Abstract
The #MeToo movement brought with it much needed conversations and media coverage of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). The reckoning began in Hollywood, and the movement has only slowly reached the injustices that individuals in less powerful and visible positions have experienced. However, forced migrants who have had to endure SGBV appear to be still absent from public conversations. This is where Gender, Violence, Refugees can be a great start to educate and raise awareness. The book includes chapters by an interdisciplinary and international team of scholars as well as practitioners that span a wide variety of topics. The authors show that SGBV takes on different forms, including but not limited to sexual assault, forced (and early) marriages (Buscher, Krause, Ensor), military conscription (Janmyr), property laws that limit female returnees’ access to their ancestral lands (Lukunka), and gender-specific violence during deportations (Betts). Similarly, the editors adopt a far-reaching interpretation of “refugee”—not limiting it to legal refugee status—and as such, experiences of many other forced migrants including deportees and returnees are also discussed. Unlike many other publications on gender issues, the editors and authors made a conscious effort to establish that gender means more than just women. For example, Janmyr discusses how male Sudanese refugees in Uganda experience violence because of their gender. She details how these men are forcefully and involuntarily recruited to join armed forces and rebel groups in their native country. Subsequently, Janmyr argues that Sudanese refugee men in Uganda are more vulnerable than women and children. While vulnerability is difficult to quantify and can also be highly objective, Janmyr and other contributors in the volume make clear that most “gender programing” by international aid organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) explicitly is for women; in particular cis-women. But the authors do not just point to the shortcomings of these programs, they make a number of very concrete suggestions how these interventions can be improved: to include women in the design stages (Martin), by “engaging men and boys in efforts to prevent and to respond to SGBV” (p. 137) for example through faith-based organizations (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Lewis, and Cole), by recognizing refugees as active agents, and that most displacements are protracted, and therefore require livelihood/economic programs that target adults and children (Buscher).
Another analytical strength of the book is the authors’ keen attention to the intersection of different identities. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. demonstrate the important roles faith-based organizations and local faith communities play to address gender inequalities and SGBV. At the same time, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al. as well as Mc Cluskey show how stereotypes and misgivings about religion can negatively affect programs for refugees in the Global North and Global South. Throughout several chapters, readers are reminded of the significance of the intersection of race and gender (Mc Cluskey, Olivius, Turner).
While Gender, Violence, Refugees is an excellent read and contribution to the fields of refugee and gender studies, there are some areas that are notably missing. For example, although the editors acknowledge LGBTQ+ refugee experiences in their introduction, they are not further discussed or simply overlooked—when “single-sex dormitories” (p. 115) are presented as a way to reduce SGBV assuming that this is limited to heterosexual encounters. Laudably, the authors collectively provide evidence that the binary assumption of men as perpetrators of SGBV and women as victims and survivors is incorrect. However, SGBV in all of the featured cases seems to be limited to the refugee and/or host community populations. In other words, none of the chapters examine how some international aid workers have also committed SGBV against the populations they are charged to protect. In addition, the second part of the book only includes case studies from the continent of Africa. This, together with the picture on the cover (depicting a Black men assaulting a Black woman), further contributes to a particular racialization of SGBV. Finally, there are also some methodological questions. Most of the researchers are from the Global North, and as such it would have been helpful to read more about their methods and data collection and how they dealt with their status as cultural/racial/linguistic outsiders.
These points aside, many of which could be addressed in a sequel, Gender, Violence, Refugees should be a required reading for graduate students and scholars of (forced) migration and policymakers working with displaced populations.