Introduction

Women refugees have long faced barriers to the refugee process. However, in the 1990s a number of countries adopted a formal set of gender guidelines to assist them in taking gender issues into account in refugee adjudications. Consequently, many women successfully obtained refugee status by claiming gender-based persecution. Additionally, genderrelated abuses were incorporated into the larger refugee narrative emphasising political and humanitarian concerns. Focusing on the recent influx of Mexican refugees to Canada, this chapter argues that today's refugee narrative has moved away from a gender-inclusive approach, and reverted to the traditional gender-blind perspective. Using a framing analysis of more than 100 articles in the Canadian media, this chapter traces this shift and the conditions that influenced it, as well as the implications for refugee women.

Women have long been overrepresented in refugee flows, but underrepresented in refugee claims in the industrialised countries (Foote 1996; Boyd 1999). This pattern has numerous explanations. One stresses the tendency of women to remain near their countries of origin (in neighbouring countries); a second emphasises the delayed migration of women, who follow their spouses or male relatives through family migration once the former have made refugee claims abroad (Mascini & Van Bochove 2009). This chapter moves beyond the individual level by focusing on how the migration of female refugees may be influenced by institutional actors, particularly the media, within countries of settlement.

During the 1990s, select states, including Canada, addressed the gendered nature of the refugee process, specifically through the development of formal gender guidelines to be used in the refugee claimant adjudication process. At the urging of the United Nations, Canada was the first country to officially adopt these guidelines in 1993. Success in addressing gendered differences is manifest in Canadian refugee data (Mawani 1993). In 1986, roughly 7,800 women refugees obtained permanent resident status, while in 2010 this number increased to nearly 12,100. Numerous Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) cases in Canada cite gender-related persecution as the main reason why claimants are allowed to remain. The strategy has been so successful that refugee scholars have described this pattern of refugee adjudication as following a ‘good women, bad men’ script.