“I must care about the reputation of my family. This is very important to me”: an exploration of factors affecting Iraqi women’s access to justice

Abstract

Women in many parts of the world are protesting to gain or maintain rights. However, they often face barriers to accessing justice, which are linked to relentlessly changing spatiotemporal settings and legal/normative spaces. In this article, we discuss the findings of our ongoing research on Iraqi women’s lives in Iraq. We explore the factors affecting women’s access to justice in Iraq based on a review of the relevant literature and in-depth interviews with 16 Iraqi women living in different parts of the country. We highlight the importance of exploring barriers to accessing justice as an agglomeration of various spatiotemporal settings and diverse legal/normative orders of different scales. The examples given herein illustrate the cumulative effect of factors affecting access to justice, including past legislation, sociopolitical events, family dynamics and internalised customs, education and place of residence. We argue that a deficient understanding of the situational spatiotemporal dynamics within legal spaces and the intertwined factors constraining people’s lives makes it challenging to propose interventions for overcoming barriers to accessing justice.