A Gendered Protection for the “Victims” of War: Mainstreaming Gender in Refugee Protection
Jane
Freedman
CRESPPA-GTM
Université
de Paris 8
Email :
jane.freedman@gtm.cnrs.fr
Media reports of widespread
rape and sexual violence during recent conflicts (such as that in the DRC) have
brought public attention to the question of war and gendered violence. But less
attention is often paid to the question of how to protect the victims of such
violence, including those who are displaced or exiled as a result of conflict. The issue 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. In the Beijing Platform
for Action, the section on women and armed conflict includes a strategic
objective to provide protection and assistance to refugee women. 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 displaced as a result of conflicts. For nearly twenty years, since the
early 1990s, the UNHCR has identified “refugee women” as a policy priority, and
yet despite this prioritisation of concerns with women refugees and gender
issues in the asylum and refugee process, ‘implementation continues to be slow
and ad hoc’ (Baines, 2004: 1). This “implementation failure” can be attributed
to the difficulty 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, but also, and more importantly to an
unwillingness of those within the organization to really engage with the
gendered causes and effects of displacement and with the roots of violence
suffered by refugee women. This chapter will examine the way in which the
concept of gender has been adopted within the UNHCR and the processes that have
been put in place to mainstream gender within refugee protection activities. As
a travelling concept, the meaning of gender mainstreaming will change in each
institutional setting, and the success of implementation will also be dependent
on institutional characteristics (see the introduction to this volume). The
path dependencies created by institutionalisation of norms mean that it is
often difficult to introduce a real change in thinking in these institutions,
for example in order to interrogate the construction of gendered identities and
norms relating to war, peace and security. In this chapter we will consider the
way in which this concept of gender mainstreaming has “travelled” into the
sphere of refugee protection. How far has the concept of “gender mainstreaming”
really been integrated into refugee protection activities? And has this concept
been modified as it has “travelled” into an international organisation? How far
has mainstreaming managed to move policies to protect women beyond a mere focus
on “vulnerable” groups, and to integrate a gendered understanding of the global
processes which produce refugees, and of the protection needs of these
refugees? As other chapters in the book also show, we will argue that too often
“gender” in these circumstances is interpreted as meaning “women”, and that
this equation takes away the real power of “gender mainstreaming” as it was
originally conceived by feminist activists.
Putting
gender on the map of refugee protection
For a long time, any
consideration of gender issues was absent from discourses on refugees. This
absence relates in part to the circumstances surrounding the drafting and
adopting of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which
together with its 1967 protocol remains the major international convention
regulating refugee protection (Freedman, 2007). It can be argued that the 1951
Convention, like other international human rights conventions, was written from
a male perspective and that the situations of women were ignored. As Bunch maintains,
‘the dominant definition of human rights and the mechanisms to enforce them in
the world today are ones that pertain primarily to the types of violations that
the men who first articulated the concept most feared (Bunch 1995: 13). Thus
violations and persecutions pertinent primarily to women are often left out of
the spectrum of those that are considered valid as reasons for granting refugee
status.
The neglect of the issue of
gender in the 1951 Convention can be seen as an important factor leading to a
failure to take into account the protection needs of women asylum seekers and
refugees. Moreover, difficulties in mainstreaming gender in asylum and refugee
policies and practices can still in part be attributed to this limited
definition and understanding of who is a real “refugee”. Gender was not put on
the agenda of refugee protection in any meaningful sense until the 1980s
(Hyndman, 1998), on the basis of growing international pressure to take account
of questions particular to women refugees and asylum seekers. In particular
campaigning by transnational networks of women’s organisations put pressure on
the UNHCR to recognise the need to consider gender issues following growing
public awareness of gender-based violence and persecutions against refugees.
One of the first signs of the issues of gender in refugee crises becoming
visible was during the massive forced migrations from South East Asia in the
early 1980s. The plight of the “boat people” was reported worldwide, and
particular attention was paid to the vulnerability of women on the boats, who
were at risk of sexual violence and rape if the boats were attacked by pirates.
