1. CONVENTIONS AND DISCOURSES ABOUT MIGRANTS

Migration is a constant phenomenon in the history of human societies and, in particular, in the European context. People have always migrated, but “all societies have long, and often conflictual, histories of negotiating issues of migration and diversity”¹.

Economic, social and security aspects (ever-changing push and pull factors) have determined over time fluctuations in migration patterns and in the attitudes towards it².

Migration, which more than ever before is deeply intertwined with geopolitics, trade and cultural exchange, provide States, societies and migrants with many opportunities, but it is often conceived as a critical political and policy challenge, for instance on issues such as integration, displacement, safe migration and border management³. In particular, people that have been “forcibly displaced by the violence of wars and migrants fleeing from the great global inequalities have been converted into a security threat through securitization”⁴.

Is a top priority topic for public policy issue and newsworthy topic because of its close relation to economic prosperity, human development, and safety and security, and this trend is intensifying⁵. Both the national and international level media reports are being daily publicized focusing on different aspects of migration, and frequently on the negative ones⁶. However, it is important to remember that while this may account for the “changing nature of migration in certain regions”, social media is a platform that “provides little or no filter”, with often a greater emphasis on the “bad” or “thorny” news i.e. opinions, rather than facts and analyses⁷. In order to understand migration and its various manifestations, as well as to develop a response to the challenges that it undoubtedly presents, it is critical to not be wrong⁸.

The right to migration presupposes that any person must be able to circulate voluntarily and freely in the whole planet. In reality, there are two aspects because it suppose the right to leave a territory of a state (emigrate) and the right to enter the territory of another state (immigrate). The international mobility of individuals is materialized when a person is allowed to cross one or more frontier leaving the mentioned State and to circulate freely with the final end of establish themselves in a different State or to go back to the first one. In this regard, the Universal Declaration of Human Right in its article 13.2 establishes that “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. In the same way, the second and fourth paragraph on the International Pact of Civil and Political Rights refers to the right of all people to leave freely any country and to the right to not be arbitrarily deprived the right to enter in their own country.

Most experts agree that an international migrant is someone who changes his or her country of usual residence, irrespective of the reason for migration or legal status. Generally, a distinction is made between short-term or temporary migration, covering movements with a duration between three and 12 months, and long-term or permanent migration, referring to a change of country of residence for a duration of one year or more⁹.

Refugees are persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection. The refugee definition can be found in the 1951 Convention and regional refugee instruments, as well as UNHCR’s Statute¹⁰.

The discursive category “refugee” confers to subjects a degree of legitimacy in making claims on host states for social rights and services and, in turn, implies a responsibility on the part of host country governments for protecting this category of displaced person. This definition of refugee, along with the responsibilities of second- and third-party governments to provide protection and resettlement assistance, is codified in international law, namely via the which extended these protections to additional signatory states¹¹.

These conventions and international frameworks establish that refugees are a political class of people made vulnerable, involuntarily, through war, violence, and natural or manmade disasters. Because they are involuntarily displaced, refugees are framed in international law as deserving; that is, in need of both physical security and due protection by the international community precisely because they were forced into–and did not choose - displacement¹².

On the other hand the definition of refugee did not have a universal scope, as were considered refugees only those who fled from Europe because of events happened before the Convention of Ginevra at 1st of January 1951¹³. Furthermore, Asian and African population who were submitted to the European colonialism, and indigenous populations were not considered as having “the right to have a right”- with the Protocol of 1967 the right to asylum was expanded to non-European people too¹⁴.

Also the Convention of Ginevra resulted blind to gender issues, even though the feminist movement was fighting for the “right to have a right” as well as against the patriarchal system prevailing all over the world, and also in the European and international politics¹⁵. For example, for a long time European states did not recognize the persecution due to the gender of the victim as a motive to be recognized as a refugee, as they did not consider male chauvinist violence as “serious enough to constitute an act of persecution”¹⁶. But today there is the ACNUR Directive on “persecution for gender”, also incorporated in various European Directive within SECE framework in 2000¹⁷.

The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention), has introduced since 2011 the legal status of a gender discrimination, which contains a specific chapter regarding: women refugee and migrants. With the obligation of the states to “remove gender obstacles” existing in the reality of asylum politics¹⁸.

2. GENDER: MORE THAN WORDS AND ENUNCIATIONS

In order to better understand what we are talking about we need to provide some definitions, for example: gender it is encompasses social and cultural representations and constructions of what it means to be women and men, femininity and masculinity, and the relational relationship between them (the meaning of one is dependant on the meaning of the other)¹⁹. In fact, Donato highlight the importance of the relational understanding of gender in studying migration because “migrants often become particularly aware of the relational and contextual nature of gender as they attempt to fulfill expectations of identity and behavior that may differ sharply in the several places they live”²⁰. It is important to stress that gender is different from sex: it refers to biological differences between men and women²¹.

Most gender analyses assume that maleness and femaleness are defined in relationship to each other, as other axes of power and difference (class, race, and ethnicity) are. Rather than viewing gender as fixed or biological, more scholars now emphasize its dynamic nature: gendered ideologies and practices change as human beings (gendered as male or female, and sexualized as homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual) cooperate or struggle with each other, with their pasts, and with the structures of changing economic, political, and social worlds linked through their migrations ²². Migrants often become particularly aware of the relational and contextual nature of gender as they attempt to fulfill expectations of identity and behavior that may differ sharply in the several places they live²³.

3. DISCOURSE AND SECURITIZATION

While current migration flows should be understood as continuities of broader constrictive migration patterns determined by Euro-American colonialism and empire, what does need to be further scrutinized and highlighted is how the framework of securitization has come to dominate current conceptions of global migration²⁴.

In both discourse and policy, the forced displacement of people in the Global South has been formulated by international political elites less as a complex humanitarian issue and more as an assault on the nation state and national security. More pointedly, such a “crisis” is produced as an existential threat to a state and its society, authorizing the suspension of regular protocols and restraint in the name of an emergency politics²⁵.

Securitization can be understood as a process during which certain actors, most often States, “transform particular subjects into matters of security in order to legitimize extreme measures to protect a given object, identity or idea”²⁶. Certain state policies in the social sphere are therefore integrated in the security agenda. In securitizing them, they are perceived as conventional threats, treated with methods and techniques specific to national defense and security arenas, which have traditionally used military or policing concepts and meaning²⁷.

The concept of “securitization” developed in the mid-1990s out of constructivism’s focus on perception and interpretation. Formulated by authors such as Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver from the constructivist Copenhagen School of International Relations, focuses specifically on “how” and “why” certain subjects are constructed as security issues²⁸. Moreover, the process of securitization can be used to motivate the introduction of a certain issue or subject on the political agenda, into what Buzan describes as the “realm of panic politics”²⁹. He argues that this “realm of panic politics” enables a departure from the rules of normal politics where “secrecy, additional executive powers, and activities that would otherwise be illegal” become justified³⁰. Buzan and Wæver postulate that, for a subject to become securitized, it must first be constructed as a threat or security issue through what the authors refer to as a “speech act” i.e. “an utterance, which represents and recognizes phenomena as ‘security’, thus giving it special status and legitimizing extraordinary measures”³¹.

The speech act in itself is however not enough; the process of securitization also requires that the idea of a perceived threat or security issue to be internalized by the general public³². The process of securitization can be understood in terms of the Foucauldian notion of governmentality that contends that the state, through the construction of knowledge and discourse, has the ability to identify and regulate populations and their subjectivities³³.

3.1. TERRITORIAL LOSS AND SECURITIZATION

The loss of territory and territorial integrity are aspects that the State has historically recorded as threats³⁴. Borders marked that security limit which could not be crossed. After the Cold War and the 11 September attacks, threats to most Western states diversified, territorial loss became more unlikely, and new threats arose from the securitization process and transnational terrorism. Borders changed from being a simple delimiting element of territorial integrity and sovereignty to becoming geographical spaces where new threats appear, turning them into securitized spaces³⁵. The diversity of threats that appear in the border geographic area causes many states to apply militaristic measures, dealing with them via military means and techniques³⁶.

In the context of a militarized border area, mobility is understood and treated as a suspicious activity³⁷. Migratory flows and forcibly displaced persons must be controlled, monitored and recorded as a security threat that requires interception³⁸.

3.2. SECURITIZATION AND EUROPE

Similarly to other field of international security, European politics of management of mobility have been securitized, through a “speech act”, through which migration has been (re)named and (re)understood as a “security threat”. Migration is reduced to a security problem, justifying in this way the use of exceptional means, mostly policing and military. In this way the “European fortress” is reinforced, with the closure of the legal channels of access, the militarization of the borders, the police networks, and the detention centers³⁹.

This process, which started as a “temporal” and “exceptional” answer on what is happening in the Mediterranean, has been permeating European politics for more than a decade. It feeds back on two ideas: the insistency in “we do not all fit there” and that “it is necessary to contain the fluxes” to not “destabilize our societies”, and the racial portray of migrants as a source of insecurity. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and in the context of the called “war on terror”, the narrative of fear and insecurity has been consolidating, through the discursive construction of the possible risk of the arrival of people linked with the called international terrorism⁴⁰.

4. GENDERING MIGRATION: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

In the 1960s and early 1970s the phrase “migrants and their families” was a code for “male migrants and their wives and children”. The women's movement, however, with its emphasis on the situation of women, caused some to question the near-invisibility of women as migrants, their presumed passivity in the migration process, and their assumed place in the home⁴¹.

Gradually, the “add women, mix and stir” or the “gender as a variable” approach appeared in more and more research. Yet, this research ultimately did not question the underlying models used to explain why people moved, where they went, and how they integrated. Instead, differences between men and women were noted, and then explained as reflections of different sex roles. In the neoclassical economic models and the push-pull demographic models of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, migration was seen as the outcome of individual decisions. The responsibilities of women as wives and mothers (and the role of men as breadwinners) were thought to influence the decisions of women. These gendered responsibilities were believed to explain why women were less likely than men to participate in migration decisions or in the labor force of the host country when they did join their husbands⁴².

