In This Story
The U.S. process for granting asylum is complex, exhausting, and often degrading for women who are escaping untenable situations. It needs to change.
In their new book, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum, Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin chronicle the heart-wrenching stories of Latin American women seeking asylum from violence and call on policymakers to overhaul the system.
Contrary to the prevailing belief that the system is too easy to exploit and is overused—a complaint women often hear seeking shelter from gender-based crimes—Cleaveland and Waslin, researchers in social work and political science, proved that it’s anything but.
Launched by NYU Press on October 15, Private Violence explores the inner workings of a system that fails most of its applicants. Cleaveland and Waslin spoke with more than 40 women from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who underwent the confidential asylum application process in the United States. They compiled the women’s psychological profiles for their immigration attorneys (pro bono work that the asylum-seekers opted into), conducting interviews with women focused on the rigors of the asylum process, observing dozens of closed asylum hearings, and speaking to immigration attorneys and former immigration judges. Cleaveland and Waslin offer a clear picture of a process that is shielded from public eye and is confusing and contradictory even to those who are part of it.
Cleaveland is an associate professor of social work at George Mason. She has been researching Latino immigration since 2004 to understand how they negotiated police harassment and anti-immigrant ordinances. Waslin is an affiliate faculty member at George Mason and the director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.
Together, their work aims to raise awareness of the process and call for a total system overhaul. Their research meticulously builds the case that women seeking asylum in the United States due to domestic or gang violence should be a recognized, protected group under the asylum laws—laws that were written after World War II to protect victims of state persecution only. In the end, only a very small number of women are granted asylum; the verdict often depends on whether the assigned judge believes them.
Cleaveland and Waslin will discuss their work on October 17 at George Mason’s Fall for the Book festival. You can find them in Fenwick Library room 4348 from 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm.