| Pamela Constable |
ONE woman described being raped, strangled and bashed against a wall by the father of her twin boys. Two teenagers said they were forced to become sex slaves for gang members. A young mother was severely beaten by her ex-boyfriend and obtained a court order against him, but gang members broke into her house and destroyed it.
All of them are seeking asylum in the US, but not because of war, political persecution or the notorious gang battles that have led to unpre-cedented murder rates in their Central American homelands. They are seeking refuge from a more intimate danger: Abuse at the hands of men.
“He was very violent. He forced me many times. I ran away but he always found me again,” said the 27-year-old Honduran mother of twins, who was detained by federal agents last month and remains in federal custody. Her lawyers identified her only as ‘Juliza’ to protect her from potential retaliation.
“In my country, nobody pays attention to what women suffer,” she said in a telephone interview. “We are just expected to endure.”
A high percentage of the women seeking asylum from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are basing their claims on domestic or sexual violence, according to lawyers and advocates. They say their personal suffering sets them apart from others who crossed the US-Mexico border illegally over the past two years – and qualifies them to be protected under laws originally passed to shelter foreigners facing political, religious or social persecution.
Many of the Central American women have no police or hospital records of their abuse and could have a hard time proving their stories.
Moreover, gender-based violence has been accepted as legal grounds for asylum only since the 1990s, and the issue remains controversial; critics say that if every abused woman in a poor country were allowed to seek sanctuary in the US, the floodgates would open.
“This is potentially opening asylum to scores of millions of women in backward societies with different social expectations,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. “Aren’t women beaten in Haiti and India and Mexico, too? This has no relation to what asylum is supposed to be about.”
But as the national debate over illegal immigration continues to rage, and the Obama administration struggles to find a way to keep long-time immigrants here while deporting those who came more recently, experts say more asylum claims based on domestic abuse are likely.
Of the 12 women who were granted emergency stays of deportation last month after being rounded up with their children by federal agents, at least seven say they came to the United States to escape abuse by a male partner.
“The strongest cases we have are based on domestic or sexual violence,” said Kathryn Shepherd, a volunteer lawyer working with Juliza and other women who were sent to a federal facility in Dilley, Texas. “Some were afraid to go to the police for fear of retaliation, and some are still psychologically traumatised.”
A second opportunity for sanctuary, announced two weeks ago by Secretary of State John F Kerry, could generate a separate stream of petitions by women facing violence. In cooperation with the United Nations, US officials plan to open centres in all three countries of Central America’s ‘northern triangle’ where people can apply for permanent resettlement as refugees in the United States.
Usually, such programmes are established in areas of military conflict or state persecution, such as Syria or Rwanda. The last time Central Americans were granted refugee protection was during the era of civil wars and military repression in the 1980s and early 1990s.
But now, after a generation of civilian rule, experts said violence has become so widespread – and the governments are failing so badly to protect civilian victims – that extraordinary measures are needed.
“This is not a traditional conflict with armies in uniform or governments targeting dissidents,” said William Frelich, a Washington-based official of the non-profit group Human Rights Watch.
“Here we have predatory private groups acting with brutal impunity – forcibly recruiting boys, sexually enslaving girls – as well as abuse in the domestic context. These women and children are literally fleeing for their lives.” – Text and Photos by The Washington Post
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