Since the late 1980s, there came a growing concern about migrant women’s problematic integration as well as concern about gender inequality in migrant communities and the need to protect women as a vulnerable group⁴³.

By the 1980s, feminism began to foreground the role of women mi-grants and gender relations⁴⁴. It not only emphasized the importance of women as independent economic migrants, but also highlighted gender inequalities in immigra-tion citizenship regulations. Thus in the mid-1980s, public policies and legal changes had begun to abolish some of the major gender inequalities, such as the right to bring in spouses and dependants and the right to transmit citizenship to one’s children⁴⁵. Yet, rather than equalizing at a higher level, these changes resulted in a levelling down of the right to bring in family members⁴⁶.

“A central aspect of migration–gender relationships is the change in the gender composition of international migrants – the so-called “feminization” of migration. Women comprise roughly half of the world’s international migrant population; however, the proportion varies considerably by region, and there are countries (such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand) where the majority of emigrants are female”⁴⁷.

Shift of current debates about integration of migrant women from the periphery, where they were largely invisible or mere appendages of men, to the center, where they have acquired in the process a heightened, though not necessarily positive, visibility⁴⁸.

4.1. WOMEN’S VULNERABILITY: LACK OF RESEARCH

While gender-blind migration studies no doubt still exist, gender perspective provides new insights in our understanding of migration processes and migrants as actors in them⁴⁹.

“Although there are increasing numbers of women making the journey to Europe, there is still little research on the specific experiences of these women. The main sources of information on these women’s experiences are reports by various NGOs and human rights organizations”⁵⁰.

Based on our reading of reviews in many social science disciplines, we are pleased to report that the state of gender and migration studies is fundamentally healthy. While many earlier publications, including the IMR special issue of 1984, lamented the paucity of research on women or gender and challenged readers to fill the gaps, we have been impressed instead by the veritable tidal wave since the late 1980s of research on issues related to gender and human mobility⁵¹. To sum up, scholarship on women, gender, and migration has progressed through several stages. Researchers have attempted to fill in the gaps that resulted from decades of research based predominantly on male migrants and immigrants. Recent studies have taken the next, crucial step and sought to reformulate migration theory in light of the anomalous and unexpected findings. Our review of the essays in this volume suggests that future breakthroughs from gender analysis will be the product of heightened collaboration across disciplines and innovative ways of combining quantitative and qualitative methods that understand gender to be relational and contextual, power‐ laden and also dynamic⁵².

Studies of gender and migration have opened new avenues of empirical inquiry and theorizing while also problematizing the meaning of theory and the relationship of theory and methodologies in an increasingly interdisciplinary field⁵³.

Introducing gender as an analytical category of security a more comprehensive understanding of security can be achieved⁵⁴. Feminist conceptualization of security: “the rejection of the state-centrism of traditional security studies in favor of a more individual or community based focus which takes women’s security as its principal concern”⁵⁵.

Security is also understood as a process rather than an ideal; this process involves exposing different social and structural hierarchies and attempting to understand how these hierarchies construct, and are constructed by, the international system⁵⁶. Feminists contend that these structural and social hierarchies produce gendered inequalities, which permeate both the private and the public spheres of society and contribute to the insecurity of individuals, and women in particular. The state-centric analysis of security thus fails to take into consideration the “interrelation of insecurity across all levels of analysis”⁵⁷.

Incorporating a feminist perspective into the conventional study of security is thus beneficial as it expands the ontological range of the field through its normative commitment to the individual and/or the community as the ultimate referent of security. Feminist theory accordingly exposes how the nation-state’s pursuit for national security and stability, manifested through the securitization of migration, can in itself be constitutive of insecurity and violence, both physical and structural in its form⁵⁸.

Importance to embed the analysis in a postcolonial framework, as it is important to be aware of tendencies of orientalism and discursive colonialism that shape policy and practice in regard to migration and asylum, and, subsequently, the experiences of asylum seekers from the Orient⁵⁹.

4.2. ACCOMMODATION INSECURITY

The vulnerability of refugee women to GBV is exacerbated by the inadequacy of the reception and accommodation conditions in many countries⁶⁰. With the introduction of the EU-Turkey deal, Greece and Turkey were responsible until the EU could figure out how to process migrants stranded in Greece. Reception centers (which already were insufficient as transit facilities) were converted into detention centers. These detention centers have become liminal, carceral spaces of uncertainty, intimidation, and bureaucratic proceduralism. Referring to such sites through the often used and purportedly neutral phrase “reception center” obscures the unequal material conditions and discursive structures in such identification⁶¹.

