Abstract
This chapter is based on a critical analysis of the political discourse on GBV and migration in France and assesses the processes through which culturalist framings have contributed to the racialisation of the issue and the stigmatisation of migrants. Within state-sponsored reports, notably by the French inter-ministerial mission for the protection of women victims of violence, GBV in migration contexts tends to be equated with forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and trafficking, whilst there have been recent proposals to introduce measures for the immediate deportation of foreign men guilty of GBV, feeding into the perception that GBV is first and foremost a foreign import. We argue that these culturalist framings of GBV result in a neglect of the deeper structural and systemic causes of violence and that they contribute to the circulation of racist, Islamophobic and anti-migration rhetoric within the French political space.
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Notes
- 1.
Emmanuel Macron was elected on a platform that promised to be neither Left nor Right, although subsequent government appointments and policies point more generally to a centre-Right orientation.
- 2.
This information comes from a presentation by an OFPRA representative, head of the ‘Vulnerabilities’ division, at an online round table on sexual and gender-based violence organised by the UNHCR on 10 December 2020.
- 3.
- 4.
Interview October 2019.
- 5.
See Coq-Chodorge C., ‘Faute d’hébergement, des migrantes et leurs nouveau-nés n’ont plus que les maternités où s’abriter’, Mediapart, 08/01/2020
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Freedman, J., Sahraoui, N., Tyszler, E. (2022). Gender-based Violence as a ‘Consequence of Migration’: How Culturalist Framings of GBV Ignore Structural Violence Against Migrant Women in France. In: Freedman, J., Sahraoui, N., Tastsoglou, E. (eds) Gender-Based Violence in Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07929-0_5
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