Fitting a Square Peg in a Round Hole: Women and the Gendered Construction of U.S. Asylum Policy

Fitting a Square Peg in a Round Hole: Women and the Gendered Construction of U.S. Asylum Policy

A. ALFRED TAUBMAN CENTER for Public Policy and American Institutions


Brown Bag Series

12:00 Noon, Thursday March 4th, 2010
Taubman Center Seminar Room, 67 George Street

American asylum laws are the product of a specific set of norms and ideas which were dominant in the mid-20th century when the U.S. asylum system took shape. These norms privilege claims of asylum based on the “high politics” of the Cold War era but create enormous challenges for claims resulting from gendered forms of violence. The result is that women victims of gendered violence, whether rape, female genital mutilation, forced marriage or extreme domestic violence, have a very difficult time to convince the U.S. authorities that they deserve to be granted asylum.