Unprotected and unrecognized: The ontological insecurity of migrants who are denied protection from domestic violence in their home countries and as refugee claimants in Canada

This paper is based on research conducted by the Migrant Mothers Project, led by Rupaleem Bhuyan as principal investigator at the University of Toronto in partnership with Mercedes Umaña from Women’s Health in Women’s Hands Community Health Centre with an active group of Community Advisory Board members who represent community-based organizations, legal clinics, and immigrant/refugee communities in Toronto. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the International Conference on Law & Society, held in Honolulu, Hawai’i (June 2012) and the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration held in Kolkata, India (January 2013).Over the last fifteen years, Canada has received an increasing number of women from Mexico and Central America who are submitting refugee claims based on domestic, social, and political violence, and on the failure of political and judicial institutions in their home countries to protect them. This group of female humanitarian arrivals, however, has been largely denied refugee status. While gender-based claims are statistically more likely to be successful relative to other types of claims in Canada (Osgoode Hall Refugee Law Professor Sean Rehaag, personal communication, April 4, 2012), claims based on spousal or domestic violence are overwhelmingly dismissed or denied, primarily because women cannot verify that their home country failed to protect them (MacIntosh, 2009). This paper involves an intertextual analysis of Canadian refugee policy and narratives from interviews with twenty-five Spanish-speaking women living with precarious migratory status in Toronto, Canada. In particular, we explore in what ways the interplay of refugee determination and the Third Safe Country Agreement produce multiple forms of liminality (or precarious migratory status) for female asylum-seekers in Canada. We also explore in what ways exposure to violence contributes to ontological insecurity (or a lack of security rooted in their very identity) that women face in their countries of origin, during episodes of transit between and through different national spaces, and as refugee claimants in Canada.This research received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, CERIS—The Ontario Metropolis Centre, and a Connaught New Researcher Award at the University of Toront