Residents of these centers are treated more like prisoners, and their movement more restricted. Once the deal was formalized, Greece transformed derelict warehouses and factories into living spaces for refugees. Such industrial spaces are not fit for human habitation as they are made to house goods, not people. In fact, UNHCR and a number of other international organizations have pulled out from refugee centers in Turkey and Greece due to the prevalence of mandatory detentions in these prison-like facilities near industrial sites and toxic waste areas. For example, the industrial town of Oinofyta in Mainland Greece, which houses around six hundred Afghan refugees, is a sign of how “those with the least hope of staying in Europe are housed in rougher camps”. Others are more makeshift sites, built near abandoned gas stations, or in the case of Elliniko, in place of a dilapidated abandoned airport outside Athens⁶².

These inadequate conditions increased women’s vulnerability to GBV, and many of the women interviewed for my research expressed fears about sharing space with unknown men, particularly single men, who were perceived as a specific threat⁶³. Fear of violence within this accommodation led to some women and families moving out to sleep in surrounding fields with no shelter or facilities⁶⁴.

Accommodation facilities are also lacking once the refugees are lucky enough to reach a destination state within the EU. Feelings of vulnerability and the aggression of which she had been a victim whilst out on the streets⁶⁵.

4.3. SMUGGLING AND SEX WORKERS

Women travelling alone, or just with children, are particularly vulnerable to attack, and during my interviews there were several accounts of women who had been raped or sexually assaulted on their journeys⁶⁶. The types of economic challenges heaped onto women make them more vulnerable targets for exploitation. By refusing to implement safe and legal ways to move through the continent, everything is done through smugglers, most of whom are men. Far from creating a more manageable system, externalization policies fuel an illicit, lucrative, organized industry for smugglers and middlemen to offer refugees alternative pathways. According to Sarah Martin, a GBV in emergencies researcher, it can cost up to fifty thousand dollars for refugees from the Middle East and Africa to get to Germany⁶⁷.

The UNHCR has also noted what they call “transactional sex”, with women being forced to swap sexual relations in return for help on their passage to Europe. Staff of NGOs working in the refugee camps around Calais in France who were interviewed for this research also pointed to the demands for coerced sex by smugglers, and the existence of networks of “sex workers” within the camps⁶⁸.

European political leaders have been quick to point to smugglers or traffickers as a key source of the current “crisis”, and have even gone so far as to suggest bombing smugglers boats as a means of reducing the number of refugees attempting to reach Europe⁶⁹.

However, as it becomes harder to reach the EU, and more and more routes are closed off, it is likely that the demand for smugglers, and the price that they ask for facilitating the passage into Europe, will increase. A UNHCR representative interviewed for this research expressed the fear that the increasing restrictions on entry into the EU, and the prospect of even more closed borders, would increase women’s vulnerability to violence at the hands of these smugglers, and the demand for sex to ensure passage⁷⁰.

4.4. SEXUAL VIOLENCE FROM GUARDS

Smugglers were not the only sources of violence identified in this research. Women interviewed in Kos, for example, explained that they had been victims of violence at the hands of the Turkish police and coastguards as they crossed the country and attempted to leave for Greece⁷¹.

Marcy Hersh has noted how in Macedonia and Serbia, “exorbitant amounts of money” are charged in order for migrants to charge their cell phone or to purchase new sim cards every time they move to a different country. Border guards who often are underpaid and lacking in capacity also partake in smuggling through bribes, sexual extortions and other corrupt mechanisms, including the repeated arrest and release of migrants in exchange for favors and currency. Families often are told not to wait for trains or buses, and that they can be transported by taxi instead, opening the way for abduction, robbery, and violent assaults⁷².

4.5. SEXUAL VIOLENCE FROM OTHER MIGRANTS

Threats also come from within the group of refugees, and women refugees interviewed said that they felt insecure when they were travelling in groups including many single men⁷³.

Once borders shut down and migrants lose their mobility, the prolonged stays of refugee women in unsafe environments as well as their increased engagement and dependence on others for help exposes them to more opportunities for harassment and assault from opportunistic offenders. Opportunistic sexual violence has been documented on borders and train stations. Transactional sex and sexual favors become especially commonplace for women in exchange for safe passages, document orders, and other requirements for mobility. Increased securitization of camps and reception centers does not automatically yield protection.

Detention centers may be ringed with barbed wire and have a heavy police presence, but little is done to secure the basic needs of women inside. In the case of Macedonia and Greece, there is no provision or access for women’s various health and wellness needs, including post-rape care. WRC notes that men and women’s latrines are not separated, and that men use all facilities indiscriminately. Indeed, this is a common trend recorded by rights groups both in refugee camps as well as transit centers.

Additionally, in refugee shelters in the Moria detention center in Greece, tents are shared between men and women of different nationalities and languages. No separate accommodation for women exists. Even in Germany, accommodation centers in Berlin and Cologne offer little privacy or security, with showers not specifically designated for women. A lack of privacy allows men to “loiter outside the toilets and showers, leaving women feeling exposed and unsafe”. Most sites do 73 FREEDMAN, J., «Sexual and gender-based violence against refugee women», cit., p. 26. not have specific entry requirements, and are relatively porous in terms of who can enter. Additionally, holes in fences where women are housed leave them exposed⁷⁴.

