Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence

8. Gender-Based Violence: Perspectives from the Male European Front Line

129 8 Gender-Based Violence: Perspectives from the Male European Front Line Uwe Jacobs This chapter is primarily a first-person account of direct service work and an attempt to reflect on motivations and issues encountered. It is secondarily the perspective of one who has created and directed a program for survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) who have fled to seek political asylum protection in the United States. This chapter is issued from a relatively protected and privileged front line and removed from the primary trauma of GBV. During the past five years, my colleagues and I at Survivors International , in San Francisco, California, have assisted several hundred asylum seekers who suffered rape, trafficking, domestic violence, female genital cutting, and persecution on account of their gender, sexual orientation , or transgender identity. GBV, from our point of view, includes all these forms of violence inflicted on women and sexual minorities in the context of political, social, cultural, and economic structures that perpetuate oppression, exploitation, and violence through either direct harm or the refusal to protect against violence. We are health professionals and social service providers—frontline workers—who assist refugee survivors of GBV by providing medical and psychological treatment, case management , advocacy, and access to self-help activities and resources. We work with immigration attorneys who represent these survivors in their quest to obtain political asylum, and we provide medical-legal and psycho-legal documentation and perform expert witness testimony in immigration courts. Through our research, comparative studies, and firsthand experiences , we have demonstrated that the effects of GBV are equivalent to those of political torture perpetrated by state actors. 130   Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence Our perspective on GBV is one of conceptualizing the rights of women and sexual minorities as inalienable human rights, where freedom from violence and persecution has to be demanded and achieved as a restorative act and within the context of international human rights law. Survivors of GBV, from this perspective, are entitled to refugee status under U.S. asylum law and deserve access to medical and psycho-social assistance as they rebuild their lives in their new country of refuge. This conceptualization is not to be separated from the context of our work, which takes place in a country of refuge and exclusively with survivors, rather than in communities where the violence took place. While this context is in some important respects still adversarial, nevertheless it holds a certain position of privilege because no compromises need to be made with local community actors in the survivors’ communities of origin. Survivors have no further need to get along with husbands, other family members they depend on, or officials who have refused to protect them. In cases where abusive husbands have come after survivors in the United States, they are able to obtain protection for themselves and their children from local law enforcement. The roughly twenty health professionals at Survivors International, consisting predominantly of clinical psychologists and clinical social workers , may here be defined as frontline workers in the sense that we come face-to-face with survivors of GBV in order to engage with them in a process of examining their histories of violence and its consequences in both clinical and forensic settings. In many cases, in-depth confrontations with the details of survivors’ trauma histories result directly from the pressures of the legal claim to asylum. Survivors cannot ask for protection without a full disclosure of their victimization, which tends to be retraumatizing and shameful. One of the principal challenges for frontline workers in this situation is to engage survivors in a paradigm of forced exposure and investigation, which is illustrated and analyzed in a later section. The Political Context For most of my time spent in the field of human rights, I have focused on the issue of torture as perpetrated by agents of the state. In my over ten years of work with survivors of torture, during which time I became a specialist in evaluating political asylum seekers, I was increasingly faced with individuals who had fled their home countries after having been abused by their husbands and other family members, as well as by others in their communities. Like political refugees, the women and gay men Perspectives from the Male European Front Line   131 have no freedom, protection, or recourse where they came from, and their lives were shattered by cruelty and violence. As some...