At the same time, it became more and more difficult to ignore women refugees in
other areas of the world, particularly because of the sheer numbers of women in
refugee camps, and because of the practical questions relating to distribution
of food and other aid. Models of aid distribution which took the household as a
unit of analysis came under question. The number of women headed households
within these camps, for example, made models of resource distribution that
targeted men with the idea that this would then be distributed to the rest of
their household, unworkable. Various issues like these gradually entered the
international consciousness and coalesced to provide a focal point for the
start of transnational activism in support of a more gender aware approach to
refugee issues, which gained momentum at the World Conference on Women, in
Nairobi in 1985. At the Nairobi conference, hundreds of representatives from
refugee women’s associations attended the parallel NGO forum. Following this
conference an International Working Group for Refugee Women was set up,
creating a network of national groups aiming to push the UNHCR to take action.
The UNHCR responded to this
international pressure by appointing a Senior Coordinator for Refugee Women in
1989. Baines recounts that when the first woman to take up this post, Anne
Howarth-Wiles, arrived in Geneva she had a rather cold welcome with few
resources at her disposal and ‘little enthusiasm amongst her co-workers’
(Baines, 2004: 44). In an interview with Baines, Howarth-Wiles describes her
initial experiences: ‘As soon as she arrived, it became obvious to her than
most UNHCR staff were reluctant to embrace a gender perspective. Most believed
that international refugee instruments and practices applied equally to men and
women and were therefore non-discriminatory. A policy on refugee women was
considered unnecessary.’ (Baines, 2004: 45). As argued below, interviews with
UNHCR staff today indicate that although the organisation has officially
adopted gender mainstreaming, this belief that international refugee
conventions and instruments are in fact non-discriminatory and that there is no
need for targeted action on gender, is still present amongst some staff today.
Despite this initial
reluctance to engage with issues of gender, the Senior Coordinator managed to
impose a campaign involving the development of a policy on refugee women, together
with training programmes to raise awareness of the issues involved both inside
and outside of the UNHCR. Initial policies and programmes focused on women
refugees, rather than on the relational issues of gender in refugee programmes.
This focus on women could be argued in some contexts to further marginalise
women by targeting them as a “separate” group and so essentialising their
difference and ignoring the relational aspects of gender which affect both
women and men. By the end of the 1990s, the focus within the UNHCR was moving
away from one that was specifically on women, and more towards gender based
policies and programmes. This coincided with efforts to incorporate gender
mainstreaming in all UN operations. Gender mainstreaming can be seen as a
“travelling concept” which has moved from its origins in feminist theorising
and activism into various institutional settings. These institutions, however
construct and utilise the concept in differing ways. In the case of the UNHCR,
research for this study suggests that the adoption of “mainstreaming” as an
approach may paradoxically lead to gender slipping off the agenda, as it
becomes dissolved within other concerns. Interviewees at UNHCR headquarters
pointed to the fact that although mainstreaming could have advantages in that
it should remind all UNHCR employees of the need to consider gender in all
aspects of their work and not merely to relegate it to a separate “women’s
issue”, in effect without the dedicated effort of an individual or group devoted
to bringing gender issues to the forefront of policies and programmes these
issues might easily be ignored.[1] They
argued that many of those employed within the organisation still ignored
questions relating to gender or women’s rights and were sometimes reluctant to
integrate these questions into their general work, feeling that they had “more
important” priorities.[2]
Thus although gender mainstreaming is an officially accepted target for the
UNHCR, there is still a long way to go before this mainstreaming really becomes
effective and is transformed in practice into equal protection for men and
women asylum seekers and refugees. The difficulties involved in mainstreaming
gender arise both from national and international responses to forced migration,
including obstacles within the organisation of the UNHCR and difficulties with the way in which gender
is interpreted in the context of refugee protection.
Refugee
Women: an “unknown” entity?
One of the difficulties in
adopting and implementing policies to ensure equal protection for men and women
asylum seekers and refugees is the diversity of situations implied by forced
migrations, and the lack of accurate data on some refugee populations. In fact,
the lack of accurate gender-disaggregated statistics on forced migrants has led
some to overstate the proportion of women refugees in an attempt to draw
greater attention to their situation. Oosterveld,
for example, claims that: ‘The faces of refugees are overwhelmingly female:
women and children represent eighty per cent of the world’s twenty seven
million refugees and displaced people’ (Oosterveld, 1996: 570). This type of
claim is used to try and reverse a previous “invisibility” of women in research
and policy-making and to press for further national and international actions.
