-infested shared housing. Two participants coped by leaving England altogether, one resettling in the United States and another returning to Kharkiv, judging the emotional benefits of her own home worth the physical risk.

The authors argue their findings carry direct implications for UK housing policy. The gap between what displaced people are promised and what the system delivers produces demonstrable harm to well-being, and the researchers call for affordable housing provision to be prioritised so that rights granted on paper match services in practice, all against a backdrop of austerity-driven funding cuts, diminished council housing stock and an increasingly unaffordable private rental sector. The longitudinal design is a key strength, capturing how attitudes and strategies shifted years into displacement, though the authors acknowledge that 19 accounts cannot represent all 12,260 households who have sought homelessness assistance. With Ukrainian visas beginning to expire from September 2028, the study warns of an approaching transition that demands further longitudinal research. Its central message, however, is already clear: housing is not a background condition for refugee mental health but one of its most decisive determinants, and insecurity in England has been severe enough to push some women to flee not once but twice.

Subject of Research: Housing insecurity and its mental health impacts among forcibly displaced Ukrainian women in England

Article Title: Insecure housing amongst forcibly displaced Ukrainian women in England: A qualitative exploration of mental health and coping responses

Article References: Seguin, M., Fokaf, O., Deinekhovska, T., Poppleton, A., Roberts, B., Sanders, C., & Egan, M. (2026). Insecure housing amongst forcibly displaced Ukrainian women in England: A qualitative exploration of mental health and coping responses. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100660. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100660

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100660

Keywords: Ukrainian refugees, housing insecurity, mental health, Homes for Ukraine, temporary accommodation, local authorities, qualitative research, forced displacement, coping strategies, England housing policy, refugee resettlement, uncertainty