Migrant women, violence, and the securitization of European borders: how asylum regimes endanger the lives of migrant women

Abstract

Adopting the concepts of vulnerability, intersectionality and gender as lenses of inquiry, this thesis will analyze the Mediterranean migration framework and attempt to answer to the main question “Does migration pose a danger to women?” Through identifying the gendered, social, racial, political and institutional circumstance that underlie women’s vulnerability to gendered sexual violence, it will argue that the selective nature of the European migration and asylum regime, together with border externalization policies, determine the structural vulnerability that affects women asylum seekers, exposing them to the risk of violence. Despite an apparatus of European norms and values that extol the protection of human rights at the core of the Eu itself, the contrary direction of asylum policies, the politicization of migrant women and their instrumentalization for border control purposes, reveal not only the organized hypocrisy of European institutions but also the willingness of member states to control migrants bodies and the exercise of their right to mobility. The paper does not aim of course, to find solutions but to draw attention to the need of a better reception of asylum seekers but and above all, on the need of autonomy and self determination of migrant women. Often crushed by the bureaucracy of the European reception systems they are deprived of their dignity and freedom to control their own lives. The European Union and its member states need to reconcile the normative advancements made in the field of international protection of women from a gender perspective, with the implementation of migration policies capable of respecting these norms.