Second-class refugees: persecuted women are denied asylum.

On a spring afternoon in 1986, a thirteen-year-old Salvadoran girl named Marta Ramirez had just arrived home from school when she heard a knock on the door. Ramirez was alone, and when she didn't answer, three men burst in. The men were dressed in civilian clothing, but they had short hair and carried machine guns, like soldiers in the Salvadoran army. One of the younger men had blue eyes, Ramirez recalls, and the leader, a man in his thirties or forties, was missing a hand. The demanded to know where Ramirez's cousin was.

"Although I felt faint and shaky, I tried to keep my courage and answer them, saying I didn't know where he was," Ramirez says. "They called me a liar. The man with no hand began to beat me and to burn me with his cigarette. He was laughing and joking the whole time at my pain, like it was something very funny to him. He burned sores all over my hands and arms. He stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth to muffle my screams, and then beat me about the head with his fist to make me stop screaming and crying.

"What happened next is very hard for me to say and makes me very ashamed. The man with no hand started touching me all over my body with his one awful hand. He ripped open the school clothes I was wearing, tearing the cloth and ripping off the buttons. I begged them not to hurt me, but the blue-eyed soldier stuck his gun against my temple and told me to shut up. The leader shoved his fingers inside my vagina, and then he raped me. All I could do was shut my eyes tightly and turn my head away. I have never felt so destroyed in my life."

Ramirez never recovered from the attack. Over the next few years, she had constant nightmares and injured herself several times by smashing her head against the bedframe while sleeping. She feared that doors would fly open by themselves, and she checked the locks over and over.

Eventually, Ramirez met a man she loved. They moved in together and had a daughter. When she discovered that he, like her cousin, was a guerrilla, she begged him to give it up. He refused, and in July 1991 he was killed by the army. After she heard the army was looking for her, too, she fled to the United States.

Ramirez, now twenty-one, lives with her daughter in Tucson, Arizona, and has applied for political asylum. Her claim of persecution is based not on her own political activities, but on the activities of her cousin and her common-law husband. Ramirez also believes that, because she is a woman, she suffered and fears a particular form of persecution. In this, she joins a small but growing number of women whose claims don't fit within the traditional guidelines for asylum.

Asylum officers and immigration judges frequently fail to consider the kinds of things that happen to women - persecution because of male family members' political activities, or such gender - specific crimes as sexual assault, genital mutilation, dowry murders, and arrest for violating restrictions on dress and behavior - as worthy of refugee status. Instead, these crimes are considered "acts of random violence," or "private," or "culturally related." As the law is currently interpreted, an asylum officer may hear a story such as Ramirez's and "while he wouldn't disagree it's harm or persecution, he'd say she's not eligible," says Dan Kesselbrenner, director of the Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.

In the past decade or so, refugee advocates around the world have begun to challenge this narrow interpretation of asylum law. The European Parliament and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have issued declarations recognizing that women who transgress social mores may qualify for political asylum, and in 1991 the UNHCR executive committee released guidelines on the protection of refugee women. The U.N. commission has also condemned the rape of more than 20,000 women in Bosnia as a war crime, thus recognizing that rape can be a form of political persecution. Just this past summer, the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights made history when it declared violence and other abuses against women to be human-rights violations.

The most significant development has been in Canada. Gender-based persecution received widespread public attention there in the spring of 1991, when a Saudi Arabian who went by the name of Nada arrived at the Montreal airport and requested political asylum, claiming she had been persecuted because she is a woman. Nada said she had been attacked in Saudi Arabia for walking down the street alone, and for not wearing a veil. Nada's petition for refugee status was at first denied. One commissioner in the case wrote that Nada would "do well to comply with the laws" in her home country, and "show consideration for the feelings of her father." But after a public outcry, she was allowed to stay. Her case called attention to the deficiencies in Canada's asylum procedures, and in March 1993, Canada became the first country in the world to issue guidelines expanding the basis of refugee claims to include gender-related persecution.

In the United States, lawyers and other advocates for women refugees have developed a set of guidelines similar to Canada's. They worry not only that the law is interpreted too narrowly in women's cases, but also that the process itself discriminates against women applicants. Nancy Kelly, director of the Women's Refugee Project of Harvard Law School and Cambridge/Somerville Legal Services, has helped come up with guidelines that would advise asylum officers both how to look at the facts of women's cases under current law, and also how to treat women claimants during the interview process.

Gregg Beyer, who heads the asylum division of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, has said his office is studying the Canadian guidelines and may be willing to adopt similar ones. Nancy Kelly's group submitted its version to Beyer this spring. The group is apprehensive, however, about calling attention to the issue in the current political climate.

