One Man’s Journey, A Family’s Survival

 

Why Are So Many Asylum Seekers Young Men? The Real Story Behind the Headlines

By Sean Ash

They arrive by boat. They arrive by foot. They cross borders, seas, fences, and continents. And when the cameras capture them, the same image repeats: young men, often alone, often silent, looking weary, determined, or suspicious, depending on the eye of the beholder.

It’s become a flashpoint in Britain’s asylum debate: where are the women and children?

This single image, young, male, of “fighting age”, has been used by critics to stir fear, to question motives, and to portray those seeking asylum as opportunists rather than victims. Yet behind the headlines, the reality tells a very different story, one of families divided not by choice, but by necessity, and of men carrying the burden not of conquest, but of hope.

The truth is not that women and children are absent. It’s that they follow later, through the only legal channel available to them. And the journey taken by the men who come first is one few would ever survive, let alone volunteer for, without desperation driving every step.

A Journey Only the Strongest Can Make

Crossing from war-torn or repressive nations to the UK is no easy feat. For most, it involves perilous travel through lawless zones, dangerous smuggling routes, or fragile dinghies across the Channel. Families fleeing conflict must often make the impossible decision: who goes first?

In most cases, it’s the young men. Physically stronger, less at risk of sexual exploitation, and more likely to endure the journey, they are sent ahead, often by their families, to seek asylum and then apply to bring relatives over legally. The hope is simple: one survives, then saves the rest.

Reuniting Through Law

Once in the UK, if granted refugee status, asylum seekers are entitled to apply for immediate family members to join them. This is done through the refugee family reunion route, a legal, formal process.

In 2024, the UK government granted more than 19,700 visas for family reunion, the majority of which went to women and children. From 2012 to 2023, over 80% of all adult family reunion applicants were women. That number is not an accident; it’s the visible tip of a hidden reality.

These figures show a pattern: men come first, then their wives and children join them once it’s safe. It’s a legal process the public rarely hears about, in part because it lacks the shock value of boat crossings or dramatic footage on beaches.

A Matter of Protection, Not Abandonment

For some, seeing men arrive first raises suspicion. “Why didn’t they bring their wives?” “Why didn’t they stay and fight?” These questions, while emotionally charged, miss the point.

In many parts of the world, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea, men are forcibly recruited into armies or rebel militias. Refusal means torture, imprisonment or death. Others are persecuted for political beliefs, ethnicity or religion. These are not men with the luxury of choosing to fight for an ideal; many are fleeing from violence, not abandoning it.

More than that, women travelling alone through smuggling routes face horrifying dangers: rape, kidnapping, forced marriage, and trafficking. Families often delay sending them precisely because they are trying to protect them. The idea that women are “left behind” ignores the grim calculus of survival: if the men die, their families are left entirely vulnerable.

The men who make it to the UK are not abandoning women and children, they are trying to save them.

The “Fighting Age” Fear Narrative

The narrative of “fighting age men” is not new. It plays on deep cultural fears, of invasion, of aggression, of difference. But it also skews the facts. Age does not make someone a fighter. Race does not make someone a threat. Most of the men arriving have fled fighting, not sought it.

The uncomfortable truth is that many such narratives are racialised. When Ukrainians, mostly women and children, arrived in the UK in 2022, they were met with open arms. Few asked why their men didn’t come. The answer, again, was simple: many stayed to fight because they had a country, a system, and a government that organised them to do so.

But for men fleeing collapsed states, authoritarian regimes, or religious persecution, the choice is not to fight, it is to flee or to die.

Beyond the Headlines

It is easy to reduce a human life to an image: a figure on a boat, a brown-skinned man with no passport, a line of faceless people moving toward the border.

But the reality behind those images is far more complex, and far more humane. These men are not invaders. They are brothers, sons, fathers. They are young men making impossible choices with the hope of someday reuniting their families in safety.

The women and children are not missing. They are waiting. Waiting in refugee camps. Waiting in war zones. Waiting in hiding. Waiting for the man they love to make it somewhere safe and lawful, so that he can bring them home.

So the next time someone asks why so many asylum seekers are young men, let’s answer honestly, not with suspicion, but with understanding.

Because the real question isn’t “where are the women?”

It’s “what would you do if your family’s life depended on you making it across?”