However, a basic problem with these statistics is that they conflate “women and
children”[3]
into one single category, thus obscuring even further the real nature of the
statistical differences between men and women. The amalgamation of “women and
children” into one category of “vulnerable” refugees is an important feature of
the representations of women refugees in humanitarian actions, representations
which can be argued to have major impacts on the way in which gender is treated
in issues of refugee protection (Rajaram, 2002). According to the UNHCR, women
make up about one half of the total populations of concern to them (UNHCR,
2007). Women are the majority in some refugee camps resulting from “mass influx”
situations following wars and other conflict situations where men will be those
principally engaged in fighting and women will be more likely to flee.
Although, as Carpenter argues, the category of women and children should not be
used interchangeably with that of civilians, as in contemporary wars many men
are also civilians and women may also be combatants (Carpenter, 2006). On the
other hand women have historically been less represented amongst those seeking
asylum in industrialised countries. Statistics which are available show that in
Europe, for example women make up only about one third of the total asylum
claimants (Bloch et al. 2000; Freedman, 2007).
Internal
Constraints on Gender Mainstreaming
Despite the UNHCR’s adoption
of gender mainstreaming, ‘implementation continues to be slow and ad hoc’
(Baines, 2004: 1). As a travelling concept, the meaning of gender mainstreaming
will change in each institutional setting, and the success of implementation
will also be dependent on institutional characteristics. The seeming inability
to put into practice much of the discourse on gender and women refugees must be
seen in part as a result of internal difficulties and crises with the UNHCR’s
own organisation. Unlike most of the other UN agencies, it is an agency which
is dependent on donor funding, with up to ninety eight per cent of funds coming
directly from national governments (Vayrynen, 2001). These funds are renewed
annually creating a particular dependence on donor states. This means that
donor states can have a large degree of control over the UNHCR’s agenda, and
that in some cases the agency might be seen to prioritise these state’s
interests over those of asylum seekers and refugees (Crépeau, 1995; Hammerstad,
2000). These pressures from states have led to what some have argued is a
change of direction from the UNHCR, moving from a function of protecting
refugees to one of controlling them in the interests of donor states. In these
conditions, the policies followed by UNHCR must resonate with the agenda’s of
its donors, and particular issues such as introducing gender mainstreaming may
be pushed down the policy agenda of the organisation in favour of more
“popular” priorities.
In addition, Vayrynen
highlights the problem of “earmarking” of UNHCR’s funds which has had notable
impacts in relation to the comparative availability of funds for projects in
Africa and in Eastern Europe, with African countries often falling to the
bottom of the lists of priorities for donor states (Vayrynen, 2001). These
particular motives for distribution of funding may have impacts on UNHCR’s
ability to adequately fund activities and programmes which aim at promoting
gender-equality or extending adequate protection to women refugees. This is
both because many of the women who are most in need of protection find
themselves in geographical regions which are not considered a priority by donor
states and so do not receive much funding, or because gender equality
programmes which are seen as long-term investments with often intangible or
only marginal results are not favoured by the UNHCR staff who have to decide
how the scarce budgets should be spent.
UNHCR must also be viewed as a
huge bureaucracy[4] and
one that holds tremendous discursive and institutional power over refugees.
This power can be seen to take away possibilities of agency from refugees and
displaced people, limiting their participation in any form of planning,
implementation or management of operations (Baines, 2004). This critique might
be particularly relevant to operations designed to overcome gender
inequalities, which are often designed and implemented without any input from
women and men refugees themselves as to what their needs or desires might be,
and which can be criticised for their framing of women merely in terms of their
vulnerability. Although there are clearly staff in the UNHCR who are committed
to mainstreaming, it could be argued that there are insufficient key
individuals in positions of responsibility who are pushing for mainstreaming.
Some UNCHR employees interviewed for this study pointed to the continued need
to persuade and remind their colleagues (and in particular their male
colleagues) of the needs for integrating a gendered approach into their work. They
also highlighted the problem that in much of UNCHR’s work in the field, and
particular in situations of extreme conflict and crisis, the majority of the
protection officers are male, and thus may not always be sensitive to gendered
needs.[5] This
lack of female staff, particularly in emergency situations and in dangerous
areas may be a result of the ‘deep structures’ of the organisation which make
little concession to the reconciliation of work and family, as Rao and Kelleher
have shown for other organisations (Rao and Kelleher, 2002).
Without wishing to advocate a
position which implies that only women can be sensitive to gendered aspects of
policy-making and implementation, it does seem that the balance of men and
women working within an organisation will have some impact on the way in which
gender is considered, and that in the case of the UNHCR women are still
under-represented both at higher levels of the bureaucracy and in field
operations.
