Representing Violence Against Women: Asylum, Voice, and Testimony (Proceedings of the British Academy: Themed volumes of essays in the humanities and social sciences 2025)

This timely interdisciplinary volume brings academic research into dialogue with women who have experienced the asylum process, activists, and NGOs. It reveals the obstacles that women are confronted with during asylum processes, when relaying their testimonies that involve violence. Women’s voices are marginalized and often erased because of multiple barriers within refugee status determination procedures and asylum and refugee reception systems. Conditions need to change so that women can voice their testimonies and know that they will be listened to and heard, and that their voices and experiences will “count” within asylum processes and lead to effective protection. This book is a site of knowledge exchange between women survivors and activists, and policy makers. It contains first-hand accounts of the asylum processes by women survivors and activists and offers examples of how the arts and humanities might open up avenues of expression and testimony for women seeking asylum through practices of co-production, creating safe spaces of representation for women to talk about their lived experiences of violence and exile but also, and crucially, resistance and resilience.