Rifugio e genere: il ruolo della credibilità nella narrazione delle donne richiedenti asilo

Abstract

This research aims to critically examine the correlation between asylum and gender relations, with a focus on the crucial role of credibility in asylum seekers’ narratives, concentrating the analysis on a feminist and gender anthropological perspective. In addition to the forms of persecution recognised by the 1951 Geneva Convention, women seeking asylum often face specific gender-based violence, including forced marriages, rape used as a weapon of war, and female genital mutilation. The complexity of expressing such traumatic experiences is intrinsic to the difficulty of retrieving memories in a coherent and orderly manner, a challenge further accentuated when this recollection occurs in a cultural and symbolic context foreign to one’s own. Women asylum seekers are frequently unable to provide material evidence to justify their well-founded fear of persecution based on gender. Consequently, credibility emerges as the main criterion through which international protection can be obtained, constituting the only means to validate their experiences of persecution. Starting from fieldwork carried out in Madrid (Spain) between 2015 and 2023, the results of ethnographic analysis of the relevance of credibility in the possibilities of accessing or not international protection from a feminist perspective are presented.