Abstract
This chapter focuses on the cross-section of the legal and policy gender-based violence and immigration frameworks in Canada. Our objective is to understand how immigrant and refugee women are protected from gender-based violence (GBV), first through analysing the gender and intersectional dimensions of GBV protection afforded to immigrants and refugees in selected, seminal legal and policy documents. Secondly, we aim to understand the practical aspects and challenges to such protection, as they emerge from the analysis of qualitative interviews of the experiences / perspectives of forty-three ‘key informants’, whose professional roles include putting into practice the pertinent laws and policies to support migrant and refugee women. Our findings identify the ‘fault lines’—the gaps within and between policies, problems in policy application, or unintended consequences of protection policies.
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Notes
- 1.
The Canadian GBV-MIG project is a three-year (2018–2021) research project that involves collaboration of researchers between four Canadian Universities. https://www.smu.ca/gendernet/welcome.html. It is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FRN 161903) and forms part of the international GBV-MIG consortium project (‘Violence against Women Migrants and Refugees: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response’) of University researchers from seven countries, a winning project of the Gender-Net Plus Joint Call on Gender and UN Sustainable Development Goals. For this chapter, we have drawn significantly from our Country Review Canada document (Tastsoglou et al. 2020).
- 2.
Interview quotes have been slightly edited for readability.
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Tastsoglou, E., Falconer, C., Sisic, M., Dawson, M., Wilkinson, L. (2022). The Gender of Canadian Legal and Policy Gender-Based Violence and Immigration Frameworks. 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_4
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