4.6. FAMILY AND CONJUGAL VIOLENCE

During interviews with key respondents, MSF staff reported cases of both psychological and physical violence within families of refugees during their journeys⁷⁵. As well as the insecurities of their journey, these women suffered abuse from their own husbands, who not only did not protect them, but posed a threat. Women in this situation find it almost impossible to leave their abusive husbands or partners because of the challenge of continuing the journey alone or with just their children. So they find themselves stuck in a violent relationship with no hope of escaping. Also, “There is no real security for asylum-seeking women because whenever they are attacked, either physically or sexually harassed, nobody knows what to do. There is no clear policy”⁷⁶.

In addition to opportunistic offenders in their new environment, migrant women navigate further violence in their interpersonal relationships. Feminist scholars for decades have noted the ways in which domestic violence increases in situations of displacement as accumulated stress and traumatic conditions exacerbate unequal power relations. Women in abusive relationships cannot leave their family member if they are applying for asylum together. Additionally, gender oppression in this circumstance is often compounded by poor responses from military and police officials⁷⁷.

The securitization of transit has a particularly nefarious impact on pregnant women and people in need of reproductive, neonatal, and postpartum care. Many NGOs including MSF and WRC have documented the scarce access to primary and secondary health care both in transit and at refugee sites. Premature illness and death is brought on by dehydration and starvation of nursing mothers, who are then unable to breastfeed their children. Additionally, there is general lack of clarity and information about where pregnant people can give birth. Refugees who have used public hospitals to deliver babies are returned to tents prematurely with no postnatal care⁷⁸.

Depending on intersecting imaginaries of gender, race, ethnicity or migrant origin, families could be seen either as a stabilizing force and tool of assimilation, but also as reinforcing traditional values and as obstacles to assimilation or integration79. Building on the analysis of parliamentary discussions and in-depth interviews in Germany, Laura Block has recently shown how discourse on spousal migration, which allegedly causes integration deficit and produces women as victims, is used to justify restrictions on family reunification in Germany and beyond80. As for men who enter as “family migrants”, they are more likely than women to face suspicious allegations of trying to circumvent entry barriers and contract marriages of convenience⁸¹.

Family migrants in Europe are disproportionately female and often, implicitly and explicitly, associated with unskilled migrants from rural areas and/or Muslim countries. Policies of integration at the border (where integration criteria are applied to admissions policies), target women migrants as family migrants⁸².

Ruffer suggests that the “third country” national family in the Europe Union is seen as being out of control⁸³, and at odds with the pillars of secularism and gender equality, upon which a liberal society defines itself, and is therefore in need of intervention and resocialization⁸⁴ . For example: in Scandinavian countries, the immigrant family has become the site of contestation in debates about integration and multiculturalism⁸⁵ and its problematization has brought together more closely the internal (integration) and external (entry) aspects of immigration policies⁸⁶. The introduction of pre-admission tests for family migrants in a number of EU states⁸⁷, as in the Netherlands (2006), Germany (2007), the UK (2010) and Austria (2011), demonstrates the ever-close relationship of integration with admissions policies in Europe⁸⁸.

By stigmatizing migrant families through representing their forms and relationships as a threat to Western modernity and a burden on the welfare system, the state is able to define and mold a permissible migrant family in extremely narrow term⁸⁹.

Using the example of transnational families and the way research has taken for granted the heteronormative frame, Kira Kosnick (2014) force-fully demonstrates how the underlying gendered assumptions about the primacy and legitimacy of biological families and essentializing women’s nurturing role are taken for granted, while other forms of affective bonds and non-normative relationships in the migration process remain underestimated. The imaginaries about migration and migrants are extremely important in understanding not only their impact on policies, but also the ways we conduct research (Morokvasic, 2014: 362).

It was necessary in the context in which the emblematic figure of the migrant was the male factory worker, while women were treated as dependents, their work invisible and unrecognized as work. The gendered nature of the discourse reflects itself in expressions like “migrant workers and their families” where the productive/reproductive divide assumes the worker to be a man and places women with children in (“non-productive”) families, sometimes lumping them together in statistical records.

Gendered and racialized attributes and representations combined act as rationales for employing most migrants in precarious, low-paid jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing and service jobs, mostly domestic work, nursing and care-giving. Migrants replace both unpaid and paid labor of women in countries where increasing local female employment rates and aging population have created a demand in a “domestic niche” (Lutz, 2008). Their employment is framed by the inadequacy of welfare regimes and, in terms of migration policies, by the absence of legal immigration channels, sometimes compensated by toleration of informal inflows and circulatory patterns⁹⁰.

It is however important to note that the cases illustrated do not exclusively describe the experiences of women. Male asylum-seekers are indeed also likely to experience lack of socio-legal protection, family fragmentation, insecurities associated to diluted refugee protection etc. Theory and previous research indicate nonetheless that socially constructed gender-roles, which produce and perpetuate power inequalities between men and women, may exacerbate the impact of the 90 MOROKVASIC, M., «Gendering Migration», cit., p. 364. identified themes by placing women in a relatively deprivation position. Moreover, though the paper does not seek to create a weighted analysis of the relative “genderless” of the identified themes, it should be highlighted that the significance of the “gender-factor” may vary somewhat across the themes. Low socio-economic status may, for example, be more important than gender in terms of exacerbating the negative side-effects of having to rely on expensive and illicit methods of transportation; whereas gender is likely to be the principal factor in terms of increased risks of being exposed to gender-based violence⁹¹.

