Members Publications

Related articles, chapters and books authored by members of the GBV-MIG Consortium

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Jane FREEDMAN, Nina SAHRAOUI & Elsa TYSZLER

Asylum, Racism, and the Structural Production of Sexual Violence against Racialised Women in Exile in Paris

Soc. Sci. 2022, 11(10), 426; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11100426

The recent arrival of refugees from Ukraine has thrown into sharp focus the racialised colonial underpinnings of the French asylum and refugee system, as the open-door welcome afforded to Ukrainians, supposedly “closer” to the French population, highlights the rejection and marginalisation of “others” who seek refuge in the country. The current situation lays bare not only the “double standards” applied to refugees depending on their country of origin and race, but also the colonial foundations of the French asylum system as a whole. This might be seen as particularly significant in a country where even within academic research on asylum and refugees the racial and colonial foundations of the current system are rarely mentioned, and where the principle of Republican universalism has been consistently used to both hide and justify racialised and gendered forms of inequality and discrimination. In this contribution we wish to explore the ways in which the coloniality of the French asylum system works to deny exiled women access to welfare and social services, creating systems of racialised and gendered violence against them. We highlight the ways in which the State not only neglects these women, but actively contributes to violence through its racialised neo-liberal policies. The withdrawal of access to welfare and social services, including housing, welfare payments or health services, all form a part of this system of structural violence which leads to increasing levels of harm. Based on ethnographic research carried out in the Paris region, our article aims to emphasise that the structural production of gendered violence, particularly sexual violence against racialised exiled women, illustrates the coloniality of the asylum system and more broadly of the migration regime, which manifests itself in policies of exclusion, neglect and endangerment—including death. Keywords: gender; race; violence; coloniality; asylum; France; Paris

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How Sexual and Gender-Based Violence affects the settlement experiences among Yazidi Refugee Women in Canada

Bhattacharyya, Pallabi, Labe Songose, and Lori Wilkinson (2021). “How Sexual and Gender-Based Violence affects the settlement experiences among Yazidi Refugee Women in Canada”. Frontiers in Human Dynamics. DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2021.644846. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2021.644846/full

Jane FREEDMAN and Elsa TYSZLER

De Nador a Lesbos: una mirada a la violencia sexual contra las mujeres ilegalizadas en las fronteras de Europa

De Nador a Lesbos: una mirada a la violencia sexual contra las mujeres ilegalizadas en las fronteras de Europa
By Jane Freedman and Elsa Tyszler
In : Género y movilidades: Lecturas feministas de la migración, Publisher: Peter Lang

De Nador a Lesbos: una mirada a la violencia sexual contra las mujeres ilegalizadas en las fronteras de Europa By Jane Freedman and Elsa Tyszler In : Género y movilidades: Lecturas feministas de la migración, Publisher: Peter Lang

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TASTSOGLOU Evangelia

The Gender-Based Violence and Precarity Nexus: Asylum-Seeking Women in the Eastern Mediterranean

Front. Hum. Dyn., 26 May 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2021.660682

This paper derives from a larger research on gender-based violence and precarity in the forced migration journeys of asylum-seeking women transiting through the Eastern Mediterranean route and arriving in Greece, in the tumultuous, second decade of the 21st century. In this paper we present the findings from the first phase of the research. We analyze and discuss the opinions and information gathered through semi-structured interviews with twenty key informants: service providers, staff of international and national NGOs, local government staff and public officials. Our findings locate the five points/loci in irregular cross-border movements and arrival at an EU member-state where precarity interweaves with gender-based violence. The first locus, is in transit and EU and Greek border crossing; second, during the asylum determination process; third, in their everyday life when they must deal with homelessness and harsh living conditions; fourth, in the deficiency of care services further aggravated by intersectional discrimination; finally, by being trapped in abusive settings and relationships due to the ineffective state response, a sluggish criminal justice system, and the victim’s financial dependence on the perpetrator. Adopting a feminist and intersectional approach our analysis shows that violence and precarity are co-constituted and reinforce each other through the undermining of the citizenship status of asylum seekers and the inscription, on their bodies and lives, of unequal gendered social and institutional power relations.

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Elsa Tyszler

Humanitarianism and black female bodies: violence and intimacy at the Moroccan–Spanish border

Tyszler, E. (2020). Humanitarianism and Black female bodies : violence and intimacy at the Moroccan-Spanish border. Journal of North African Studies, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2020.1800211

Around Ceuta and Melilla, progressive Moroccan migration policies implemented since 2013 have not produced much positive change, as political, diplomatic and economic issues take over, producing a violent game of borders, both material and symbolic, racialised and gendered. Through an ethnographic approach, this article addresses the issue of violence experienced by migrants from Central and West Africa on the Moroccan– Spanish border, emanating from humanitarian and religious actors. Based on two and a half years of field research in Morocco (mainly in Rabat and in the North) and the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, with a special attention to embodied experiences of the border, this contribution shows that the humanitarianism practiced in a border town in Northern Morocco is also a space for updating relations of race and gender, which can, contrary to its claims, lead to even greater constraints on the mobility of people, notably women, being ‘helped’, and can reproduce a racialised and gendered order at the border. This contribution also proposes to reconnect this contemporary violence to history and underline the coloniality of such humanitarianism.

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