In the years since 2001, Australian governments on both sides of politics have at times appealed to compassion to justify their asylum seeker policies. This article takes these discourses of ...compassion - contradictory and cynical as they sometimes seem - and subjects them to careful and systematic analysis. It seeks to identify the underlying model of compassion that these government discourses employ, and to explain its significance. Ultimately it argues that the model of compassion that has been advanced by successive Australian governments deviates from traditional philosophical understandings of the concept. In reserving compassion for the weak and the passive, government discourses have allowed Australia to understand itself both as 'good' and as powerful. When privilege replaces solidarity as the basis for compassion, discourses of compassion - like the 'hardline' rhetoric that scholars have often prioritised in their analyses - speak to the fears and insecurities of the Australian people.
Background
Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is considered a human rights violation and is practiced all over the world. It has been used as a basis for seeking asylum in various ...countries, including in the USA since 1996, and the precedent‐setting matter of Kissindja. Clinicians in the USA and elsewhere who perform asylum evaluations may be called upon to evaluate women who seek asylum based on their FGM/C status or risk. In this manuscript, we provide expert‐informed best practices to conduct asylum evaluations based specifically on FGM/C. We review evidence‐based history taking, physical examination unique to the population of women and girls affected by FGM/C, and consider the evaluation in the context of trauma‐informed care.
Conclusion
Although general clinical skills often suffice to perform asylum evaluations, FGM/C represents a unique niche within the field of gynecological asylum evaluations and requires additional background knowledge and clinical competencies.
Ethical approval
As this is a clinical review and does not involve patients or research subjects no ethical approval was sought or was necessary.
FGM/C is a human rights violation, used globally as a basis for asylum. We provide expert‐informed best practices for asylum evaluations based on FGM/C.
The last three decades have witnessed tectonic shifts in the doctrine and political valence of laws protecting religious exercise. In this Note, I analyze how this change has created the potential ...for sanctuary churches to receive greater legal protections today than during the 1980s sanctuary movement. This case study illustrates significant shifts in religious accommodation doctrine and helps to illuminate the transsubstantive nature of religious exercise protections. By drawing attention to sanctuary claims, this Note also helps to disrupt the existing partisan divide over religious freedom by reminding progressives of the potential value of RFRA claims for marginalized individuals, while highlighting to conservatives the importance of placing limits on religious accommodation claims. My hope is that this will motivate a return to an earlier consensus around accommodation as a means to protect systemically vulnerable groups and individuals in our society.
This article explores how queer refugees’ navigation of ‘the closet’, centre of the coming out metaphor, is subverting its Scandinavian Design. While many queer people in Denmark conceptualize coming ...out of the closet as a desirable process, allowing queer subjects to become who they truly are, this understanding is challenged by the experiences of queer refugees who are strategically (not) coming out of the closet in different spaces and at different times. Through interviews with queer refugees and volunteers of a support group in Copenhagen, the article shows how these individuals negotiate the continuous closet – (re)appearing in different spaces and at different times. In being cautious about where to come out (on dating apps, in support groups, at home), to whom (friends, family, potential lovers) and at what time(s), queer refugees balance the refugee regimes’ expectations of normative LGBT(IQ)+ identities with their own complex lived realities.
This review brought together research investigating barriers asylum seekers and refugees (AS&R) face in accessing and negotiating mental health (MH) services. The candidacy framework (CF) was used as ...synthesizing argument to conceptualize barriers to services (Dixon-Woods et al. in BMC Med Res Methodol 6:35,
2006
). Five databases were systematically searched. Twenty-three studies were included and analyzed using the CF. The seven stages of the framework were differentiated into two broader processes—access and negotiation of services. Comparatively more data was available on barriers to access than negotiation of services. The
Identification of Candidacy
(access) and
Appearances at Services
(negotiation) were the most widely discussed stages in terms of barriers to MH care. The stage that was least discussed was
Adjudications
(negotiation). The CF is useful to understand inter-related barriers to MH care experienced by AS&R. A holistic approach is needed to overcome these barriers together with further research investigating understudied areas of candidacy.
