On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Of course, hostility towards refugees and asylum seekers in Europe long predates the aggressive policies of Theresa May. Indeed, it has been one of Europe’s hallmarks, notably in the second half of the twentieth century, a type of post-war consensus where inhumanity, which was thought to have been assigned to the past after the Second World War, quietly and then unquietly festers. Hatred of migrants can even be seen as a direct consequence of that war. As historian Tony Judt describes it, the relative ethnic purity that settled over Europe after the war was the surreal fulfilment of Hitler’s legacy. Today’s migrants clamouring at the door of Europe are its ghosts.55 Many of them are also trying to exchange the crushed and/or exploitative economies of former colonies by ‘building a nest’ in the gaps of the economies of their former oppressors (claiming a place which, to say the least, might be seen as rightfully theirs).56 In 1994, migration and human rights lawyers Jacqueline Bhabha and Sue Shutter described the dire record on migration of European countries as a whole, or ‘Fortress Europe’, as it was then termed (we could say that Brexit has merely contracted the space). One point three million refugees were living in Europe, as compared with two million at the time in Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world. In May 1993, the German parliament voted to amend the constitution and revoke the right of asylum in response to a dramatic escalation in xenophobia and racist violence, coupled with the resurgence of the far right, following an influx of migrants over the previous eighteen months. A betrayal by Western governments of the post-war commitment to human rights was, write Bhabha and Shutter, becoming ‘increasingly harsh, not to say hysterical’.57 The tightening of immigration policy is always accompanied by frenzy.

  Today the violence inherent in such policy is if anything more blatant. In June 2019, a legal submission to the International Criminal Court argued for the prosecution of the EU and member states for intentionally allowing thousands of deaths of migrants at sea – with ‘foreknowledge and full awareness of the lethal consequences’ – in order to deter others.58 These decisions expose the lunatic undercurrents of the so-called reason of state. Their irrationality seems to know no bounds. When states across Europe announce that they are suspending all rescue boats for migrants at sea in order to deter them from an unsafe crossing, they surely know that, as a result of this policy, more migrants will drown.59 When the French and British governments agree to shut down the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp, on the grounds that it is unruly and dangerous, they must be aware that the numbers of minors attempting the perilous Channel crossing in flimsy dinghies and boats will rise.60

  In August 2015, Angela Merkel stunned the world by opening the doors of her country to a million migrants with her famous utterance ‘Wir schaffen das’ (‘We will handle this’ or even ‘Yes we can’). To many, it felt like an act of atonement, or at least the sign of a wish that Germany appear humane. The fact that only a few months before she had screwed Greece financially by refusing to forgive the country’s debt as the German debt had been forgiven after the war – which if anything she seemed to forget – simply shows how much more comfortable it is for a political leader (for anyone) to feel magnanimous than to be absolved of a crime. In relation to Greece it was also the Federal Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, who bore down on her, not to speak of the banks. But even if she has never explicitly made the link to the nation’s past, there is surely an inverted echo: making room for the wretched of the earth as the opposite of Hitler’s land seizure policy of Lebensraum which sent millions on the move.

  Merkel must also have been conscious of the political danger she was courting. In 2017, the far right entered the Bundestag for the first time since 1945 in the form of the AfD (‘Alternative for Germany’) which is calling for the borders to be closed – its supporters have cited the arrival of the refugees as their top concern. This was the context for the death of Walter Lübcke, who was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head in June 2019. Several of her allies and cabinet members who have publicly stood up for refugees have received death threats.61 The AfD is also demanding an end to the country’s preoccupation with public memory – the ‘culture of atonement’ for Second World War atrocities – and a restoration of national pride. Memory and borders shut down. ‘As the harmonisation process gathers steam,’ write Bhabha and Shutter of the tightening policy across Europe, it ‘obliterates the past’.62 The defence – and we know historically that most fortifications turn out to be useless – goes to work on two levels, on the land and in the head. Such panicked entrenchment suggests that it is the vulnerability of migrants that makes them so hated. A sudden, highly visible influx of refugees, observed British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in one of his last interviews, draws to the surface the dim suspicion that our fate lies with forces beyond our mastery and control, feelings we try to ‘stifle and hide’ (a theme that has been constant here).63 These migrants are the pitiful reminder of the most shameful moments of European history, and also of the fragility with which in the end all human subjects, regardless of nation, race, wealth or status, hold on to the ramparts of life. Just as it seems to be the vulnerability of the women at Yarl’s Wood that provokes the next stage of violation, the touching, the taunts, the jibes.

