Demography and Rights: Women, Children and Access to Asylum

Abstract

Women and children are normally treated as one homogenous group by those analyzing refugee law. Women and children are aggregated as one disadvantaged and neglected group. It is claimed that women and children who apply for refugee status independently are more likely to be denied than men. This paper suggests that the tendency to aggregate the two groups is misguided. It obscures the historical differences in consideration of the position of women and children as refugees, and asylum seekers, differences which illuminate the diverse sources of political pressure to expand protection; it distorts the empirical picture regarding current access to asylum protection for these two groups of asylum applicants; and, most significantly, perhaps, it obscures the different strategies necessary to secure greater inclusion and improved access to asylum protection for each group today.

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