What
progress in gender mainstreaming?
So what have been the
substantial changes that have resulted from the UNHCR’s attempts to take more
account of specific needs of refugee women and to integrate and mainstream
gender in its policy making and activities in the last two decades? In 2001, the
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children carried out an assessment of
the results of ten years of implementation of the 1991 Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women (UNHCR, 1991). This
assessment concluded that the Guidelines
had succeeded in raising awareness among UNHCR staff and partners of women’s
specific needs and interests, but that overall the implementation of the Guidelines was ‘uneven and incomplete,
occurring on an ad hoc basis in certain sites rather than in a globally
consistent and systematic way’ (WCRWC, 2002: 2). The report cites barriers to
implementation including a lack of female UNHCR staff which is a serious
obstacle both to obtaining information from refugee women and to addressing the
specific protection issues they face. It argues further that insufficient
participation of refugee women themselves in decision-making is also a serious
barrier to the full implementation of the Guidelines
(WCRWC, 2002). A consultation exercise that the UNHCR organised with some
refugee women came to similar conclusions that despite progress in some areas,
women refugees often still lacked access to food and other basic resources, and
that they were not adequately protected against sexual and gender-based
violence. One issue which was raised was the continuing failure to provide
refugee women with their own personal documentation, such as their own food
ration cards. The distribution of these cards to male “heads” of families, led
to particular problems because it increased women’s dependency and thus the
protection problems that they faced. In places such as Guinea, where individual
ration cards were not provided, some refugee women and girls were forced to
exchange sex for food. ‘Most refugee women participants agreed that food would
be distributed more evenly within families if ration cards were distributed to
refugee women and they were equal partners in the development and
implementation of food distribution strategies.’ (UNHCR, 2001: 19). The
consultation exercise criticised the way in which refugee women were often left
out of camp planning and decision-making processes. Women in Guinea, for
example, ‘felt they were left out of planning, designing, implementing and even
evaluating programmes for refugee assistance’ (UNHCR, 2001: 26). This exclusion
of women from planning and implementation was a contributing factor in lack of
access to basic resources.
These criticisms of the
implementation of UNHCR policies on refugee women and on gender are consistent
with other analyses of UNHCR’s actions in particular refugee situations in
which they intervene. Many of the criticisms stem from an underlying
understanding and construction of the relationship between the refugee and the
UNHCR/NGO bringing aid as one between “helper” and “victim”, with no
possibility of collaboration as equals being envisaged. Relations of power
which start of as highly unequal, may be made even more so by the way in which
aid is administered. In the context of management of refugee camps, for
example, UNHCR and other aid agencies have been criticised for promoting unequal
power relations between aid workers and refugees and for encouraging types of
dependent behaviour on the part of refugees (Harrell-Bond, 2002; Hyndman,
2000). It is argued that the nature of aid given out develops a patron-client
relationship within which powerful and competent aid workers distribute aid to
the “helpless” refugees. Even the conditions in which refugees tell their
stories and register their claims for protection with the UNHCR authorities in
a camp can be seen as reinforcing power inequalities. Often they may be forced
to wait hours in a queue in the sun before gaining access to a UNHCR official.
And when they do get access to a UNHCR official to relate their stories, they
are themselves frequently forced into a re-affirmation of their “victim”
status. As Ratner comments, refugees often feel the need to tell stories about
their own “powerlessness” in order to gain certain advantages from UNHCR
officials or from other aid agencies, benefits such as extra food rations,
child support, or even third country resettlement (Ratner, 2005). This
re-appropriation of stories of “powerlessness” and “victim” status can be seen
as a form of agency on the part of refugees who adapt their strategies for survival
to the dominant representations created by those providing aid to them: ‘The
refugees have to tell stories of “powerlessness” to invest in their future and
ironically, the disempowering experiences that got them in their hopeless
situations in the first place, become a strategic tool for survival in the form
of a utilitarian narrative that is far from a powerless act.’ (Ratner, 2005:
19).