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  The 1951 Geneva Convention on the status of refugees did not include gender as a ground of persecution: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion were the only categories recognised. The implications for women refugees and asylum seekers have been momentous and have surely played their part in what was to come. In a much-discussed case from 1984, Sofia Campos-Guardado, a Salvadoran woman, fled to the US and applied for asylum after being forced, together with her female cousins, to witness her uncle and male cousins, activists in the agrarian reform movement, being hacked to death. The women were then raped and told to leave on pain of death. Her case was rejected by the US Board of Immigration Appeals on the grounds that her account had failed to prove that the harm she feared might come to her was based on her political opinion or membership of a particular group (despite the fact that the attackers chanted political slogans during the assault).64 In the same year, Olimpia Lazo-Majano, also from El Salvador, failed to persuade the Board that the repeated rapes and beatings she had suffered at the hands of a military sergeant, who threatened to expose her as a subversive as a post facto justification for killing her, qualified as political (his actions were ruled as ‘strictly personal’). In this case, a majority on the Ninth Circuit Court disagreed and overturned the decision, but according to the one judge who produced a dissenting opinion, the sergeant – in uniform and carrying a gun which he used ‘to vent upon her his rapacious assault’ – was displaying a ‘pathological display of a lover’s wooing’.65

  Since the 1990s rape has been seen as a violation of human rights and a persecutable offence under international law. Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, it has been defined as a crime of genocide. As feminists have long pointed out, the rape of women pertains to the group since one of the things it does is to enforce a woman’s place in the subordinate category of women (always containing an element of display, it is the great ugly performative of gender). In the twentieth century its collective dimension has never been more clear. In countries ranging from Chile and Argentina in the 1970s to Haiti and Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, rape has been used as an instrument of national security. Under the 1990s post-Marcos government of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, the government, which had lifted martial law, continued military operations against the New People’s Army, breaking into homes and raping women suspected of being insurgents or of working on their behalf.66

  In Bosnia, women were systematically raped by the nationalist military on grounds of ethnicity. Mixed-ethnic marriages, relatively common in Serbia, were seen as ‘factories of bastards’ and the female body a spoil of war, a territory whose borders ‘spread through birth of enemy sons’. When the Belgrade feminist group Women in Black visited the refu
gee camps they found that the women who had been raped were being pressured to ‘suppress their own subjective understanding of their experiences’. They were being prepared as ‘fodder’ for the next war which would be waged to overcome the ‘national shame’.67 These rapes are political, although the rape victim is permitted neither access to her own experience nor any control over the consequences of the act. The irony is that the assault on the woman can fuel over-masculinised identities which will in turn make rape – as an act of national vindication – more likely. Anti-rape campaigners in situations of military conflict or foreign occupation – the rape in 1995 of a twelve-year-old girl in Okinawa by American troops is a famous instance – always run the risk of inflaming nationalist military swagger.68 Viewed in this light, classifying rape as purely personal in relation to any asylum seeker in flight from a situation of military conflict is a form of daylight robbery. It strips of all significance an experience which, as numerous survivors testify, already works to blank out the mind.

  Despite the shifts in international law, women migrants raped in their home country can still not be confident of asylum in the liberal democracies of the West. Violence against migrant women, whether perpetrated in the country of origin or after their arrival, is simply not sufficient cause. The number of women immigrants refused leave to remain after being subject to domestic violence in the UK more than doubled from twelve to thirty per cent between 2012 and 2016 (a direct outcome of the hostile environment policy).69 ‘What we are doing in these cases is saying we care about domestic violence,’ observed Thangam Debbonaire, Labour MP for Bristol West in August 2019, ‘except if you have insecure immigration status and then we don’t.’70 ‘From the point of view of the government,’ writes gender historian Eithne Lubhéid of the situation in the United States, ‘the rapes of undocumented women remain largely unrepresentable.’71 This is at least partly due to the silence surrounding the systematic rape by border guards of migrants and those seeking asylum in the US.72 Across Europe, the same story applies. In September 2019, asylum seekers from North Africa claimed to recognise the captors who had systematically raped women at a migrant registration centre in Messina (three men were arrested by detectives on charges of torture, kidnapping and human trafficking).73

  Whether or not asylum will be granted appears to be something of a lottery. In the US, for example, evidence of the woman’s resistance to subordination has been the condition for her to be potentially eligible for asylum based on her ‘political opinion’ (one of the categories recognised by the Geneva Convention). In one case from 1999, the judge ruled in favour of a Guatemalan woman who had undergone years of domestic violence, including rape and assault, on the grounds that she was opposed to male domination and had therefore been attacked in retaliation for her political views (this would make all resistance to domestic violence a political act, as feminists have long insisted it is).74 The Board of Immigration then overturned the decision. In the same year, agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the States came to the house of ‘Ana Flores’ and arrested her for deportation because she had bitten (sic) a habitually abusive husband.75 In 1990, the Canadian authorities granted refugee status to a woman and her two daughters on the grounds of a well-founded fear of persecution based on their membership of the social group ‘consisting of women and girls who do not conform to Islamic fundamentalist norms’.76

  But if these decisions in favour of the women applicants are humane, the logic – the grounds of recognition – remain suspect. What does it mean to make resistance a condition of freedom from oppression? What hidden, or not so hidden, Islamophobic agenda might be lurking behind the generic category of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, or behind the idea that women can be seen as belonging to the legally requisite status of a group only on the grounds that they are resisting it? Why should trashing one’s home country and culture be one of the necessary conditions of asylum? ‘Some of us,’ remarks Saeed Rahman, a woman from Pakistan who was granted asylum because of persecution based on her sexual orientation, ‘as people of color and immigrants in this country, do not buy completely into the discourse of freedom and rights.’77 She grew up, she adds, under a military dictatorship in Pakistan strongly backed by the US. ‘Are we willing’, asks Judith Butler, ‘to have our claims to freedom instrumentalised for the purpose of a racist European national identity through restrictive and coercive immigration policies?’78

  And what is being implied by the suggestion that men may sometimes have political, sometimes purely personal, reasons for assaulting their wives, with the corresponding implication that in the second case, flight by the assailed woman, and hence the woman’s asylum claim, is not justified? Again, it is as if the fragility of the woman’s status, the unstable ground – literally as well as metaphorically – that she treads, is then reproduced by the uncertain and unpredictable legal apparatus which is meant to be protecting her. Despite the voice of feminism over more than half a century, it would seem that, as far as migrant women are concerned, what goes on in private, the world of domestic intimacy, however violent, still falls outside the purview of the law. In July 2020, MPs in the UK were told that migrant women with no recourse to public funds would be excluded from the forthcoming domestic abuse bill. ‘The state’, observed Jess Phillips, the Labour shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, ‘is continuing the threat of the perpetrator who says “no one will believe you, you won’t have anywhere to go and no support” – and right now the abuser is absolutely right.’79 In 2018, then US Attorney General Jeff Sessions passed an interim order that ruled out domestic abuse as grounds for granting refuge.

  In what has become a notorious case, Vilma Carrillo, a Guatemalan mother whose husband had beaten and almost killed her, was separated from her eleven-year-old child, Yeisvi, at the border. When she flew to Georgia to be reunited with her daughter, she was taken to a detention centre and threatened with deportation, while her child, who had US citizenship, was put out to care in Arizona two thousand miles away. A legal petition to release Carrillo on humanitarian grounds was turned down, even though it was clear that it would be impossible for her to avoid her violent husband if she returned to Guatemala. ‘She faces certain death’, stated Shana Tabak, the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Tahirih Justice Center, ‘if she returns.’ Lawyers appealing her deportation claimed she was not given a fair hearing as her papers were in a backpack confiscated on entry to the US and because her first language was a Mayan dialect different from that spoken by her interpreters. In December 2018, a Washington, DC District Court judge ruled Sessions’s decision unlawful for having imposed ‘an arbitrarily heightened standard to credible determinations of fear’.80

  In October 2018, months after Trump announced that he was ending his policy of forced separation, a five-year-old Honduran girl, Helen, was seized from her grandmother, Noehmi, who had fled along with several other relatives after her teenage son was threatened by gangs. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated to Texas four years before. Arrested at the South Texas border, the family passed through several detention centres, at the last of which the child was taken and placed in a cage. ‘The girl will stay here,’ the Border Guards told Noehmi, ‘and you will be deported.’ It took months for Noehmi and Jeny to track the child down. Eventually they traced her to a Baptist shelter contracted by the federal government, where she was being taught to develop ‘SMARTgoals’ – goals that are ‘Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound’ – as if at five years old she had been hired by an upmarket commercial firm. Although she had known enough, even at that young age, to assert her legal right to have her custody reviewed, when it came to filling out the requisite Flores Bond form, she ticked the box withdrawing her previous request for a hearing (border officials had helped her to fill out the form). The form also declared its right to determine ‘whether you pose a danger to the community’ (she was five years old). In her backpack was found a sketch of ‘Lady Liber
ty’ with the instruction that the students ‘draw one of the most representative symbols of the United States’.81

  It would seem that the power to separate mothers from their children excites especial venom. Visiting the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, Schwartz tells the story of one woman who was forced into solitary confinement and ‘subject to starvation’ when she tried to tell a visiting official that she had been separated from her child.82 This too has a history. From as far back as the 1970s, border patrollers regularly engaged in beatings, torture, murder and rape including of girls as young as twelve, using the children of migrants either as bait or to extract confessions. Mothers, one border agent is reported as boasting, ‘would always break’.83 By 2016, the year of Trump’s election, more was already being spent by the US on immigration and border control than on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined. Children would often try to cross the border alone because increased militarisation made it too dangerous for families to travel together.84 In July 2020, it emerged that two years previously Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had advised attorneys during a conference call that there could be no ban on prosecuting migrant parents with children under the age of five, which effectively meant that no child was too young to be separated from his or her parents.85