"There's a tremendous amount of anti-immigrant sentiment right now," Kelly says. At the same time that advocates are trying to make U.S. asylum law and procedures more receptive to women, legislation to crack down on asylum claims is making its way through Congress. The bill would allow immigration agents at ports of entry to make on-the-spot decisions regarding a refugee's eligibility for asylum. Refugee advocates say such a "summary exclusion" policy would mean denying many women who have legitimate claims. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has filed a memo protesting the provision. "In cases where the form of persecution has been sexual in nature," she says, "it is often difficult, even under the best of circumstances, for a woman to speak frankly about it."

Nurjehan Mawani, chair of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, gets credit from many activists for pushing Canada to adopt its new gender-persecution guidelines. Mawani was born in Kenya of Indian parents, and studied law in London before emigrating to Canada with her husband and two children. "While I was never a refugee, I saw family and friends having to flee from Africa," she says in lightly accented English. "I couldn't help but develop empathy for people in tragic circumstances."

While most Canadians were receptive to the new immigration guidelines, Mawani says, she did encounter criticism that the gender-based persecution standard smacked of "cultural imperialism."

"But this is not a matter of imposing Western standards on other countries," she says. "It's a matter of respecting internationally accepted human-rights standards."

The Canadian guidelines call on immigration officers to consider such issues as whether the applicant fears persecution because of reasons pertaining to kinship, as a result of discrimination against women, on grounds of religious precepts, social mores, legal or cultural norms, or because of exposure or vulnerability to violence, including domestic violence. The guidelines also require consideration of the social, political, and legal position of women in the applicant's country, and whether or not state authorities inflict, condone, or tolerate violence against women.

In Canada, as well as the United States and other countries, a refugee is defined according to the 1951 U.N. Convention as someone who cannot return to his or her country because of "a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." Because most asylum-seekers were and are men, advocates say, the definition was written and asylum law developed with a bias toward the facts of men's cases.

The Canadian guidelines do not add gender as one of the enumerated grounds, but they state that gender-related claims should be considered under one or more of the other five categories. Thus, Ramirez could be considered part of a particular social group - a persecuted family. She could also argue that the Salvadoran military had imputed her cousin's and husband's political opinion to her. Someone like Nada could claim she suffered persecution for belonging to a particular social group as well - in this case, Saudi women who refuse to conform to their country's strict code of conduct and dress for women. Moreover, Nada's feminism could be considered a political opinion.

Attorneys in the United States are also arguing a number of women's cases under the "political opinion" and "particular social group" categories. But because they lack guidelines or clear legal precedents, U.S. lawyers generally avoid references to gender-based persecution. "We have to go with what works," says Marcy Janes, who represents Marta Ramirez.

While some would like to see gender added as a separate, sixth ground for asylum, Nancy Kelly and others working on the guidelines say that's an unrealistic hope right now. "If we reopen the refugee definition, we might end up with something worse than we have," says Harvard law professor Deborah Anker.

Even without the addition of gender as a separate category, strong resistance exists to expanding the definition of what constitutes political persecution. Millions of women could potentially qualify for asylum, and that scares Americans and Western Europeans who already feel their countries are being overrun by immigrants. Immigration authorities, who are conscious of their role as guardians of the "floodgates," have shied away from making precedent-setting decisions to offer more people asylum.

One precedent-setting case is that of Lydia Oluloro. The thirty-two-year-old Nigerian woman, who has lived in Portland, Oregon, for eight years, recently faced deportation. If she went, her two American-born daughters, ages six and five, would have gone with her. In Nigeria, says Oluloro, they would have suffered clitoridectomies, just as she did. "My sisters told me, as soon as my back is turned, they will have it done. They say they don't want any |American whores' running around."

Oluloro doesn't remember her own clitoridectomy, which was done by her mother's oldest brother when she was a young girl. She didn't think there was anything wrong about it until she came to the United States. Now she blames the procedure for her inability to enjoy sex or feel love, and she is adamantly opposed to it for her daughters. "They cut me as punishment for being a woman," she says.

Women like Oluloro have sought protection in France, but, according to Oluloro's attorney, Tilman Hasche, her case is a first for U.S. immigration law. In the best-known French case, a twenty-two-year-old Malian woman named Aminata Diop was denied political asylum, even after the French Commission for Appeals of Refugees recognized genital mutilation as a form of persecution under the Geneva Convention.

Following an international letter-writing campaign, Diop was allowed to stay in France, but the government made it clear that it was making a humanitarian exception.

In late March, an immigration judge in Seattle ruled that Oluloro's deportation would result in "extreme hardship" for her and her family. In his decision, Judge Kendall Warren called clitoridectomies "cruel, painful, and dangerous."

Because Oluloro recieved a stay of deportation rather than political asylum, the significance of her case for women requesting asylum on the grounds of gender-based persecution is not yet clear.

