Women seeking asylum - Jane Freedman

The issue of asylum seekers and refugees has been a major source of debate in European countries in recent years. However, little attention has been paid to the gendered impacts of recent developments in asylum policy and legislation. This article will explore the difficulties of women seeking asylum in France in order to analyse the way that the asylum decision-making process operates through gendered lenses that ignore the complexity of women's experiences. The multiple actors involved in the process, and the role played by discretionary power in the decision making on asylum means it is impossible to point to just one source of gendered inequalities within this process, and thus a careful unpacking of legislation, jurisprudence and official policies but also of more informal procedures and practices is required.
From: International Feminist Journal of Politics, June 2008