Gender-based and intersectional violence in migration and refugee contexts: A contextual global approach

Abstract

Gender-based violence is a major infringement of women’s human rights, and an obstacle to sustainable development as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals. In this article, we explore both the processes and findings of our international comparative project on gender-based violence in migration contexts. Our research takes a feminist, intersectional, collaborative, and contextual approach to understand gender-based violence in the context of migration, analysing the ways in which discriminations and inequalities based on gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and age, interact to make certain women more vulnerable to gender-based violence. While we start from the lived experiences of women and persons working with them, we engage meso- and macro-level analyses of border practices, reception conditions and policy implementation, policies and legal systems that exacerbate their plight in order to understand the underlying dynamics that re(produce) patterns of violence. Our project shows the need for situated and contextual analyses of gender-based violence in national contents, but also the global rootedness of gender-based violence, and the key role of States in creating the structural conditions for the production of gender-based violence in migration contexts.

Introduction

In this paper, we discuss insights on global features of gender-based violence (GBV) in diverse migration and refugee settings, drawing upon research findings from our interdisciplinary, collaborative, multi-country project entitled “Violence against Women Migrants and Refugees: Analyzing Causes and Effective Policy Response” (GBV-MIG; 2019-2023). ¹ These research findings balance off global features of GBV in migration and refugee contexts against the specificities of time/place/histories (contexts) and illustrate the significance of understanding both, in order to develop effective policy interventions and policy recommendations for reducing migrant and refugee women’s (MRW) vulnerability to GBV. Research teams from seven countries have collaborated in this international project funded in an international competition through the Gender-Net Plus Consortium, a multi-country consortium, which was formed within Horizon 2020, the biggest EU (European Union) Research and Innovation programme. The national research teams working together developed common theoretical and methodological approaches, while at the national level, each research team adapted the themes and methodologies to local, national, and regional research and policy needs and conditions. While direct comparison was not and could not be a research objective, as the case studies were not comparable, the analysis of GBV in specific migration and refugee contexts allowed us for a more nuanced, well-rounded and ultimately comparative contextual analysis.

Upon providing a brief background of the project, introducing its overall methodological design, and describing the nature of collaborations, we identify and discuss key features of GBV in migration and refugee contexts, as they emerge from our findings. While the features seem to be global in nature, they can only be understood in their specific time / place / history, that is, contextually (Abraham, 2018; Aulenbacher and Riegraf, 2016). In other words, the specificities of contexts in which GBV unfolds make important differences in its experience and impact on the victim-survivors. This reinforces our understanding that GBV is intersectionally situated, that is, impacting on women in their location within a matrix of intersecting inequalities, and in their specific spatial, temporal and social locations. More specifically the key features we discuss in respective sections below are (1) the global character of GBV; (2) GBV in migration: the significance of context; (3) intersectionality; (4) forms of GBV in migration; and (5) GBV on different levels in a migration / refugee context. The first three key features of our project and respective sections below (#1–3) explain and flesh out our main theoretical perspective (global character of GBV; need for contextual analysis; situated intersectionality), while the last two (#4–5) provide findings from different country contexts to illustrate how a global, contextual and intersectional approach works.

The international “Gender-Based Violence in Migration” (GBV-MIG) project

GBV is a major violation of women’s human rights, and an obstacle to sustainable development as set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). GBV against MRW is widespread, but often invisible and under-analysed both in academic research and in policy-making. The international GBV-MIG project examines the interconnections of GBV and migration, the multiple forms of GBV in migration and refugee contexts, but also the underlying causes and aggravating factors of GBV in the various stages of the migration process. GBV may be a cause of migration for some women, but MRW may also be subject to GBV on their journeys and in countries of transit and destination by smugglers, traffickers, border guards and security forces or fellow migrants, and even domestic and intimate partners (Freedman et al., 2022a). The project takes an intersectional approach to understand GBV in migration, analysing the ways in which discriminations and inequalities based on gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity and age, interact to make certain women more vulnerable to GBV and less able to access support and services for survivors than others. Furthermore, women’s vulnerability to GBV may be exacerbated by (1) policies aiming to restrict migration and migrants’ rights, or to increase control of borders, and (2) conditions of reception, and policies for integration of migrants and refugees in receiving countries. A special focus of the project is health, and GBV is a major cause of ill health for women, further exacerbated in migration and refugee contexts (Tastsoglou, 2025). In addition, conceptualizing MRW as active agents with their own individual and collective strategies, the research focused on understanding how policy makers and service providers can better support them in preventing GBV and mitigating its impacts, including negative health and social consequences.

