Because Deportation is Violence Against Women: State Responsibility, Gendered Violence and the Right to Have Rights

• In Event: 097 - Section on Human Rights Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Rights and Migration

Abstract

This paper analyzes how advocates in Toronto, Canada are responding to the increased presence of border officials in women’s shelters and anti-violence spaces since 2004. I offer a discursive analysis of a social movement campaign supported by over 200 feminist and migrant rights organizations, which called on the Canadian government to provide shelter, sanctuary, and status to all non-status women in cases of gendered violence (2008-2011). My findings distinguish between competing transnational and postnational human rights frames mobilized by differently-positioned actors during the campaign. While the former expands the boundaries of state responsibility to include all women at risk of violence regardless of immigration status, the latter offers a more fundamental challenge to the structural violence produced through existing citizenship and deportation regimes. However, in a climate of increased securitization of state borders, both approaches arguably fall short of addressing non-status women’s multiple and intersecting experiences of precarity, risk, and violence.

Author

• Salina Abji, University of Toronto