These unequal power
relationships within which refugees are constructed as “vulnerable” or
“helpless” victims, may have particular resonance in the case of women
refugees, reinforcing gendered constructions of women’s powerlessness and lack
of agency in certain societies. We will discuss below the way in which
representations of “refugee women” have perpetuated particular understandings
and constructions of the specificities of these women’s situations, which may
serve to essentialise women’s experiences and to diminish the understanding of
the differences in their positioning dependent on class, ethnicity, age and other
factors. As with other refugees, however, women may in fact exercise a very
particular kind of agency in re-appropriating and mobilising these
representations for their own benefit. Thus the way in which they are treated
as “victims” may be used to help their own personal survival strategies. In
some camps, for example, women may actively use the stories of sexual violence
which they have experienced as a pragmatic strategy for improving their own
situation (Ratner, 2005).
However, despite these possibilities
of re-appropriation of the discourse of “victimisation” to further personal
survival strategies, the overall effect of the highly unequal relationships
between UNHCR and refugees has been that of removing refugees from the decision
making and planning processes concerning the organisation of their lives and
their protection. This is in many cases particularly problematic for women as
they are generally already positioned in a subordinate position with relation
to these processes in their own societies, and so relationships with UNHCR and
other aid agencies can act to reinforce local gender inequalities and
mechanisms of domination. Further, important physical and material barriers may
exist to women’s participation in planning such as lack of childcare facilities
to enable them to participate in meetings. Unless all of these factors are
taken into consideration by UNHCR staff, then gender equality in any camp
planning programmes will remain illusory.
Another explanation for the
difficulties in implementation of UNCHR’s gender policies and programmes in
refugee camp situations is highlighted by Baines and Harrell-Bond who point to
the way in which goals of cultural sensitivity may undermine efforts to
implement gender equality policies. Harrell-Bond points particularly to the way
in which the aim of cultural sensitivity has led humanitarian agencies to
encourage “traditional” methods of solving disputes within refugee camps. This
method of favouring “traditional” methods of negotiation and arbitration can
reinforce the power of those already dominant in any society or population and
can give license to many kinds of oppression by the camp “elders”
(Harrell-Bond, 1999). As these “elders” are generally older men, then their
judgements may well reinforce unequal gender relations among refugee
populations. Baines also points to the way in which resistance to gender
equality policies within the UNHCR has sometimes stemmed from the ideal of
universalism which is used to deny the validity of treating women as a separate
category. This type of recognition can be ‘associated with privileging one
group over another in a zero-sum game’ (Baines, 2004: 63). In parallel with
this claim to universalism, however, exists a discourse which locates the roots
of gender inequality and practices of domination or oppression within the realm
of cultural values and norms of the country of origin or of the host society:
‘Gender equality then, is regarded by some staff as a cultural imposition,
undermining the principle of non-intervention embedded in UNHCR culture. That
gender equality is perceived to be a Western-feminist imposition is defended by
staff who maintain a certain cultural relativism in their belief systems,
despite their loyalty to principles of universality.’ (Baines, 2004: 63).
The
“Women at Risk” Programme
The “Women at Risk” Programme
is one of the ways in which the UNHCR has sought to respond to the needs of
women refugees, and particularly those in refugee camps around the world. The
programme was introduced in 1988 following recommendations emanating from the
third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985. It is a programme which
aims to identify women in refugee camps who are at extreme risk of harassment,
physical or sexual violence or refoulement and to fast track their removal and
resettlement in one of the seven Western countries that have agreed to take
part in the programme. The criteria state that exiled or displaced women who
have been identified as being at extreme risk should be eligible for immediate
resettlement whether they have formally been recognised as refugees or not. The
problem however, is how to identify those women “at risk”. This is a term which
is open to varied interpretation and is subject to the personal biases of those
involved in selecting women for the programme. The problem of definition and
selection is particularly acute when a large number of women can be identified
as potentially at risk. Pittaway and Bartolomei quote one director of a refugee
camp in Africa who comments that: ‘Every woman in this camp has been raped. Do
you want to resettle them all?’ (Pittaway and Bartolomei, 2003: 91). In
addition to the criteria established by the UNHCR to qualify for this
programme, the countries which accept these refugees for resettlement may also
have their own criteria for selection. In Australia, for example, to qualify
for resettlement under the women at risk programme, a woman must be living
without the protection of a male relative and be in danger of victimization,
harassment or serious abuse because of her sex, and she must be able to pass
medical and character checking procedures (Manderson et al, 1998). Similarly,
Canadian criteria for the selection of refugees for resettlement insist that
the person must have been recognised as a refugee by UNHCR, and that in
addition they must meet the standard of “admissibility”, which generally means
that they should demonstrate the potential for successful integration and
settlement in Canada. But as Boyd argues the characteristics used to evaluate
such potential are largely of a socio-economic nature such as education, job
skills, or knowledge of English or French. And since gender inequalities in
many countries mean that women have fewer educational opportunities and less
job skills, these criteria may discriminate against them (Boyd, 1993). This
critique of the women at risk programme also highlights a more general problem
with resettlement programmes in general, namely that the refugees who are
chosen for resettlement are often those who are most “desirable” in terms of a
set of criteria set out by the host country, and these criteria can
discriminate against women who have had fewer educational or employment
opportunities in their countries of origin. This perception of discrimination
in selection for resettlement is widespread in countries with large refugee
populations. A Tanzanian official in the Ministry for Home Affairs thus
explained to an Oxfam researcher that Western states only want to resettle the
‘healthy, brainy refugees who are more likely to integrate easily’ (Oxfam, 2005:
51).