Methodological design

The project was built on international contextual comparison and as such a comparative methodology was adopted across all country partners. The 4-year international project thus entailed a systematic and comprehensive comparative analysis of the ways in which (1) various policy frameworks, social and cultural attitudes to migration, as well as the migration process unfolding within, can combine to increase vulnerabilities to GBV and (2) governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or regional and international policy-making institutions could help to mitigate the risks, protect women and provide better services to survivors. Key objectives included (1) analysis of causes of GBV along the migration journey; (2) estimate of prevalence of different forms of GBV among various groups; (3) analysis of the impact of policies on women’s vulnerability to GBV; (4) assessing current state of services; (5) exploring how women use their agency through individual and collective action; and (6) analysing existing international norms and conventions relating to GBV and assessing their efficacy. These objectives were to be accomplished by national research teams within Europe (Austria, Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Norway) and outside (Canada, Israel) at the national level first and then comparatively and contextually.

Our methodologies included first state-of-the-art literature reviews and analysis of existing statistics on MRW and GBV, followed by an analysis of national, regional, and international policies concerning gender, migration and GBV. We then carried out key informant interviews in each country with relevant policy-makers, staff of civil society organizations working with migrant women, health service providers working with migrants, to draw upon their experiences and opinions of the incidence and causes of GBV in the context of migration. The exact numbers of these interviews varied across countries according to the numbers of organizations involved in work with migrant women. These interviews were carried out by each national team, and were recorded when interviewees consented, and then transcribed for analysis. Finally each national team carried out in-depth semi-structured interviews with women with MRW to gain information about their experiences of migration and of violence, their opinions and beliefs about the impacts of GBV in the context of migration, and the strategies that they may have used to avoid violence or when they had experienced violence, as well as their interactions with immigration authorities and various service providers (social workers, health care workers) in countries of destination. Aware of the major ethical issues in interviewing women who may have experienced violence, we worked together carefully across the team to devise interview guides which would minimize any risk of re-traumatisation, and were careful to avoid posing direct questions about GBV. Where women agreed, all interviews were recorded and transcribed for analysis, following the ethics guidelines of the Research Ethics Boards of the respective researchers’ institutions. The data collected was analysed thematically by each national team, and then a comparative and contextual cross-country analysis was carried out jointly by all researchers. This allowed us to identify common structural drivers of GBV in the context of migration, as well as specificities relating to different national legal, political, economic, and social contexts.

We worked together across all of our national teams to outline a shared feminist perspective as well as embedded intersectional analyses to understand GBV in specific migration contexts at the macro, meso, and micro levels. In addition, there was a shared understanding of migration among contributors,

as a complex, multi-causal, multi-stage, non-linear (and often non-conclusive) temporal – spatial continuum/process, including a spectrum of forms (from the freely decided economic or family migration to forced migration and asylum seeking) and producing a multitude of categories of migrants with differential legal/citizenship statuses and associated rights. (Freedman et al., 2022a)

The collaborative dimension

Collaboration at various levels was a key feature of our project and an integral part of its methodological design aiming at producing new knowledge and insights on GBV in migration within a global context. The first collaborative dimension of our project was external to and preceding the project, namely, it pertained to the funding agency itself: Gender-Net Plus is a consortium of 16 committed organizations from 13 countries (mostly in the EU but also others) aiming to strengthen transnational collaborations and provide support to the promotion of gender equality through institutional change in the European Research Area (ERA). The focus of the Gender-Net Plus consortium has been to promote the integration of sex and gender analysis into research. This integration gives new knowledge and insights, which ultimately benefits both women and men.

The second dimension of collaboration was internal to the project. It involved research teams from seven countries working together. In order to ensure that our project was really collaborative and to be able to carry out comparative research and analysis we first held joint workshops with all partners to define our conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and to develop common research tools including interview guides. In addition, there was collaboration within each of the seven countries’ teams. In Canada, for example, collaboration involved four institutions and four co-investigators, each with their own research team of student assistants, associates, and post-doctoral fellows. It was only through this collaboration that we were able to collect data from across the country. In addition, a national advisory Board was set up in order to provide advice and guidance on stakeholders, data collection, and other aspects of the research. In other countries, lead researchers also set up research teams as well as employed post-doctoral researchers and research assistants. National advisory boards in many of the countries helped guide the project and provide links between researchers and policy-makers.

Another dimension of collaboration was intersectoral, at national and international levels, namely, involving project researchers, with other stakeholders such as policy-makers and civil society. The project focused on policies, social and cultural attitudes to migration, the specific migration process in each country, with the intent to make recommendations to government, NGOs, or regional and international policy-making institutions that may help protect women, and provide better services to survivors. For example, in France we worked with an NGO running health and social services in a temporary accommodation centre for asylum seeking women and families. Collaboration with this NGO helped us to understand their role and also to carry out observations and interviews with staff and with MRW living in the centre. As part of the collaboration, we committed not only to data collection, but to participating in the NGO’s activities, by accompanying women to hospital appointments, organizing lessons and activities for them, and debriefing workshops for NGO staff.

