The Gender of Canadian Legal and Policy Gender-Based Violence and Immigration Frameworks

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the cross-section of the legal and policy gender-based violence and immigration frameworks in Canada. Our objective is to understand how immigrant and refugee women are protected from gender-based violence (GBV), first through analysing the gender and intersectional dimensions of GBV protection afforded to immigrants and refugees in selected, seminal legal and policy documents. Secondly, we aim to understand the practical aspects and challenges to such protection, as they emerge from the analysis of qualitative interviews of the experiences / perspectives of forty-three ‘key informants’, whose professional roles include putting into practice the pertinent laws and policies to support migrant and refugee women. Our findings identify the ‘fault lines’—the gaps within and between policies, problems in policy application, or unintended consequences of protection policies.