Fleeing Gender Based Violence: Where is it Really Safe?

Lojain Soheim

Credit: Juan Carlos Tomasi/MSF

Every year, thousands of women flee their home countries in Central and Latin America because the act of staying would mean risking their lives. 2022 alone saw at least 4,050 women killed in Latin America and the Caribbean for the sole crime of being women— the equivalent of one woman murdered every two hours. Globally in 2022, the number of femicides committed came close to 89,000, showing how the issue transcends regional boundaries, but is instead a worldwide crisis. For many of the women escaping this sort of gender-based violence, reaching the United States means a vast array of dangers until reaching the border.

The issue, however, is that the violence they're fleeing doesn't stop when they begin their journeys; it just changes form. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has described the “extreme levels of violence” experienced by people who flee countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and that consistently take place on the way north. These people, doing nothing more than trying to reach safety, face challenges of extortion, assault, and sexual abuse on their journeys. The same MSF report also notes how migrants face repeated attacks while travelling through Mexico, even on top of the freight trains that multitudes of people rely on during their journeys. In fact, sexual violence is one of the most common forms of harm that migrant women experience during their journeys in the Americas. 

When focusing on individual stories in particular, women’s experiences confirm that gender-based violence is both the reason they flee and what they encounter again as they leave. The Mixed Migration Centre interviewed over 28,000 women on why they chose to migrate and found that many were escaping violence at home. These women then became subject to new dangers like assault, coercion, and sexual exploitation along the route to safety outside of their home countries. The various personal accounts of the women show how the journey of migration itself can become a continuation of abuse, especially for women travelling with children who must consider lives beyond their own. This additional concern for children, coupled with a mother’s own safety and the cost of traveling with more people, can lead families to "forsake safer, costlier routes in favour of more affordable, perilous journeys.”

In northern Mexico, researchers have seen how women who have made the journey north and are waiting for US asylum live in constant uncertainty, with a study on asylum-seeking women in Tijuana finding that pregnant and parenting migrants often face multiple forms of gender-based violence. Because these women can be stuck in a state of liminality for extended periods, waiting for US administrative matters to allow their migration, many deal with the psychologically draining effects of migration, along with the physical, as time passes. Unsafe housing while waiting for asylum claims and American deterrence policies also make these vulnerabilities worse. Even when women reach the US, however, safety is not a guarantee. The ACLU reported almost 200 formal allegations of sexual abuse occurrences in immigration detention centers since 2007, saying that many more abuses likely take place that just aren’t reported. In fact, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that ICE’s official data didn’t “include all reported allegations.”

The lack of protection for migrant women, both en route and after arriving to the US, is precisely what human insecurity looks like in practice. The UNHCR calls gender-based violence a “serious violation of human rights and a life-threatening health and protection issue.” Despite this statement, however, the US continues to reduce the women experiencing this sort of violence to a ‘migration problem’ instead of human beings in genuine need of protection. American policy has shifted back and forth regarding asylum depending on the presidential administration, further complicating an already exhausting process for migrants. 2021, under Biden, saw the Attorney General overturn Matter of A-B- and Matter of L-E-A-, reopening the door for domestic violence survivors to apply for asylum after the first Trump administration had shut them down. Despite the progress this decision made, restrictions like the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule from 2023 make it harder for women to qualify if they did not seek asylum in a third country first. There continues to be inconsistency with US asylum policy, with the Biden-Harris presidency limiting entry during periods of high crossings, and the current Trump presidency reinstating pre-Biden restrictions in Matter of A-B-. 

To put it more simply, women fleeing gender-based violence are stuck in a space between policies that aim to shut them out and systems that fail to protect them once they’re in, all of which is paired with the perilous migration journeys they've endured. The statistics on the experiences of migrant women tell only part of the story: devastating femicide rates, widespread sexual violence in transit, and continued abuse inside detention centers. Behind each of these numbers, though, is someone who ran from her life because of a well-founded fear that it would end, only to find more of it waiting again in another form.

If the US truly wants to live up to its ideals of freedom and liberty, it must start by seeing migrant women as more than just individuals who cross a border, but human beings seeking safety in its land. Doing this means treating gender-based violence in migration as a humanitarian issue, not a law-enforcement one. It means enforcing accountability when abuse is found, expanding asylum access and protection for women facing gendered persecution, and funding trauma-informed care at US shelters and processing centers to provide immediate psychological support. It is already recognized on an international scale that gender-based violence prevention and adequate responses to it save lives, and the US should act like it believes that.