In addition, we studied policy-makers, service-providers, and front-line workers’ experiences of how policies work on the ground, as well as their experiences in supporting MRW survivors. Finally, we spoke with the survivors about their understandings and experiences of violence during their migration and settlement journeys in order to find out more about their experiences and their ideas about what kinds of support they need. The involvement of NGOs, civil society and MRW themselves helped to ensure that the research was relevant and that our results would have an impact on policy and programmes, contributing to reducing MRW’s vulnerability to GBV and improving services for them. For example, it was the input of MRW themselves and the frontline workers that allowed us to identify unique forms of GBV that affected their settlement experience in Canada, such as the threat of deportation or of ‘losing’ their children to social services.

The global character of gender-based violence

Our starting point for understanding GBV is that it is violence directed against a person because of their sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. UNHCR defines sexual and GBV as follows:

Any act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and is based on gender norms and unequal power relationships. It encompasses threats of violence and coercion. Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) can be physical, emotional, psychological, or sexual in nature, and can take the form of a denial of resources or access to services.

Women, girls, men, boys, and sexual and gender minorities experience gender-based violence, yet GBV ‘disproportionately affects women and girls’ (UNHCR). Worldwide, it is estimated that one in three women has experienced gendered violence in her lifetime by someone she knows (WHO, 2024). Thus, GBV is global in terms of its incidence in general and prevalence against women specifically across the world.

Reflecting this knowledge, we decided, early on in our international project, to focus our research on all persons who identify or are identified as women. Nevertheless, we understand women not as an essentialist category but rather as a self-identity with a position of inequality (i.e. individuals positioned and oppressed as women). We can mobilize the concepts of women and gender to better understand how normative ideas of femininity and masculinity impinge on migrant women’s wellbeing. We approach the concept of gender as a fundamental analytic concept for understanding a hierarchy of power (Scott, 1986), an axis of domination, a process – gendering process – going beyond the masculine/feminine binary (Choo and Ferree, 2010; Collins, 2015) Within Western patriarchal systems, violence, or the threat of violence, is embedded in ‘gender’. If gender at its core denotes inequality, the latter is preserved and reproduced through ideologies, discourses, institutions and generally through everyday processes of normalization in the Gramscian sense. This systemic gender inequality is ultimately backed by the threat of violence. Thus, power/violence is built into gender inequality as a way of (re)producing and maintaining the gender hierarchy and system of domination. As Connell (1987) argues along similar lines, ‘hegemonic masculinity’ is reproduced through ideologies and everyday processes of normalization of violence or the threat of violence.

Furthermore, GBV has a global character in terms of common structural / systemic roots and intersections with other axes of discrimination prevalent around the world. Particular contextual expressions and forms of violence at the interpersonal level have their origins at the structural/systemic levels. Academic and policy research concurs with us on this claim (e.g. Davies and True, 2015; UNHCR; Tastsoglou, 2023). GBV, but also generic violence with gendered consequences, is exerted by institutions, laws, policies, and practices, either directly generating violence, placing women in situations of vulnerability to violence, or failing to provide protection from it. Categories of gendered individuals are even more vulnerable to this institutional and structural violence because it intersects with other systemic forms of social divisions, hierarchies, and discriminations, such as race, class, religion, age, sexuality, gender identities and so forth. In migration / refugee contexts, individuals, whether citizens or others, perpetrate this violence against those with precarious migration status, the undocumented, or insufficiently protected ‘others’. Structural/ systemic violence results in discrimination and social exclusion of those ‘others’ from protection/support. This discrimination/exclusion mechanism consequently increases the likelihood of, and vulnerability to, interpersonal GBV.

GBV in migration: The significance of context

There is a close link or intersection between GBV and the migration process. GBV is often a cause for migration, a result of migration, or a side-effect and aggravating factor during the journey (e.g. Anani, 2013; Tastsoglou and Nourpanah, 2019). GBV can occur at all stages of migration, in countries of origin, transit and destination, during peace or war time, during journeys for survival or in ‘safe’ countries (Freedman et al., 2022a). Our use of the term ‘migrant’ was a deliberate attempt to break down rigid classifications of different forms of migration and to capture a broad spectrum of non-citizens and foreign-born, set apart by different entitlements, protections and socio-cultural capital. While migration overall offers a unique context in which GBV unfolds, it also includes a spectrum of forms (from the ‘freely’ decided economic or family migration to forced migration and asylum seeking) and produces a multitude of categories of migrants with differential legal/citizenship statuses and associated rights (Freedman et al., 2022a). As well, migrants move frequently between different statuses, gaining or losing rights and becoming less or more precarious as a result. It is important to not only understand the special vulnerabilities that differential statuses and sets of rights give rise to, but also take into account the fluidity and ambiguity of status and how this impacts migrants’ experiences of GBV. For example, some of the women we met in our French study had claimed asylum and for some time had a legal status as asylum seekers. However, the rejection of their claim ² (as is very common for asylum seekers; see Freedman et al., 2022b) led them to become ‘irregularized’: pushed into an irregular status where they had even less access to accommodation, resources and public services, and were also constantly fearful of arrest and deportation.

