Supporting Women Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Abstract

The issues of gender-related persecution and violence against women have been put onto the international agenda, largely thanks to lobbying by feminist NGOs and transnational networks. There is a question, however, of how successfully this agenda setting has translated into effective policy making and policies that will increase the protection of women who are victims of gender-related persecution. One of the problems with policies to support women refugees and asylum seekers lies in a failure of transmission of the goals of gender sensitivity through all of the various bureaux and representatives of a large bureaucratic organisation such as the UNHCR. There is thus a gap in many cases between the adoption of policies and their implementation. The process of diffusion of international norms relating to protection of women asylum seekers and refugees into national policy domains and national legislation is also problematic. Thus, as outlined in the previous chapter, whilst the UNHCR adopted gender guidelines in 1991, few states have adopted these guidelines into their national asylum policies or legislations. In this chapter, we examine various responses to the particular situation of female refugees and asylum seekers, both from international organisations and from NGOs in order to try to analyse to what extent international and national responses to refugees and asylum seekers have taken into account gender-related persecutions and gendered differences in the situations of women and men forced migrants.