Asylum and Domestic Violence: One Step Forward with a Rhetorical Question Mark

Some of you may have seen this
article in the NYTimes. As it notes, “[t]he Obama administration has recommended political asylum for a Guatemalan woman fleeing horrific abuse by her husband,” a recommendation that is expected to set precedent and influence future cases of asylum request.

Good news, right? I have to say, first, yes, and second, but…

On the “but” part, it strikes me as problematic that the United States presents itself–through its refugee policy–as a safe haven of domestic violence. This legal/symbolic maneuver obscures the disregard that this country has for domestic violence within its borders and particularly, the women who are victims of domestic violence. Further, it suggests domestic violence is “cultural,” that is, a practice of backward societies, not something that would happen in the United States. Meanwhile, an estimated third of women murdered in the United States were killed by an intimate partner (the statistic is for 2005). For those interested in a discussion of this rhetorical strategy see philosopher Uma Narayan’s discussion of “death by culture” in her 1997 book.

Secondly, the decision (if it is eventually taken, and the article suggests that it will) disavows the fact that violence in Central America bears the mark of American military aid. The US provided military aid to Guatemala for years, and only suspended it in 1990 when Guatemalan military forces killed an American citizen (meanwhile, it is thought that “About 200,000 people were killed or missing in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, mostly Mayan Indian civilians”). Aid was restored in 2005, by Ronald Rumsfeld.

Thirdly, and related to the previous point, it positions America (or American men) as protecting women of color from men of color (very much in the spirit of Gayatri Chakravarthy Spivak’s descriptive “white men saving brown women from brown men”) in a way that is similar to how feminist discourses were activated to support wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is also false, to the extent that the trend in the last decade has been to exclude immigrants (both documented and undocumented) from access to basic health and welfare services and to increasingly link local to federal immigration enforcement, thus disencouraging women suffering from domestic violence from contacting the local police for protection.

This is not to say that the decision might be crucial for particular women escaping a violent husband and for progressing toward recognizing that women are individuals who may be persecuted on accounts of their belonging to “particular social group,” that is, women (see definition of asylum). However, to the extent that this recognition is not accompanied by a similar reflection on the works of patriarchy in this country, and the constant reminder that the US is not a safe haven for domestic violence for the thousands of women affected by it every year, the decision only works to reinscribe a false positioning of the United States as the Western liberal democratic model to emulate and to foreclose two kinds of struggle, the feminist one at the domestic level, and the anti-imperialist one both at home and abroad.