We thus underline the need to maintain a very broad conception of migration as a unique context for GBV but also maintain the ambivalent distinctions of voluntary (including various legal statuses) and forced migrants (refugees, refugee claimants). These distinctions are ambivalent because they have been politically instrumentalized to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants (for example, through the stigmatization of those labelled as ‘fraudulent’ or ‘bogus’ refugees who are believed to be using this status to hide the fact that they are really ‘economic migrants’ (Sajjad, 2018)). There has, therefore, been a pushback by researchers against this categorization (Crawley and Skleparis, 2018). However, we still felt it important to understand how the differing legal statuses afforded by these different migratory categorizations, i.e. different specific contexts, would mitigate or aggravate the GBV experience of MRW. Abraham’s ‘contextualized and locally grounded global sociology’ (Aulenbacher and Riegraf, 2016: 276) calls for an investigation of how ‘past local and global histories intertwine’ (Riegraf, 2016: 276) in sociological analyses. When it comes to violence against women, domestic violence, or GBV, Abraham’s contextual global approach focuses on such violence as a global problem that cannot be understood but only through its diverse structural, cultural, and intersectional manifestations.

In our GBV-MIG project, we shared common research objectives and methods, as outlined above, which we had to adapt to different geo-political and social contexts in each country, in respect of the varied profile of MRW or the different processes for claiming asylum or gaining refugee status, for example. We found that across these differing legal, political, and socio-economic contexts, it was possible to carry out research within our common objectives and to establish some levels of comparison by analysing shared experiences of GBV in differing migration contexts. The purpose of such research was not to rigidly compare or generalize but to understand contextually. Following such adaptations, the seven country-specific research projects of the international GBV-MIG project provided context-specific understandings of the global GBV incidence. For example, Israel as an ethno-nationalist State with a very specific definition of citizenship provided a particular legal and political context for research as it is a country in which asylum seekers cannot hope to ever gain permanent residence or citizen status (Levenkron et al., 2022). While, on the other hand, the countries within the EU each have a different national political and legal context, but are all at the same time subject to the EU’s immigration and asylum directives which must be transposed into national law in each Member State, demonstrating the importance of considering the multi-level nature of migration governance and thus of the context for the (re)production of GBV.

Intersectionality

Important as the contextually specific intersections of GBV with migration may be, the intersections of migration status with gender and other forms of social division are equally necessary in order to understand how the forms of vulnerability to and experience of GBV. Gender inequality/patriarchy is not the only root of GBV, after all. Gender hierarchies, structures, norms, practices and identities intersect with those of race, class, age, sexuality, religion, migration status and other inequality-producing divisions and processes, as a rich tradition of intersectionality in the social sciences has demonstrated (e.g. Choo and Ferree, 2010; Collins, 2010, 2015; Crenshaw, 1991; Yuval-Davis, 2015). The ‘national’ research projects engage with intersectional gender and violence in specific migration and refugee contexts. While the principal intersectionality to understand GBV in the specific context is that of gender with the range of migration statuses, other intersectionalities of social hierarchies and divisions that are pertinent and important to the specific country contexts are deployed by the national research teams. The salience of race as a social hierarchy has been underlined, for example, by the political reactions to White women fleeing the war in Ukraine who have been offered significantly greater protection as refugees than other racialized women fleeing similar situations of conflict. Thus, the project teams analyse the ways in which discrimination and inequalities based on gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and other identities interact to make certain women in migration and refugee contexts more vulnerable to GBV and less able to access supports and services for survivors compared to other groups. Inspired by Yuval-Davis’ (2015) ‘situated intersectionality’ and Abraham’s contextual global approach (Abraham, 2018; Aulenbacher and Riegraf, 2016) we engage context-specific analyses to reveal the specific, varying effects produced by different intersectional configurations at multiple levels in the macro–micro range.

Yuval-Davis’ ‘situated intersectionality’ is a theory of complex social stratification, applying well beyond migration and refugee contexts and beyond assessing the impacts of gender, race and class. Situated intersectionality calls for particular attention to be paid to the ‘geographic, social and temporal locations’ (2015: 95) of the individual and collective actors who we seek to understand, as well as to the structural features of their locations. Methodologically, this theory directs researchers to investigating at the micro level particular facets of actors’ social locations entailing differential access to resources (e.g. people’s positioning along socio-economic grids of power) or, at the macro level, domains likely to produce social inequalities (e.g. re-production and distribution of economic and various other goods in society). (2015: 98). Drawing broadly upon such an approach, each of the seven national research teams in the international GBV-MIG project produced a ‘case study’ of its country that focused on selected and pertinent ‘facets’ and ‘domains’. In the following sections we build on and bring into play the theoretical framework we developed for our project to provide examples of how we used the situated and intersectional analyses to understand first forms of GBV in migration (a ‘horizontal’ approach) and second the ways GBV is produced at different levels (a ‘vertical’ approach).

