Private Violence: A conversation about gender-based violence and asylum in the United States

Michele Waslin and Carol Cleaveland will discuss their new book, Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum. Through eyewitness accounts of closed-court proceedings and powerful testimony from women who have sought asylum in the United States because of severe assaults and death threats by intimate partners and/or gang members, Private Violence examines how immigration laws and policies shape the lives of Latin American women who seek safety in the United States. The authors describe the women’s histories prior to crossing the border, and the legal strategies they use to convince Immigration Judges that rape and other forms of “private violence” should merit asylum – despite laws built on Cold War era assumptions that persecution occurs in the public sphere by state actors.