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11THE FEMINIZATION OF ASYLUM MIGRATION FROM AFRICA PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES JANE FREEDMAN One of the accepted characteristics of contemporary migratory flows from Africa to countries of the global North is “feminization.” The newness and extent of this feminization are matters of some debate, but one area where there is a clear increase in women migrants is in asylum migration. This growth comes at a time when governments in many states are introducing increasingly restrictive and repressive policies with regard to asylum seekers. Regarded as “false” refugees by much of the media and public opinion, asylum seekers are more and more often seeing their claims rejected by the authorities who determine national refugee status. In addition , restrictions on the welfare and social rights of asylum seekers and increasing use of detention, dispersal, and deportation have made the living conditions for many asylum seekers particularly difficult (Bloch and Schuster 2005; Valluy 2005). While supposedly gender neutral, these policies may have specific gendered impacts that are ignored by policy makers but that may lead to particular insecurities for women seeking asylum. Further, women may adopt specific strategies for seeking asylum in order to try to conform to the particular constructions of who is a “real” refugee . A gendered analysis of the way that asylum seekers are constructed through asylum determination procedures shows that although in some circumstances it may now be easier for a woman to be granted refugee status on the basis of gender-related persecution, this is dependent on her ability to conform both to an appropriate image of the “convention refugee ” and to representations of proper modes of “female” behavior. This chapter seeks to explore the experiences of African women seeking asylum in industrialized countries, specifically within the European Union. I argue that restrictive legislation and policies within the EU have Jane Freedman 212 not stemmed the increasing flow of women wishing to seek asylum, and that on the contrary the causes of asylum migration from Africa are ever more present. The current policies and legislation have, however, pushed some women into situations of great insecurity and have made them reliant in many cases on the services of smugglers or traffickers to reach Europe. Paradoxically, European Union policies designed to crack down on trafficking and illegal migration have often just increased the demand for such services, and gendered structures of inequality may mean that women are more vulnerable to exploitation in this case. The chapter is based on research carried out in various European countries from 2005 to 2008, including interviews with asylum seekers, policy makers, and representatives of various NGOs and associations involved in the support of asylum seekers and refugees. WOMEN ASYLUM SEEKERS: THE “INVISIBLE MINORITY”? One of the difficulties in researching the “feminization” of asylum migration from Africa is a lack of accurate gender-disaggregated statistics. While UNHCR has called on states to provide gender-disaggregated data on asylum seeking and refugee populations in order to ensure a more accurate and comprehensive knowledge of such populations, there are still large gaps in the available data.1 These gaps have led some to overestimate the proportion of women in refugee and asylum-seeking populations, arguing for example that “the faces of refugees are overwhelmingly female: women and children represent eighty percent of the world’s twenty seven million refugees and displaced people” (Oosterveld 1996: 570). This type of claim is used to try to reverse a previous “invisibility” of women in research and policy making on asylum seekers and refugees, and to press for further national and international actions. However, a basic problem with these statistics is that they conflate women and children into a single category, thus obscuring even further the real nature of the statistical differences between men and women.2 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 that can 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. Breaking down the available data for 2006 by gender reveals that less than half of the overall population of concern is accounted for—only 13.9 million out of 32.9 million persons. Of these roughly half are women, although the proportions vary greatly depending on the refugee situation and the region of asylum (UNHCR 2006). Women are the majority in...

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