Monday 23 June 2014
6pm - 8pm
Old Theatre
Syrian women and girls who have escaped the conflict in Syria are exposed to serious risks during their journey to find sanctuary both in refugee camps or in Europe. As refugees in camps and cities in Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, those forcibly displaced women and girls report sever forms of gender-based violence, such as forced and early marriage, domestic violence, sexual assault and rape, exploitation and abuse. Once in Europe women seeking asylum based on their gender may face detention and destitution which are also strongly gendered.
This event, organised by the LSESU Student Action for Refugees (STAR) society and the Gender Institute, marks the celebration of refugee week 2014. A panel of a distinguished scholar and NGOs activists will speak on what it has become the world's biggest refugee crisis of all time.
Old Theatre, LSE Campus
Speakers:
Professor Dawn Chatty, Director of the Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre
Amanda Gray, UNHCR UK
Chair:
Latefa Narriman Guemar, Visiting Fellow, LSE Gender Institute
Dorothea Baltruks, President of LSESU STAR Society
Biographies:
Professor Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people. Dawn is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman. Following the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, Dawn spent the period October 2005–September 2007 researching and writing a manuscript on Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East.
Amanda Gray Meral is currently working for UNHCR in London, having just returned from mission in Baghdad, Iraq. She is a lawyer by training and has worked for UNHCR in the UK since 2010. Prior to UNHCR she worked as a solicitor at a national law firm and for a short stint at the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London. She is the office lead on gender issues and as part of that role has spearheaded UNHCR engagement with the Home Office in terms of both decision making and policy responses to LBGT asylum seekers. She has also been engaged in UNHCR's work on LGBT and asylum at a regional level in Western Europe.
Latefa Guemar is visiting fellow at the LSE Gender Institute. Latefa has made an important contribution to the recent (2011) review of gender / women's issues in Country of Origin information for making decision on asylum applications; Latefa has also undertaken research on the conduct of asylum interviews at UKBA looking at the range of issues , including gender, sexuality, religion, and age, which might impact upon the ability of asylum applicants to discuss their experiences; On the impact of forced migration on women's mental health; On the decision making of asylum seekers to come in the UK Latefa has a particular interest in gender issues in forced migration, Diasporas and identities. She is also a research associate for the Centre of Migration Policy Research at Swansea University.