Who Are the ‘Refugee Women’?

Abstract

How many of the world’s refugees and asylum seekers are women? It is very difficult to estimate with any degree of precision what proportion of the approximately 51 million people who were living in conditions of forced displacement in the world in 2013 (UNHCR, 2014) were women, and impossible to know how many of the ‘undocumented’ refugees are women. Even with regard to women coming to seek asylum in the West, there are relatively few reliable statistics. Many governments do not provide a breakdown of statistics on asylum claimants according to sex, and even fewer provide gendered statistics regarding the proportions of asylum seekers granted refugee status or other forms of subsidiary protection. This deficiency in the provision of accurate statistics can in itself be seen as showing a lack of interest on the part of governments in these states in issues concerning gender in the asylum process, and although the UNHCR has recommended that more should be done to identify asylum seekers and refugees by gender and age (UNHCR, 1991), there are still few governments who have responded. Recently, in the Agenda for Protection (2003), the UNHCR urged all states to provide and share detailed sex- and age-disaggregated statistics to enable a quantitative identification of particular groups of refugees and asylum seekers in order to better provide for their needs. However, in their comparative analysis of the treatment of female asylum seekers in Europe, Crawley and Lester report that less than half of the states surveyed provided gender-differentiated statistics on asylum applications, and less than one-fifth provided gender-differentiated statistics on the outcomes of initial asylum claims (Crawley and Lester, 2004).