In fact, the total number of
women who have been resettled under the women at risk programme has remained
minimal for the reasons explained above. Canada, for example, accepted a total
of five hundred and eighty six women and children through the Women at Risk
programme between 1988 and 1993, which comprised only 0.8 per cent of the total
number of refugees accepted into the country. ‘In other words, the Women at
Risk Programme, laudable in its conception, has in practice scarcely touched
the numbers and proportion of women refugees resettled in Canada’ (Macklin,
1995: 220). Figures for 2005 show that a total of 2,777 women were resettled
worldwide. The main countries of destination for these women were Australia
(921), USA (918), Canada (360) and Sweden (168) (UNHCR, 2006). Again these
numbers represent a tiny percentage of those women who are living in refugee
camps in Africa, Asia or the Middle East, and more importantly of those women
who continue to run daily risks of sexual attacks or other violence. Moreover,
evidence from Australia shows that the women who are most likely to be
resettled originate in Europe or the Middle East rather than from Africa, and
that as a consequence ‘the Women at Risk programme seems to have barely touched
the problem of the high proportion of immobile refugee women, mainly in camp
situations in countries of first asylum or refuge’ (Kneebone, 2005: 12).
In addition to this confusion
about which women are “at risk” and the limited numbers actually chosen for
resettlement, it can also be argued that the programme is weakened by its
failure to address the wider issues of protection of women by focusing only on
resettlement of these women to third countries. Finally it can be argued that
resettling women to a Western country is not sufficient to achieve effective
protection. As Pittaway and Bartolomei argue: ‘The response to the special
needs of women at risk in receiving countries … is often sadly lacking. Many
countries do not understand, nor are equipped to deal with the high levels of
trauma which can be the result of protracted refugee situations, endemic sexual
and gender based violence, and torture’ (Pittaway and Bartolomei, 2006). The
fact that once they have been accepted for resettlement and have received legal
status their host country, these women
cease to receive any special support or help can thus be a barrier to their
integration into a host society or to the fulfilment of their continuing needs
for protection and assistance. Single women with children as those resettled
under the programme usually are, may have particular needs and continuing
vulnerabilities when they arrive in the host country which may thus remain
unmet, and so the value of assisting women in resettlement can be limited ‘if
the conditions which led to their classification as “at risk” during the
assessment period cease to be recognised during the period of resettlement’
(Manderson et al., 1998: 282).
Representations
of the Refugee
In seeking to understand
obstacles to the achievement of gender equality in refugee protection it is
also necessary to examine critically the global norms that have been created,
and the frames which are used to represent women refugees and asylum seekers.
It might be argued that one of the reasons for the uneven impact of global
norms in this area, is that they are based on frames which represent women
refugees principally as vulnerable victims, thus essentialising a particular
set of gendered roles, and failing to take into account the underlying gendered
relations of power. Representations of “refugee women” as helpless victims also
act to de-politicise these women’s experiences and activities (Baines, 2004).
Rajaram (2002) points to the way in which humanitarian responses to refugees
amount to a generalizing and depoliticized depiction of these refugees as
helpless victims. Refugees are thus rendered speechless and without agency, and
as Malkki argues, they are identified not in terms of their individual humanity
but as a group whose boundaries and constituents are removed from their
historical context and reduced to norms relevant to a state-centric perspective
of international relations (Malkki, 1996). This depoliticization can be argued
to be particularly acute with regard to women refugees and asylum seekers, as
women tend to embody as particular kind of “powerlessness” in the Western
imagination (Malkki, 1995), and are thus idealised as “victims” without agency.