5. POLITICAL ACTORS AND MEDIA POLITICAL DISCOURSE

When migrant status and citizenship are defined by means of state categories, the language of inclusion and exclusion is key to an under-standing of their contemporary shape and historical transformation: “Historically and across multiple settings, the discursive framing of the causes of displacement has shaped states’ and other social actors’ responses to immigration and to migrants themselves”⁹².

We consider “discourse” to encompass the various legal, social, and symbolic frames that surround groups of displaced persons⁹³ . According to Arrieta, it is important also to mention Silverstone concept of “Mediapolis”, as “[…] a mediatic public space where political contemporary life is developed more and more, at the national as much as at the international scale, and where the materiality of the world is constructed through public discourses and communicative actions”⁹⁴.

It results in narratives that, in general, are produced by the “interaction and constant feedback between media, elite discourses and socio-popular discourses”⁹⁵. Arrieta also highlights that, as noticed by poststructuralist studies, elites (in this instance, European elites) are the ones that have the best capacity and resources to articulate and consolidate determinate discourses that best suit their values and interests⁹⁶. However, the Mediapolis is also a space where counter discourse is generated, creating a discursive controversy with important material consequences, in this case, over the life of migrants⁹⁷.

Categorizations, words and phrases are constantly renewed with the intention to exclude (mostly) or to include (rarely) this issue. Society is defined so as to automatically exclude certain categories of people issue). Constructions differ according to class, gender and ethnicity⁹⁸. The way discourses produce objects of problematizations that legitimate policies and practices of in- and exclusion.

The situational, institutional and social contexts shape and affect discourses and discourses influence social and political reality. In other words, discourse constitutes social practice and is at the same time constituted by it. Through discourse, social actors constitute knowledge, situations and social roles, as well as identities and interpersonal and intra-group relations. Discursive acts are socially constitutive in a number of ways. They play a decisive role in the genesis, production and construction of certain social conditions, for instance the construction of national identities. They might perpetuate, reproduce or justify a status quo, and are instrumental in transforming it⁹⁹.

6. DISCOURSE AND THE PROBLEMATIZATION OF IMMIGRATION

Discourses on migration issues focus on problems¹⁰⁰. The conservative and right wing press emphasize the problems that immigrants are seen to create (in housing, schooling, unemployment, crime), whereas the more liberal press (also) focuses on the problems that immigrant shave (as a result of poverty, discrimination). This binary construction is reproduced in the distinction between migrant man, who cause problems, and migrant women, who have problems, or between being a risk (to the labor market or security) and being at risk (of being trafficked, ending up in prostitution, forced marriages, situations of domestic violence or as victims of honor killings)¹⁰¹.

Problematization is the process in which actors (academics, politicians, journalists, non-governmental organizations, lawyers or others) analyze a situation, define it as a problem, expand it by attaching issues to it or by exaggerating the number of people or the cost involved, and finally suggest a solution. Analyzing problematization leads to questions like: what is seen as the problem, and who or what is seen as the cause? The process of problematization, in our view, is characterized by six phases: defining; claiming; legitimizing; expanding; and sensationalizing the problem, and suggestions regarding causes and consequences via the use of metaphors¹⁰².

Arrieta, analyzing dominant narratives, highlighter in the first place the repeated use of terms such as “avalanche”, “invasion”, “massive fluxes”, “humanitarian crisis”, “without precedents”, “the biggest since the Second World War”, referring to the arrival of migrants in Europe ¹⁰³ . This situation of “exceptionality” is lined to the armed conflict in Syria, in particular of DAESH since 2014. Is therefore because of this “unexpected” “massive influx” that, according to the dominant discourse”, that Europe is having difficulties in managing it, in particular the Southern countries, such as Greece and Italy, that seem to be “unable to manage the influx on their own”. In this way is constructed the necessity to adopt “exceptional” measures to answer, only temporarily, a situation “without control”, with the means that has been exposed above.

Representational politics around refugee inclusion and exclusion is not new, but dates to the crafting of the international refugee regime. As Watson notes “Western states essentially constructed two types of states in the international system, refugee-producing states that endangered international stability and refugee-protecting states that ensured stability”¹⁰⁴.

Thus, the refugee and the international refugee system become important mechanisms for states to constitute themselves and others through a wide host of descriptors (as benevolent, degenerate, incompetent, efficient, perilous, etc.)¹⁰⁵. The process of securitization is also a process of “othering” - as described by Huysman-, a process of constructing the migrant as inherently different¹⁰⁶.

