Last year the national Board of Immigration Appeals reversed a judge’s decision to grant a Guatemalan woman asylum in the United States because it decided she wasn’t fleeing persecution for her political opinions or membership in a social group. Rather the board said that since the woman was fleeing domestic violence by an abusive husband, this was an internal criminal law matter for Guatemala to decide.
Feminists, on the other hand, argue that in fact domestic violence is an act of political oppression that targets women because of their gender. As Karen Musalo, director of UC Hastings’ Center for Gender and Refugee Studies told the San Francisco Weekly,
Everyone agrees that [domestic violence] is persecution. The board is saying that [the circumstances] are a shame but they are bound by the statutes of the law. We, the people that disagree, say that you can interpret the statutes differently. But the effect is that right now, we might not be able to offer protection to women persecuted because of their gender.
Should women who are victims of domestic violence be allowed to seek asylum in the United States?
As a libertarian I favor simply opening up the borders and letting anyone who wants to come to the United States, so I certainly hope this Guatemalan woman is able to stay in this country. On the other hand Musalo and others don’t seem to have thought through their position very well.
While domestic violence is deplorable, all of the evidence indicates that it is far from a gender-specific crime in which men target women. Not only do studies of domestic violence in the United States repeatedly show that women are as likely to engage in acts of domestic violence as men (a recent study even found higher incidence rates by women) but we also know domestic violence incidence among lesbian couples is comparable to that which occurs in heterosexual couples.
Radical feminists like to resist the notion, but violence is a human condition rather than a specifically male characteristic.
In addition, one of the obvious problems the immigration courts are concerned with is that if gender is created as a special category that men might well form the largest class of individuals targeted based on their gender. University of California Berkeley law professor Patty Blum told the San Francisco that, “The paradigm of refugee law is about the concerns for men. THey are about the public sphere activities that men participate in, the political organizations they participate in, the speeches they make. But women are impacted in this society in this more private sphere.”
Huh? If you had visited Guatemala during the height of its civil war you would have found many men forced into military service by one side or another who were targeted by the government or rebels specifically because they were men. Men who would have much preferred to grow old farming their small plots of land were forced to join government or rebel militias, fight and often die simply because they were men.
Immigration courts clearly want to avoid those kinds of claims. Again, I think pretty much anyone should be allowed to cross the border, but if there are going to be laws, feminists shouldn’t pretend that women are the only ones targeted for special repression based on their sex.
Source:
Shelter from the Storm. Bernice Yeung, San Francisco Weekly, October 25, 2000.