This use of strategic frames
of women as vulnerable victims in need of protection is prevalent amongst
practitioners in the international policy community (Carpenter, 2005), and it
can be argued that the symbols and signifiers of women as vulnerable victims
form a valuable part of the ‘cultural tool kit’ (Swidler, 1986) of these
practitioners. Images of women and children in refugee camps have become common
in fundraising campaigns by UNHCR and NGOs. In some contexts these images have
been shown to be highly effective in raising public awareness of refugee
issues, and of attracting donor support for particular humanitarian crises, or
in drawing the attention of political leaders. In Somalia, for example,
Loescher comments on the way that ‘widespread media coverage of starving women
and children finally turned policy makers’ attention to the disaster’
(Loescher, 2001: 303).
However, although such
framings might be assumed to be beneficial to women as they are supposed to be
used to mobilise support for specific protection measures for women, these
frames are in fact essentialising of gender difference, and ignore women’s
agency and voice. A different way to approach this problem of the
essentialising nature of the frames used to describe women asylum seekers and
refugees, and of the framing of particular issues of persecution in terms of
pre-existing and essentialising norms, is to relates these problems to the
question of how gender issues become (or do not become) securitized and the
fact that asylum seeking women themselves are often excluded from the process
of “framing” their own claims, because they lack a “voice”. In a critique of
the Copenhagen School, Hansen uses the example of honour killings in Pakistan
to argue that those who are constrained in their ability to speak about their
security/insecurity are prevented from becoming ‘subjects worthy of
consideration and protection’ (Hansen, 2000: 285). She concludes that: ‘Silence
is a powerful political strategy that internalises and individualises threats
thereby making resistance and political mobilisation difficult.’ (Hansen, 2000:
306). This critique might serve as the basis of a wider criticism of the ways
in which the “voice” of women asylum seekers and refugees is ignored in the
framing of issues relating to gender specific persecution. The discursive
opportunities which exist are not open to these women for reasons of political,
social and economic marginalisation and exclusion. The NGOs and associations
which make claims for gender specific policies and legislation do so on behalf
of refugee and asylum seeking women, these women themselves have little or no
voice in the process. Speaking for women asylum seekers and refugees leads to
representations and framings of them which rely heavily on pre-existing
cultural norms as argued above, and which contain these women in their role of
“victims”. Real understanding of the gendered causes of forced migration would
take into account the voices and perspectives of those women who flee, and
would adapt solutions for protection to specific experiences and to particular
national and local contexts.
Conclusion
A goal of feminist
constructivist analysis must be to give a “voice” to those considered marginal
in international politics (Locher and Prugl, 2001). As Steans and Ahmadi
conclude: ‘Agreements on principles or statements of good intent are of little
use if they are not followed up with implementation and enforcement measures or
if they are undermined, subsumed or spoken for only by elites. Impediments to
women’s participation in decision making processes remain, while practices of
inclusion and exclusion in relation to NGOs … also silence women’s voices.’
(Steans and Ahmadi, 2005: 244). If the interests of women fleeing armed
conflict and gendered violence and seeking protection as refugees are truly to
be guaranteed, then the voice of these women needs to be heard. It is important
to listen to the voices of women seeking asylum and refugees if the trap of
essentialising their experience and treating them as passive victims is to be
avoided. Women do need protection and are vulnerable in some circumstances, but
this should not be generalised to assume that they are all just “vulnerable
victims”. Cockburn argues that women should only be treated as “mothers”, as
“dependents” or as “vulnerable” when they themselves ask for this special
treatment. ‘When, on the contrary, should they be disinterred from “the
family”, from “womenandchildren”, and seen as themselves, women – people, even?
Ask the women in question. They will know’ (Cockburn, 2003: 29).
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[1]
Interviews with author 2005, 2006 and 2007.
[2]
Interviews with the author.
[3] Cynthia
Enloe has explained eloquently the ways in which the utilisation of the
category « womenandchildren » acts to identify man as the norm against
which all others can be grouped together into a single leftover category,
reiterating the notion that women are family members above all, and allowing
the state and international institutions to play a paternalistic role in
“protecting” these vulnerable women and children (Enloe, 1993).
[4] By the
mid-1990s UNHCR employed over five thousand staff worldwide.
[5]
Interviews with the author at UNHCR headquarters and in national bureaus in
Europe, 2005, 2006 and 2007.