Forms of GBV in migration and refugee contexts

Our project involved a range of different migrant and refugee contexts studying both ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ migrants. ³ As we argue that GBV in migration is distinct, in this section we take a ‘horizontal’, linear view of GBV and discuss forms that are distinct or more common in particular types or stages of the migration journey. GBV has been discussed as a cause of forced migration both through studies of violence during conflicts which has forced women to flee (with a focus on rape and sexual violence in war), and to a somewhat lesser extent looking at gender-related forms of persecution such as forced marriage, domestic violence for which women have migrated to claim asylum. Findings across various national asylum systems show that even when gender is formally integrated into asylum law (through the Directives of the Common European Asylum System, for example), there are barriers to women making claims on these grounds. The reluctance to consider women’s experiences of violence or persecution as ‘political’ persists, particularly with regard to issues such as domestic violence (e.g. Tastsoglou and Nourpanah, 2019). Women face serious obstacles and problems in making their claims such as the difficulties in talking about GBV during asylum interviews (Freedman et al., 2022b). Perhaps the most difficult problem is the burden of proof and the difficulty of providing evidence to support women’s claims of violence during the refugee status determination process (Singer, 2014). Currently, a perhaps even greater barrier to gaining refugee protection is that of being able to reach a country to make an asylum claim. This is shown by the research on the impacts of the securitization and militarization of borders, which demonstrates how increased border controls and harsher visa regimes act to increase the insecurities of those trying to cross them, making journeys longer, more dangerous and more expensive (Freedman, 2016; Pickering and Cochrane, 2013). Women are particularly impacted by GBV on these journeys, violence which is perpetrated by border guards and police, smugglers, or other migrants. For example, lack of economic resources for paying for their journeys often compels women to exchange sex for passage. Sahraoui and Freedman (2022) discuss the continuity of violence in diverse forms during the various stages of forced migration journeys to France. Yet another body of research has focused on migrant and refugee reception conditions and the ways in which this might contribute to women’s vulnerability to GBV. Inadequate reception conditions for migrants have been shown to pose problems of insecurity for women, with a lack of safe and sanitary accommodation, access to health services or psychological support (e.g. Tastsoglou et al., 2021; (Grøvdal and Bjørnholt, 2022; Sahraoui and Freedman, 2022). GBV here may take a variety of forms, from sexual violence, to prolonged temporariness, to exposure to financial exploitation, with clear structural roots in institutions and policies that are not necessarily intended to discriminate against women but end up having gendered consequences.

Women who are not forced migrants may also experience GBV at different stages of their migration journeys and on arrival in countries of destination. Women domestic workers, for example, may be subject to GBV from their employers, and often have little recourse to police or judicial support, particularly when they are working without legal residence and work permits (Murphy, 2013). Migrant women have also been shown in research to experience domestic violence more frequently than non-migrant women (Menjívar and Salcido, 2002). In Ireland, for example, the national domestic violence association found that one-fifth of the women it assisted in 2018 were migrant women (Reilly et al., 2021). Migrant women who experience domestic violence may find it hard to gain support because of various barriers including language, social isolation, lack of interpretation, and may be reluctant to report such violence as they fear that they will lose their residence status or their children (Briddick, 2020; Tastsoglou and Wilkinson, 2023). Not unlike forced migration, in ‘voluntary’ migration too, forms of violence are interpersonal but can be traced to conceptual, institutional, and structural gaps and omissions in legal frameworks, policies and their implementation, and services (e.g. Tastsoglou et al., 2022).

The range from interpersonal GBV to structural violence in migration and refugee contexts

In this section we take a ‘vertical’ look at GBV, examining the levels at which GBV unfolds in the specific migration / refugee settings of our project. Our analysis is contextual as well as intersectional. GBV is primarily a systemic / structural problem, but we also encounter it at a range of levels: interpersonal, small group / community, and institutional / structural. The presence of violence at a higher level on the macro -micro range makes its expression more likely at lower levels without necessarily determining its specific forms. In addition, as discussed, diverse positionalities, including the range of migrant and refugee legal statuses, interact to make certain individuals more vulnerable to GBV and less able to access supports and services for survivors compared to other groups. Understanding the structural roots of GBV in the context of migration became very important when developing our research (Freedman et al., 2022a) in order to avoid ‘traps’ or limitations that some previous research had shown when focusing only on specific forms of violence linked to women’s religious or cultural identities. It is equally important to engage in contextual analysis of discrimination and intersectionality at the meso and micro levels as well. There is a tendency, for example, to compartmentalize in research on GBV and migration, such as considering GBV as cause of forced migration, linked to refugees; or considering specific forms of violence such as domestic violence, or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This compartmentalization leads to overlooking some of the many other forms of GBV against migrants or linked to migration, and also failing to make the links between different forms of GBV against migrants, and the structural and systemic inequalities which underlie them. As a consequence, GBV has been examined in countries of origin and often seen as producing migration flows, rather than understanding that it can also be the product of national policies and legislation in countries of destination.

