Topic of the Month Europe Must Act 2024
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We’ve come a long way since the1951 refugee convention, which largely only used male pronouns and didn’t mention gender throughout the entire document. Since the 1990s, UNHCR has issued more recent policy documents such as:
Policy on refugee women[1],
The Guidelines on the protection of refugee women[2] and
The Sexual violence against refugees: guidelines on prevention and response [3].
All of which sought to call attention to gendered persecution and the ways gender may affect the experience of someone on the move.
However, as is often the case when it comes to policy, there are still multiple ways that reception conditions, the media, asylum systems and outcomes and many
more experiences continue to have a gender bias. Moreover, it has also been highlighted that whilst the need to offer international protection for reasons of gender-related persecution and violence is increasingly acknowledged, in practice it is still not effectively available[4].
How many women and girls are on the move?
According to UNHCR, women make up roughly 50% of any refugee, internally displaced or stateless population globally. When we look at the most recent figures
for the number of female asylum applicants in the European Union in 2022, there were 253,485 first-time female applicants, which is roughly 29% of all applications.
One study takes a deeper look into why there seems to be a gender disparity in Europe when it comes to asylum applications[5]. Although the common explanation relies on family migration strategies – where men migrate first and then their wives and families follow – this study found that this explanation isn’t plausible as the family unification figures don’t tend to coincide. Instead, they argue that it is various dimensions of gender inequality found in the country of origin that appear to dictate the likelihood that women will migrate as well as men. For example:
“The higher the share of women relative to the share of men in the origin country labor market, the higher the relative share of female asylum-seekers”p11
This study helps to demonstrate the way that gender inequality shapes women and their ability to move. Moreover, it exemplifies how many different factors contribute to everyone’s migration experience. That identity, culture and lived experience in a person’s home country also play a role in shaping their migration decisions before they’re even considered to be someone on the move.
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References:
[1] UNHCR. (1990). Policy on refugee women. UNHCR. Geneva.
[2] UNHCR. (1991). Guidelines on the protection of refugee women. UNHCR. Geneva.
[3] UNHCR. (1995). Sexual violence against refugees: guidelines on prevention and response. UNHCR. Geneva.
[4] Freedman, J. (2012). Taking Gender Seriously in Asylum and Refugee Policies. In: Khory, K.R. (eds) Global Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978113700712_3
[5] Maximilian Schiele (12 Jan 2024): The Role of Gender in Asylum Migration to Europe: Analyzing Country-Level Factors of Gendered Selection of Asylum Seekers to Europe, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2023.2298515
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