ABSTRACT
This article considers the duration and meaning of insecurity—as it is experienced over the course of a life and moves over borders—through the narrative of a Palestinian woman from Shatila ...now seeking asylum in Belgium. Structured around one person's account of the asylum process, it considers what a singular case can reveal about a collective migrant condition, the inconstant line separating secure from insecure states, and the reconstitution of a secure self in conditions of chronic uncertainty.
The majority of asylum seeker and refugees around the world currently reside in cities, but continue to face issues of mobility, documentation, and rights. While research has looked at designated ...buildings and centres as a type of border excluding refugees and asylum seekers in cities, underlying contention over the location and presence of specific buildings and physical structures has not been fully examined. Therefore, I analyse how various state and non-state actors have challenged the location and presence of certain buildings and physical structures designated for refugees and asylum seekers in cities. Specifically, I review the past two decades of legal case records, supplemented by interviews and field observations, around legal and political contention over the relocations and closures of Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) in post-apartheid South African cities. I argue that RRO relocations and closures highlight the objectives of head state officials, though in relation to ambivalent interests and litigation by various actors over the jurisdiction of specific buildings, neighbourhoods, and cities. I develop the concept of state-urban borders to highlight the constitutive process of RROs as contested state borders within urban spaces contributing to broader discussions on the multiplicity and contingency of borders within cities.
Concerns with 'vulnerability' increasingly proliferate in global and regional pacts, international and domestic legislations, and policy discourses and practices regarding migration and international ...protection. Also in France, vulnerability governance has made its inroads, and policy documents hail vulnerability considerations as a strengthening of the politics of reception and integration of asylum seekers and a means to improve accommodation and care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, I argue that vulnerability governance, situated within the context of securitization of migration and budget constraints in the reception system, leads to a 'differential inclusion', which is partial, conditional and precarious. By examining the understanding and operationalization of vulnerability within French migration legislation, policies, and governance practices, the study exposes how normative constructs of gender and sexuality inform the identification and hierarchization of vulnerable persons. Ethnographic evidence illustrates how these norms are perpetuated by governance actors, including civil society, and sometimes strategically mobilized or internalized by asylum seekers in their quest for recognition and assistance. In conclusion, the article highlights how protection-seeking migrants also contest the authorities' understanding and operationalization of vulnerability. Through protests and legal actions, they expose the state's role in producing and differentially distributing vulnerability through abandonment and destitution.
Here, Man Is Nothing! Griffiths, Melanie
Men and masculinities,
10/2015, Volume:
18, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In policy terms, “genuine” refugees are conceptualized as vulnerable, coerced victims, an image that does not reflect the realities of most male refugees and asylum seekers. Not only does the image ...conflict with dominant forms of masculinity, but as refused asylum seekers have their purported vulnerability rejected and honesty challenged as part of having their claim refused, there is an implicit conclusion that they are deceptive, opportunistic, or even criminal. The emblematic “bogus asylum seeker” figure is generally imagined to be male and is associated with gendered suspicions and expectations regarding agency. Concurrently, however, the asylum system operates various emasculating tendencies. Using testimonies from male refused asylum seekers, this article explores the interplay of gender and asylum law and policy, examining how individuals understand and negotiate their reconstruction from vulnerable would-be refugee to undeserving “bogus” asylum seeker. Gender is presented as an unspoken but critical dimension of this immigration category.
Resettling into a new country may pose many challenges for unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs). In this study we seek to get a better understanding of these challenges through analysing interviews ...with 48 URMs five years after their arrival in Norway, using the concept of turning points as an analytic frame. Gaining a sense of security, feeling affiliated, being loved and cared for, and becoming independent were identified as important turning points. Despite high levels of agency, many of the youths struggled to fulfil these basic needs, possibly due to limited relational and cultural resources. These struggles seemed to interfere with their capacity to participate in important developmental activities, affecting their well‐being and making integration difficult. This study's results accentuate the need for better systems and assistance from people in their support system to help URMs towards feeling secure, affiliated, loved, and independent as this may facilitate resettlement and integration.
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