Gender, Movement and Safety

This book looks into the sexual assault of irregular/illegal immigrant women and girls throughout their arrival to the European Union borders and borderlands between the period of 2011 and 2018, through an Intersectional lens. It intends to analyze this sensitive human rights issue through grasping the cultural obstacles and procedures at European borders which have fueled the violation of this fragile migrant group’s human rights, while also supporting this argument with academic research, statistical data and reports on irregular migration from international and regional organizations, security mechanisms at borders, and statistics on sexual abuse and exploitation during the aforementioned period.

It intends to explore the manner in which several factors and developments at European borders and in the borderlands have resulted in a more dangerous migration journey for these women and girls, as well as the manner in which these developments further perpetuate the likelihood of sexual violence of migrants, and female migrants in particular.

This book aims to comprehend the linkages between academic research and the supporting statistical information through the lens of Intersectionality Theory – a theory which will allow for the issue to be tackled across its different layers and across all the intersections and overlaps these layers create. This book highlights multiple instances of sexual violence throughout the journey, and upon arrival of these migrant women and girls to the European borders and borderlands, and subsequently emphasizes that these events further perpetuate the vulnerability to sexual assault for irregular migrant women due to the very “illegal” nature of their journeys.

Through this lens, this process is examined across: power dynamics, security, legal status, and gender. Through examining these realities and power systems, it becomes evident that this particularly vulnerable group of women and girls from developing countries escaping war, economic burdens and conflict, are ostracized and subordinated in a number of interconnected patterns. This book highlights a need for more gender-sensitive policies because the group of women in question has close to no viable resource for justice within a system that currently acts against them and views them as criminal or “illegal”.