Gender, ‘Refugee Women’ and the Politics of Protection

Abstract

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the particular difficulties faced by women in securing access to protection under international refugee law. It is typically men who have been considered the principal agents of political resistance and therefore the (more) legitimate beneficiaries of protection resulting from associated persecution. Forms of violence and discrimination more commonly experienced by women have routinely been dismissed as ‘private’ and therefore falling outside the scope of international refugee law. This chapter argues that whilst all refugees have increasingly struggled to secure access to international protection, efforts to engender international refugee law have also been undermined by use of the category ‘Refugee Women’. This category has been harnessed by policy makers, lawyers and civil society organisations to draw attention to the particular experiences of women fearing gender-based violence but has served to ‘flatten out’ the complex gendered experiences of those seeking protection, extrapolating their experiences from the socio-political contexts in which they occur. The result has been a form of ‘exclusionary inclusion’ in which women’s experiences are effectively ‘depoliticised’: they are represented almost exclusively as ‘victims’ of male violence rather than activists and/or resisters of patriarchal norms.