Gender, Violence and Displacement

This research works from the assumption that displacement and its underlying causes are gendered and affect gender relationships. Gender roles, expectations, and inequalities affect who migrates during conflict, why, and with what consequences. Responding meaningfully to the needs of migrants requires that we understand these effects. Previously focused on migration as a consequence of armed conflict and political transition, the research now considers all categories of migrants. However, the manner in which violence stems from and (re)produces gendered social relations remains a central concern.

Programmes of research exist in the following main areas:

• Gender in the asylum system in South Africa and internationally: This ongoing research project has generated a range of data on asylum applications submitted in South Africa on the basis of gender-based persecution.
• Evaluating ‘the domestic’ in domestic violence: This project engages with a growing body of research that considers the blurred boundary between domestic and political violence, and questions the value of this distinction, particularly in contexts of conflict and political transition.
• Mainstreaming gender into practice: Many attempts have been made to ‘mainstream’ gender into development and humanitarian responses to migration. Existing research projects have sought to evaluate the many guidelines, tools, and policies that have been developed for working with migrant communities, in order to assess what they tell us about relationships between migrant men and women, and what their needs – be they different or similar – are considered to be.
• Migration, gender, and identity: Research in this area has focused on how migration affects our sense of who we are, our social position, and the roles we attach to that position. Does migration, for example, create the possibility of more egalitarian social and cultural structures, or does it restrict changes to social relationships as we cling to stylised representations of ‘life before migration’?
• Childhood, migration, and gender relations: Gender relationships both shape and are shaped by our understanding of what children need. Assumptions about children’s vulnerability – what adults believe they are vulnerable to and what care they are thought to need – are often challenged by the activities of migrant children and their own questioning of their status as ‘vulnerable’, and even as ‘children’. Furthermore, patterns of childcare shape relationships between men and women, and provide an indicator of shifts in these patterns.