Geographies of Gender-Related Persecutions: The Case of Women Seeking Asylum in Spain

Women from the global south escape from their countries of origin to face structural violence, contexts of armed conflict and civil war (with their differential and disproportionate impacts due to gender). However, they have also decided to leave their countries for reasons related to the gender-based violence which is being deployed by the States, the communitarian orders or, even, within their personal relationships (although these problems are not absent in the places of destination) so that the decision to seek refuge becomes a strategy of survival and agency against the hostile patriarchal order. Faced with this reality, feminist literature has reflected about how, since a couple of decades ago, we have been moving towards gender regimes that exercise more violent and high-intensity disciplinary methods (Segato, 2016) and, at the same time, coincide with the transformations of the global capitalist system, and the new expressions of war (Falquet, 2014, 2017). According to the statistics "In 2015, women and girls represented the 47% of the total refugee population" (UNHCR, 2016), "at least 1 in every 5 refugee or displaced women have suffered from sexual violence (...) 232.245 women sought international protection in the EU in 2017, the 33% of the total "(ACCEM, 2017). This paper aims to report the progress of my doctoral thesis where I have been researching the recognition of gender-related persecutions in the Spanish asylum system. In this case, I would like to explore into the “geographies of gender-related persecutions" with the objective of identifying the scenarios, places of origin and types of violence that have motivated women to seek asylum in Spain. This proposal is based on documentary analysis, it stands from the decolonial and postcolonial feminist theories and seeks to contribute to the understanding of the experiences of women and the questioning of the existing barriers of host countries so that their rights be effectively protected.