There has also been an issue of attributing GBV against migrants and refugees in their country of destination to ‘cultural differences’, and thus paying less attention to structural and systemic factors which may render migrants vulnerable to certain forms of GBV. In France, for example, when asked about GBV in the context of migration, many of the stakeholders in government and administration focused almost exclusively on ‘cultural’ forms of violence such as FGM, or forced marriage, ignoring the multiple other forms of GBV produced in the context of migration, and by restrictive migration and asylum policies.

Drawing upon the results of our research, we provide below a number of contextual examples of how vulnerability to GBV is generated at various levels. These examples, deriving from the findings of several of our research teams, illustrate (1) the forms and underlying structural causes of GBV, showing the internal connection between the two and how the former are largely shaped and (re)produced by the latter, and (2) the particularities of forms in the specific migration / refugee contexts showing the significance of the migration / refugee context. While the structural roots and intersectionalities among them indicate foremost global features of GBV, the forms speak to its contextual character, provided by the particular migration and refugee contexts:

1. The lived experience of vulnerability to GBV in migration

According to findings from all our national research teams in the GBV-MIG project, MRW are confronted with many similarities in their experience of GBV with native-born survivors of violence. In cases of domestic violence, for example, some of the same impediments to seeking help are present (e.g. reluctance to leave the relationship, only wanting to stop the violence). Yet, there are also important differences which give rise to unique forms of threat and vulnerability for MRW. Many of these differences are linked to a precarious migration status, and to legal and policy gaps in providing adequate services to MRW. To understand the uniqueness of such GBV experiences, we need to approach them with an intersectional lens.

In many cases, MRW lack accurate information about their situation and their rights, because of, for example, linguistic obstacles or lack of community connections. This may create uncertainty and confusion, and fuel disproportionate fears. Survivors may not be aware, for example, of their rights to legal support in cases of domestic violence, or the existence of specific services for domestic violence survivors. Further, lack of interpretation in most public services can make accessing information near to impossible. Our Israeli team’s project findings, for example, pointed to the fact that women asylum seekers are not entitled to the services of a translator when they file a complaint about GBV at a police station (Levenkron et al., 2022).

Women may fear to report violence because they believe that this could negatively impact their residence status. In Canada, women reported that a violent spouse can use a threat of withdrawing sponsorship to prevent a woman from reporting violence. In the absence of a legal immigration status however, a migrant woman can ask for a temporary residence permit (TRP) and a work permit for 6 months. More recently, the permit fee was waived. Quite frequently the victim-survivor will end up staying in Canada by making a ‘humanitarian and compassionate’ (H&C) claim, though neither is this process easy, nor the outcome certain. During this time of applying for a TRP, the woman has no healthcare access and no income assistance. MRW survivors in other countries are faced with similar constraints (Tastsoglou and Wilkinson, 2023). In France, for example, migrant women who experience domestic violence should be granted an independent residence permit if they separate from their violent spouse. However, the granting of these permits is at the discretion of local police prefectures, and there are reports of varying practices, making the granting of this resident permit rather random and dependent on individual decision makers. Furthermore, staff working in asylum seeker accommodation reported that women who reported violence to them frequently did not want to go to the police or be separated from their partners, because of fears of these partners being deported (Sahraoui and Freedman, 2022). Research in Norway found that women were reluctant to report GBV for fear of the consequences on their legal status, and that of their families. Recent years have seen a number of restrictions of rights for migrants in Norway, such as a prolonged period for migrants who arrive through family unification before being provided permanent residence permits (Ludt et al., 2022). This increases the problems for women who are victims of abuse from their partner or family. Although victims of violence are in theory entitled to special protection, this is not easy to obtain (Grøvdal and Bjørnholt, 2022).

The threat of having children removed by social services also makes women reluctant to report GBV. In Canada, for example, interviewees reported that if the woman divulges the violence is occurring in front of the children, counsellors are obligated to involve children’s protective services. Although women may perceive the risk to be greater than it is, it can be a very real threat. As one interviewee remarkably argued, ‘Children’s Aid has a disproportionate history of taking away racialized kids, right?’:

• 2. A reluctant communal, cultural, and social discourse

While the extent and seriousness of domestic violence is increasingly coming into focus globally, there is still a certain denial or cultural/social unwillingness to address it, if not an attitude of ‘blaming-the-victim’. This effect is magnified in the case of MRW when ‘culturalist’ explanations of violence are often deployed to explain and normalize the violence. In Austria, for example, a frame analysis of public discourses showed that gendered violence against migrant women is presented as ‘their’ violence. That is, public discourse frames violence as caused by migrants, allowing for the discursive relocation of gendered violence as a phenomenon ‘outside’ of what counts as ‘Austrian society’ (Standke-Erdmann et al., 2022). In Norway, our researchers found that migrant mothers who are victims of domestic violence are labelled as ‘uncooperative’ and this is imbued with racist and culturalist connotations. This has implications for the support they receive and for their ability to retain custody of their children (Grøvdal and Bjørnholt, 2022). While in Ireland, it was noted that public discourse on a citizenship referendum focused on allegations that pregnant women were coming to Ireland to give birth to claim Irish citizenship (Reilly, 2022), representing MRW as a ‘threat’ rather than as persons in possible need of protection from the Irish State.