The United Nations announced recently that there are more than 100 million displaced people worldwide, some 80 per cent of whom are women and children. At least twenty million of them fit the definition of a political refugee. Yet hardly any are able to reach countries that might grant them asylum. "Few women have the means or the desire to travel," says Janet Dench of the Canadian Council on Refugees. "Most refugees are women, true, but most of those who make it here are men."

Of the more than 100,000 asylum applications filed with the INS each year, probably three-quarters are filed by men, Gregg Beyer says. Women - even those with good cases in their own right - usually derive asylum through male family members' applications. The overall approval rate averages about 25 per cent. In Canada, about half of 30,000 annual claims are granted, and Mawani says there's been no flood of women applicants since the guidelines were adopted last March. "If anything, they've decreased slightly," she says.

Mawani argues that it's irrelevant how many people could potentially qualify for asylum under the guidelines. "The other categories are also very broad," she says. "I consider it revealing, if not ironic, that only the gender issue has raised the concern of over-inclusiveness, particularly in view of women's lack of mobility."

The fact that sexual abuse of women is widespread may also underlie the "floodgates" fear. People still see such abuse as relatively "normal" compared with other forms of persecution. "The more different a practice is from what's done in our society, the easier it is to call it a human-rights abuse," says Janet Dench.

Asylum for victims of domestic violence is especially controversial because of the "private" nature of the crime. Last June, the Canadian refugee board raised eyebrows when it granted asylum to an Ecuadoran woman fleeing an abusive husband. Historically, asylum has only been granted to people fleeing government persecution. Feminist human-rights activists and legal scholars question this public-private distinction, and maintain that it discriminates against women asylum-seekers.

"What is considered private, the home and family, the |women's world,' is seen as not relevant to political discourse and so is not protected in the same way as the so-called |public' sphere of men," says Pam Goldberg, a law professor at the City University of New York.

Goldberg and others say the distinction should not be between persecution by government officials or private citizens, but between whether a government will or will not protect a woman from her persecutors. Canada adopted this argument in the case of the Ecuadoran woman, who had repeatedly asked for police protection to no avail.

"If the government won't protect you. then it makes no difference to the victim." says Jessica Neuwirth. director of the New York-based human-rights group Equality Now. "It's the same as if the government killed you."

In June 1992, Haitian soldiers broke into a meeting of students listening to a banned radio broadcast. Twenty-four-year-old Genevieve Paul. who was six months pregnant, escaped, but her fiance disappeared and is presumed dead. The army tracked Paul down, ransacked her house. and beat her to unconsciousness. She fled to another city and lived in hiding until she was able to get a forged passport.

When Paul arrived at the airport in Miami. INS officers questioned her for several hours about her false documents. She was finally released to her uncle in New York, where she now lives with her daughter. Although Paul has been in the United States for almost two years. she says that even among family members she still can't speak of what happened to her in Haiti. "Each time I think of it. it's like it's happening to me again, and I cry for two or three days," she says.

Critics say the asylum process, which often requires applicants to tell their stories repeatedly to strangers in uniform, discriminates against women like Paul. Many sexual-assault victims are too embarrassed or ashamed to reveal what's happened to them. They may keep silent rather than bring "dishonor" on their families. They may come across as evasive or forgetful, which can be grounds for denying their claims.

The asylum bill endorsed by the Clinton Administration, now working its way through Congress, would make matters worse. Under the new law, an exhausted and terrified Paul would have to prove, immediately after leaving Haiti, that she had a "credible fear" of persecution if returned. If her plane had stopped in a third country, even for a few minutes, she would not be eligible. Moreover, her use of a false passport would also make her automatically excludable, unless, again, she could prove a credible fear of persecution.

In her memo on the bill. Representative Nancy Pelosi suggests that the "credible fear" standard be changed to a less-stringent, "non-frivolous" standard. The memo also questions the requirement that applicants make no stops between their home country and the United States. In addition, Pelosi suggests that language be added to the bill to make the asylum process more receptive to women. Women's cases should be considered independently from their male relatives' cases, Pelosi says, and women asylum officers who are trained to ask questions in a sensitive way should be available to interview women applicants.

Pelosi says she has discussed the bill with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. and both seem open to her proposals. INS asylum director Beyer insists his office already assigns women officers to hear women's cases whenever possible: "We're not against that at all."

Pelosi hope that Congressional consideration of the asylum bill will help sway public opinion toward women refugees. "We have to show our country that the face of the asylum seeker is not the person who blew up the World Trade Center." Pelosi says. Too often, it is the face of Marta Ramirez.

"I still jump even during the day if there is a knock on the door." Ramirez says. "My greatest worry is my little daughter. I worry, about what her life will be like. in El Salvador. the military has no respect for the age of their victims. No girl is too young to be abused."