6.1. GENDER INEQUALITIES IN THE MEDIA

Contemporary debate on immigration policy generally frames the issue in gender-neutral terms; this applies to legal propositions (entry status and citizen-ship), but also to concepts, which structure the subsequent settlement process. However, the neutrality makes the absence of gender even more conspicuous because what seems to be impartial affects men and women rather differently¹⁰⁷. Sometimes fail to notice that this ‘neutrality’ is only the result of the deeply in-grained assumption that the male is the universal, that the universal is nothing but the male concept or way of seeing things. And not surprisingly, it is when we are searching for the women in the picture that we discover the contructedness of a relationship, of a role or an institution. Thus it is easier to see how a woman’s position is constructed through the state, through the various dimensions of state policies, taxation, social services¹⁰⁸, than to see the state as a male construction, or that the state is constructing the position of men by the same process¹⁰⁹.

Harzig applied the relational and processual concept of gender to core aspects of immigration policy, such as labor market needs, demo-graphic development, cultural compatibility and family reunification (as the concepts that structure entry regulations). She showed the presence of a male bias and thus the limitations of these policies become most apparent. As we have seen, the underlying theme of these concepts is the male breadwinner/male head of household model. The concept of the male breadwinner household has structured nineteenth and twentieth century understandings of society and social relations ¹¹⁰ . Racialized and gendered imaginaries by states and societies have always had an impact on mobilities and underlying policies¹¹¹.

Gendered representations seem to be both shifting and resist-ant over time. The imaginaries relate mobility to men and maleness and sedentary to women as preservers of hearth and home. So by crossing borders men especially in the 19th and 20th century industrialization era followed the gender norm of mobile family breadwinner, while women were seen as transgressing the norm unless they followed as dependents and remained invisible as active protagonists of migration. From the perspective of sending countries, when they are seen as transgressing local cultural expectations, migrant women may be subject to stigmatization and mobility restriction.

Suspicion and fear targeted especially single women border crossers¹¹², who were or could be stigmatized as prostitutes or potential prostitutes, their immigration jeopardized, or on the contrary, geared to accompany their male counterparts and their sexual needs¹¹³. The emblematic figure of a migrant has for a long time been a male industrial worker and men were recruited into jobs designated as male. The demand for domestic and care-workers shifted the focus to women – considered naturally gifted and generally charitable in disposition, undemanding and subservient, i.e. perfectly suited for service and care work¹¹⁴. Women, being the dominant group in family migration, were assumed to be uninterested in participating in the labor market or, at best, being involved in supplementing the male breadwinner’s income¹¹⁵.

7. WOMEN BEING VULNERABLE AND IN NEED OF PROTECTION

Poststructuralist and post colonialism feminism denounce how the narrative of the Mediapolis participate in the creation of the identity portray of migrant women, through old stigmatizing pictures, as “passive”, “weak”, visualizing them the most as “humanitarian victims”, “victims of human trafficking” and “victims of the oppression and sexist violence of their cultures”. It’s a discursive process in which not only the identities of women and men migrating are reconstructed, but also of the European elites and societies¹¹⁶.

Women migrants are “victims”, “person needing protection”, “vulnerable”, “depending on help”, in an understanding of “vulnerability” constructed on strongly negative connotations¹¹⁷.

Vulnerability then becomes an intrinsic quality of women that always appear associated with discourses that also involve children and old people. In this way they erase that this vulnerability have very concrete causes (historic, social, political, economic and, most of all, gender causes). It is silenced the fact that these women are as well political subject that migrating, are resisting local, national and global unfair politics that reinforce patriarchy and neoliberal capitalism¹¹⁸.

Furthermore, representations of migrant women are too often based on a homogenized image of uneducated and backward migrants as victims of patriarchal cultures, especially those from Muslim countries. Such images are promulgated not just by political parties but also by some feminists eager to save and protect white, emancipated woman from ‘other’ women depicted as bearers of a backwards and illiberal culture. Interestingly European and international organizations, such as the Council of Europe, the European Commission, IOM and the OECD, are paying increasing attention to the deskilling of an increasing proportion of educated and skilled women, both family and labor migrants¹¹⁹.

The integration of migrant women in particular is seen as both the problem and the solution for migrant incorporation into society. They are portrayed both as victims as well as the key to solving problems. Policies are slotted into this prism as in the Home Office Securing Borders paper, which highlights sex trafficking and forced marriages faced by vulnerable women in need of protection¹²⁰. In addition, the more discourses focus on Muslim women and Islam as inimical to European societies, the more the debate becomes culturalized and marginalizes the socio- economic dimension of integration and the structural inequalities migrants have to face¹²¹.

Abundant production of knowledge in the venues other than academia, which relies on gendered and racial stereotyping to produce the image of the migrant “other”, leaving in the shadows multiple and complex realities of migrant experience. This creates hyper-visibility of certain issues and allegation of gender inequalities related to culture, while invisibilizing other instances of gender-, class- and migrant status-related inequalities. Focus on issues such as forced marriages, honor killings, polygamy, Islamic headscarves and trafficking produces gendered victimization (of women) and relates it to the “cultural tradition of Islam” and to violence and insecurity, spear-headed by “patriarchal migrant masculinities” as formulated by Paul Scheibelhofer in his insightful analysis of migrant Turkish Muslim masculinities in Austria¹²².

