Oxford, C. Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims. Trauma Care2024, 4, 120-147.
Oxford, C. Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims. Trauma Care 2024, 4, 120-147.
Oxford, C. Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims. Trauma Care2024, 4, 120-147.
Oxford, C. Legal Interpretations of Trauma: The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gender-Based Asylum Claims. Trauma Care 2024, 4, 120-147.
Abstract
This article focuses on the variation of how the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals uses the language of trauma in gender-based asylum claims. Gender-based asylum claims include female genital mu-tilation (FGM), domestic violence, forced marriage, coercive population control (CPC) in the form of forced abortions and forced sterilizations, and rape. The Circuit Courts have reviewed appeals from petitioners with asylum claims since 1946, yet the language of trauma did not appear in the Court’s decisions until 1983. From 1983-2023 only 385, 3.85% or less, of the over 10,000 asylum cases before the Circuit Courts used the language of trauma in its legal interpretation of persecution. I have identified 101 gender-based asylum cases that were reviewed by one of the eleven U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that apply the language of trauma in its legal interpretation of persecution for this analysis. This study found that U.S. Circuit Courts use the language of trauma in four ways: precedent cases, psychological trauma, physical trauma, and policies and reports when reviewing gender-based asylum claims.
Keywords
trauma; asylum; gender-based persecution; U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
Subject
Social Sciences, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
