REFUGEE EXPERIENCE IS IMPORTANTLY GENDERED

Refugee Experience Is Importantly Gendered

Refugee Experience Is Importantly Gendered

Introduction

A refugee is a person who has fled his or her country because of fear of persecution. Under U.S. immigration law, a refugee is a person who has been or has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion and who is unable to avail him- or herself of the protection of that country. This definition mirrors the definition of refugee adopted in the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951. This definition focuses on persecution as the defining characteristic and thus excludes people who have been displaced because of civil war, ethnic strife, any sort of natural disaster, or for economic reasons.

Discussion

There is a litany of cases in which the asylum claims of women have been denied because the harm was defined as personal, not persecutory. Olimpia Lazo-Majano, for example, was repeatedly raped, abused, and threatened with death should she try to escape by a sergeant in the Salvadoran military (McSpadden, 2007, pp.241). Her husband, who had fled El Salvador, was a member of the paramilitary forces, a fact referenced by the sergeant during his abuse, calling both the victim and her husband "subversives." The majority opinion denying her asylum in the UK, however, stated that "such strictly personal actions do not constitute persecution within the meaning of the Act (Helton, 2001, pp.106)."

Both cases, and many others like them, reflect a profound reluctance on the part of many immigration and other state authorities to see violence against women in the same light as other persecutory behavior. Gender-related asylum claims are also denied because violence against women has often been seen as a societal norm in countries of origin and therefore as personal crime. As a result, it is considered far too broad a category to amount to persecution. Violence that happens to women because they are women is not seen (or legislated) in the same way as, for example, violence that happens to ethnic minorities because of minority status.

Both the United Nations and the UK have issued guidelines for dealing with gender-based persecution and asylum, respectively. In 1991, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued its Guidelines on the Protection of Refuge Women. Four years later, the CIS (then INS) released guidelines for gender-related asylum claims (Crawley, 2007, pp. 368).

One such notable asylum case is Matter of Kasinga. In a landmark decision, the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) granted Fauziya Kasinga asylum. Kasinga had fled Togo, her country of origin, so as not to undergo female genital mutilation, a common practice in Togo from which the Togo Republic does not provide protection. Although Matter of Kasinga addresses asylum from a gendered lens, this remedy is limited and available to only a small percentage of women who face sexual abuse.

In another notable case, Matter of R-A-, Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman, suffered years of violence at the hands of her ...