Gender-Based Violence as a Continuum in the Lives of Women Seeking Asylum: From Resistance to Patriarchy to Patterns of Institutional Violence in France

Abstract

This chapter offers a study of women seeking asylum in France to analyse the specific challenges to health and well-being that arise at the crossroad of migration and gender. We seek to foreground the voices and experiences of women asylum seekers to highlight the continuum of violence which they face and the precarity induced through the denial of access to services, and the continued enforced precarity they experience once they have arrived in France. Migrant women have unequal access to healthcare services and services for survivors of violence owing to different entitlements attached to precarious administrative statuses, and policies of planned neglect of migrant welfare. We focus on the experiences recounted by five young women to demonstrate the continuum of gendered violence that characterises their trajectories, from the motives of their flight, to the risks faced en route, to the conditions encountered in France.