Generally across our project’s countries, we found a lack of public awareness of key issues of GBV in the context of migration. While GBV is increasingly discussed, gender inequality has persisted and become normalized. In addition, the question of GBV in the context of migration has not quite made it onto the policy agenda, in many cases. At the same time, negative discourses around immigration mean that problems are invisibilized both in public discourse and among policy makers. Thus, policy deficits can be seen as resulting from inadequate consideration of the rights to protection and access to services of MRW survivors of GBV. Furthermore, there is a lack of understanding of intersectional positionalities and discriminations and the ways in which these produce particular forms of violence in the context of migration, and prevent women from seeking help or support (Tastsoglou et al., 2022).

Help-seeking and contacting social services for domestic violence survivors becomes further complicated when dealing with MRW who come from backgrounds and societies with long periods of involvement with war, drug violence, or settler colonial violence, as the Canadian team’s findings showed. In such contexts, domestic violence often is becoming a secondary concern and possibly concealed from public view, with men and women of the ethnic community becoming complicit in the hiding (Tastsoglou and Wilkinson, 2023). Finally, faced with racism and stereotypical thinking from the receiving society, it is not uncommon for survivors to prefer to tackle the issue within their own immigrant, ethnic or refugee communities (Tastsoglou and Wilkinson, 2023):

• 3. Institutional gaps and failure to protect

The micro-level interpersonal violence and meso-level communal discourses that distort understanding of GBV occurrence, have roots in macro-level legal, policy and other institutional gaps; calculated exclusions or omissions to protect; inadequate and uncoordinated practices. At a deeper level, the latter can be traced ultimately to various systemic roots (e.g. patriarchy, racism) engendering GBV vulnerability for MRW. Gender, legal migration status and other social divisions and discriminations operate intersectionally at every level to aggravate the outcome, be that GBV experience and associated health and integration outcomes, or structural exclusion from protection. In our GBV-MIG project, findings from across the national research teams indicate that lack of legal residence status has been a key factor in engendering vulnerability across country settings.

In Canada, migrant women without legal migration status specifically: (1) are excluded from some services because many settlement and anti-violence organizations do not serve women without status. This presents many challenges for those without status, as many of these services are essential for newcomers, such as education and language classes; (2) are ineligible for any kind of income or housing support and may find themselves pushed into situations of extreme vulnerability where they are dependent on a violent partner for housing, or forced into sexual-economic exchange in return for accommodation; (3) are excluded from healthcare services; (4) are negatively impacted due to lack of coordination between criminal justice, immigration and family law systems; (5) do not have access to adequate information about rights /services in the languages of immigrants / refugees. This results in misunderstandings or even deliberate misinformation (by abusive partners) and, hence, fears of being deported, arrested, or having children taken away (Tastsoglou, 2025; Tastsoglou and Wilkinson, 2023; Tastsoglou et al., 2022). Researchers from our Israeli team summarize as follows:

The lack of legal status, in fact, impacts every aspect of asylum seekers’ lives: housing, health, family, work, and also the extent to which they are protected from GBV. They tend to refrain from going to the police to file a complaint, and some said that they would not complain even if their lives were in danger. (Levenkron et al., 2022)

Finally, in Ireland, the Habitual Residence Condition (HRC) is mentioned as a major obstacle to securing safety for migrant women. This HRC which was introduced into the Irish welfare system in 2004 states that a person must have a “right to reside” in Ireland and must meet the HRC in order to be eligible for forms of social assistance such as the Supplementary Welfare Allowance and Rental Supplement, which women often rely on when escaping violent partners. Women who are undocumented, dependent, in insecure work are not able to access social assistance and places in refuges (Reilly et al., 2021).

With respect to income assistance for those without legal migration status or those with precarious migration status, while some countries provide allowances for asylum seekers, this is not always the case, and often the allowance is insufficient to meet women’s needs. In Ireland, for example, the policy of ‘Direct Provision’ is used to accommodate applicants for international protection who do not have independent means. These asylum seekers must reside in a Direct Provision (DP) centre, and are given only low value vouchers with which to purchase necessities. Although DP centres are supposed to be temporary solutions, many asylum seekers live there for several years. This situation where ‘residents live a life of forced dependency with limited opportunities for self-determination’ (Reilly et al., 2021), has been shown to have particularly negative impacts on women. One report found that: ‘Domestic violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault in Direct Provision centers, recruitment for prostitution, and trafficking, particularly of young asylum seekers for the purposes of sexual exploitation, were all . . . experienced by refugee and asylum seekers in Ireland’ (Rape Crisis Network of Ireland (RCNI), 2014).

