Infrastructures of protection for the right to health and dignity of women and girls in displacement

Forced migration heightens all forms of gendered injustices. For women and girls, health, and sexual and reproductive health in particular, is one of the bleakest experiences of gendered harms that affect their rights, dignity, and freedoms during displacement and beyond. With a focus on South-South displacement from Venezuela to Brazil, this paper explores gendered risks and vulnerabilities during and because of migration, as well as the infrastructure of protection that exists to safeguard their right to health and wellbeing in the host country. We argue that any gender-sensitive infrastructure of protection should redress immediate violations to the health harms and vulnerabilities that female fleers face in ways that enable their (long-term) opportunities to rebuild the social standing and dignity that has been lost. Accordingly, we identify protection gaps revealed in the contradictions between existing normative and institutional frameworks of protection, and how those are enacted in practice. We argue protection gaps reproduce gendered forms of violence and conditions of protracted insecurity and indignity for (forced) migrant women and girls. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it contributes to gender and migration accounts of the ‘feminisation’ of migration by adding a perspective of human dignity as an approach to the gender-health-migration nexus, risks and harms. Second, it provides an account of gender-sensitive protection that underlines the importance of harnessing institutional and social processes that promote the dignity and social standing of migrant women and girls in society