Mariam was subjected to serious violence by her husband in a country which offers women little protection from family violence. She borrowed money secretly from a relative to flee to the UK with her daughter Zainab, after her first daughter was forced into marriage against her will by Mariam's husband. She suffers from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of her experiences. With her daughter, she was accommodated in Suffolk, in the East of England region.

As Figure 3.1 shows, no legal aid advice is available in Suffolk, nor in the counties to the north and south, although all of those counties accommodate dispersed asylum applicants. Those to the west appear to be well supplied, with five providers having received contracts in September 2018 in the closest access point, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire. One of them either lost or surrendered its contract within the first year, leaving four in Figure 3.1, and another did not open any cases in the year. All but one of those providers is in Northampton, to the far west of that access point, over two hours by car and three by train from Ipswich. The total number of cases opened in that access point that year was just 49. Eventually, Mariam found a solicitor in Bedfordshire, also over two hours away by train – a daunting journey for a woman suffering with anxiety and PTSD, and barely able to speak English.

Worse, her solicitor turned out to be of the ‘minimalist’ variety and she lost her appeal, despite country background evidence that women in her home country are often subjected to serious domestic abuse and forced marriage. No evidence was taken from Mariam's daughter Zainab, who was old enough to give a statement and (it later turned out) recalled seeing her father assault her mother and her older sister being taken from the family against her will to marry. No medical evidence was obtained, either of the scarring from the violence or the psychological effects. Evidence of Mariam's mental state would have been particularly important, because she found it difficult to give a coherent account of her older daughter's disappearance and her own escape from their home country, a fact fully explained by the effects of her PTSD and depression, which are well documented for women subjected to domestic abuse.