RTÉ Brainstorm – How Ireland’s asylum system commits violence against women
Whitaker Institute member Carol Ballantine, of the Gender and Public Policy Cluster, has a new piece in RTÉ Brainstorm. The article explores how Ireland’s asylum system enables violence against women.
How Ireland’s asylum system commits violence against women
Opinion: the Irish state has accepted its responsibilities to eliminate violence against women, but it is enabling further violence in its treatment of migrants
Migration is rarely out of the news, and refugee and asylum seeker stories tend to garner most attention, both positive and negative. Often it is necessary to remind people of the many types of violence that play a part in forcing people to migrate from their home countries.
At the recent European Conference on Domestic Violence (ECDV) in Oslo, the focus fell on a different kind of harm: the violence perpetrated by European states against asylum seeking and refugee women. Trends that have been documented in other European countries are clearly present in Ireland, where asylum seekers are offered “direct provision” of accommodation with few basic rights, and the average length of stay in direct provision in two years (though stays of up to 12 years have been recorded). These conditions are themselves responsible for increasing women’s structural vulnerability to sexual harassment and assault, and especially to intimate partner violence. Continue reading…