In some cases, even women who do have a legal status find themselves in highly vulnerable situations due to the State’s failure to provide legal and policy protection and/or adequate services. In France, for example, lack of accommodation for asylum seekers (and particularly in the Paris region) mean that many women find themselves sleeping on the street, or in station concourses (Freedman et al., 2022b). This ‘degradation by design’ (Canning, 2019), is also evident in other European countries where lack of support for MRW can be understood not just as an oversight but as a direct policy, part of the necropolitical management of migration (Freedman et al., 2025). In Austria (but also France), the ‘culturalization’ of GBV through a discourse that frames it as a problem of the ‘other’ thinly conceals the underlying systemic problem of racism which perpetuates it (Freedman et al., 2022c; Standke-Erdmann et al., 2022). In Canada, the gaps and failure to protect MRW at the structural level refer to (1) conceptual and definitional issues (e.g. narrow conceptions of GBV and human rights); (2) absence or inadequacy of law and policy (e.g. no explicit definition of GBV in law, exclusion of categories of MRW from protection); (3) and implementation of policy (e.g. inaccessibility of protection; interprovincial and intersectoral gaps in collaboration) (Tastsoglou et al., 2022). Finally, our Norwegian case study, focusing on the specific form of GBV that trafficking constitutes, concludes that the state response reveals an inherent structural violence at the intersection of international and national criminal-, migration-, and human rights laws and regulations, as well as policies aimed at limiting immigration. By doing so, the research team argues, the Norwegian state evades its Human Rights obligations, as well as contributes to ‘the brutalisation of contemporary international migration regimes’ (Grøvdal and Bjørnholt, 2022).

With respect to intersectionalities at the macro level, our Israeli case study demonstrates the effects of intersectional positionalities in aggravating the protection plight of marginalized migrants and refugees who are GBV survivors; our Canadian case study showcases how an absence of intersectional legal and policy analysis results in limiting protections for MRW; or our Austrian and French case studies illustrate how the absence of a materialist, structural and intersectional analysis results in producing a culturalist framing of GBV which, in turn, produces stigmatization and racialization of migrants and refugees, as well as blindness to systemic causes of GBV, ultimately fuelling anti-immigration discourses and measures.

Conclusion: Gender-based and intersectional violence in migration and refugee contexts

The international and intersectoral collaboration fostered by our GBV-MIG research project allowed us as researchers to carry out in-depth research on GBV in the context of migration in our unique national settings, while at the same time anchoring our analysis within the framework of a global understanding of GBV within Western patriarchal societies. Our research highlighted the need for a situated / contextual intersectional approach which understands GBV as a global problem, rooted in global structures of inequality, but at the same time notes that MRW experience GBV differently according to their intersectional positioning across spatial, temporal, and social locations within unique economic, cultural, political and ideological State settings (Yuval-Davis, 2015). A key finding across all of our country’s case studies, and a global parameter in GBV indeed, was the predominant role of the State, which is also supported by other research (Tastsoglou and Abraham, 2016). How this role unfolds however refers to more context-specific conditions, that is, context-specific institutions and laws. These include laws and policies relating to GBV protection/prevention but also laws and policies referring to border crossing, asylum and refugee status determination, migrant and refugee settlement, citizenship and integration. In addition, context refers also to the layer pertaining to the implementation of laws and policies ‘on the ground’. How the above ‘context’ operates may contribute to increased vulnerability to GBV for MRWs (e.g. through limiting citizenship rights because of nationalist projects of belonging / exclusion) and/or inadequate protection of MRW victims-survivors (e.g. by failing to provide adequate translation services within GBV initiatives or within asylum procedures).

Our national case studies pointed to the specific ways in which global gendered and racialized representations of migrants and refugees across States contribute to creating risks of both symbolic and physical violence, perpetrated by States and individuals against MRW (1) through the securitization and militarization of border control; (2) through culturalist discourses which treat GBV in migration as a product of ‘other’ and ‘violent cultures’ while overlooking or minimizing the violence which MRW face; and (3) through limited conceptions of GBV and human rights in law and policy as well as the absence of gender and intersectional analyses of legal and policy frameworks (Tastsoglou et al., 2022). As we conclude in our collective volume (Freedman et al., 2022a) from the GBV-MIG project:

At a time when gender equality, and particularly campaigns against GBV, benefit from a particularly hopeful political momentum internationally post #metoo, it is sobering to examine the ways in which migration policies are crafted and implemented and the instrumentalization of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, means that this political momentum often fails to reach migrant and refugee women.