Venturing into, and for different reasons, prioritizing the issues that are at the top of the public discourse agendas, the research risks reiterating (and does so, in fact) rather than questioning the produced visibilities and invisibilities¹²³, leaving in the shadows complex realities of the migrants’ experience and other forms of inequality and exclusion, in particular those related to limited access to and opportunities on the labor market¹²⁴.

Mohanty argues, it results in homogenate and reductionist representations of the “Third-World-woman” as leading an “essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being “Third World” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)”¹²⁵. She argues that this discursive representation stands in contrast to “the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, as modern, as having control over their bodies and sexualities and freedom to make their own decisions”¹²⁶.

Mohanty identifies six different ways in which the monolithic understanding of the Third-World-woman is manifested and reproduced within western feminist research; it is expressed through the portrayal of Third-World women as victims of male violence, as universally dependent, as victims of colonial processes, as victims of economic development processes, and finally, as victims of the Arabic family system and the Islamic rule system¹²⁷.

Theoretical notions with the aim of drawing attention away from how language is used, and towards the functionality of discourse. For example, western feminists have eagerly bought into the construction of “Third-World women” as “powerless”, “exploited” and “sexually harassed” women who were automatically and necessarily defined as religious and family oriented (Mohanty 1988). Their victimization was instrumental to the construction of a counter identity of ‘western’ women, who were modern and emancipated, and everything else; these ‘Third- Worldwomen’ were not¹²⁸.

The insistence on their role of “victims”, mere faces without voice, bodies without their own agency, is part of a discursive strategy adopted by European elite that often portray non-western women following the old colonial image of “helplessness”, oppressed by cultures that are sexists and retrograde¹²⁹. In this way, sexists violence is reconstructed as inherent to “other” cultures, reinforcing old discursive dichotomies of civilization vs barbarous, instrumentalizing this to try to protect the European frontiers against “others that are not desired”¹³⁰.

Della Libera: the oppressed and submitted Islamic (or African) woman vs the liberated and independent European women. European societies are discursively constructed as progressive and emancipated, and the non occidental ones are bad, this narrative serves the function of reinforcing securitizing migration and invisibilising the sexist violence that is present in European societies¹³¹.

8. CONCLUSION

The countries of the European Union are dealing with the movements of forcibly displaced persons and migratory flows by constructing walls, locking down borders, securitization, militarism, and by outsourcing the surveillance and monitoring of people’s movements. All these policies are legitimized and reinforced by xenophobic and racist policies which expand in size and scope, consolidating the structural violence which establishes the illegality of people, migratory flows and the movement of people as big threat to our security.

The narrative of threats and fear has permeated throughout the European Union. Member States and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) have reinforced, in discourse and practice, security policies that address people’s movement as a threat and migration as a crime. Its purpose is to stop people before they reach European borders rather than rescue them¹³².

The analysis of the influence and political propagation of xenophobic discourse in the different countries, and in particular in Germany, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, shows great similarities, indicating how terribly easy it can be to reach an amplification of the racist thesis in certain scenarios. The analysis shows that certain non-xenophobic parties, upon seeing an increase in votes for racist competitors, opportunistically size part of the xenophobic discourse in hopes of capturing a sector of the voters. They choose to do so instead of daring to consolidate their own discourse that would move them away from xenophobic ideas and that could demonstrate a true commitment to the sullied human rights that the European Union claims to defend. Thus, the most racist parties get to see their proposals amplified without hardly any effort. This is how they implement a discourse about the “other” as an enemy, as well as they build a narrative about a civilized interior and a barbarous exterior, for which it’s necessary to build walls of all kinds to feel safe and protected. The perversion of many governments is to use fear to launch racist messages and encourage xenophobia¹³³.

In short, the European Union and its member states are rallying behind erecting of mental walls and granting space to xenophobic discourses that criminalize the movement of people. In this way, they legitimize the construction of the “Fortress Europe” that is expanding with the creation of new agencies such as Frontex, the reinforcement of external borders and the construction of physical and virtual walls across the European space. As a result, European border policy moves towards the construction of structures based on racism and inequality, where our movements are a suspicious activity and where the “other” constitutes a threat.

The new visibility of some of these issues as well as the overwhelming focus on gendered “victims” in the production of knowledge outside of academia, has to be appreciated against gaps in research and lack of visibility of other gendered forms of inequality and exclusion in particular in the labor market, as well as migrants’ mobilities and mobilizations to overcome them that have received little attention so far¹³⁴.

The securitization of migration has resulted in both explicit and implicit barriers which work to restrict and complicate the process of seeking asylum in the EU. Although different individuals experience the effects of these barriers differently it is, in Gerard, Freedman and Hunt’s research possible to identify certain shared characteristics¹³⁵, or themes, in the way the securitization of migration affects women’s experiences of the asylum-seeking process, such as Luthman¹³⁶.

Notes