Women and refugee status: beyond the public/private dichotomy in UK asylum policy

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look beyond the statistics at the experiences of the women, men, girls, and boys who comprise this global flow, and at the highly gendered forces that frame and affect them. In theorizing gender and forced migration, these authors present a set of descriptively rich, gendered case studies drawn from around the world on topics ranging from international human rights, to the culture of aid, to the complex ways in which women and men envision displacement and resettlement. This chapter was one of the first papers to specifically examine the way in which distinctions between activities and violence taking place in the 'public' vs 'private' sphere, and more often associated women, have typically been used to exclude gender-related asylum claims from considerations of eligibility for protection under international refugee law.