Dealing with women asylum seekers: how gender structures intervene in the international protection procedures in Italy

Gender structures, which influence every aspect of society, intervene in international protection procedures as well. The interaction between this institution and women asylum seekers, who have increasingly composed the migratory flows to Italy in recent years, has made it possible to highlight that international protection, as it is declined in the Italian context in the case of female asylum seekers, in terms of norms and practices in the territories, guarantees the right to asylum only under certain specific conditions that refer to a single image of victim-model, disregarding the current complexity of protection requests. Such concretization of international protection through norms, their interpretation and application, often ends up hindering migration and re-proposing social roles and hierarchies of power and control shaped on economic, political and cultural logics and devices that are well rooted in Western societies and in the Italian one in particular, and also create the conditions for other abuses, forms of oppression and violations of human rights not only of women, but of the entire migrant community.