By Veronica Strong-Boag
Canadians are easily sentimental about babies and toddlers. Look at the ready adoption of global infants or September 2015’s outpouring of grief for the three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi. Once victims of poverty, exploitation, and conflict reach adolescence and beyond, however, sympathy frequently evaporates.
Refugees are a case in point and gender consorts with age to matter. Girls and women suffer recurring abuse and stigmatization (Dauvergne, Angeles & Huang) but boys and men have a special place in the hierarchy of the demonized. Males beyond childhood are only too readily branded rapists, drug-dealers and addicts, thieves, lay-abouts, and, increasingly, terrorists. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that male teenagers and twenty somethings are somehow less worthy. The image of one drowned little boy cannot redeem his elder brothers.
The racial or ethnic origins of asylum-seekers are not incidental to this reception. Much like the recurring stigmatization of the Catholic Irish in the mid- 19th century, the Indians from the subcontinent a few decades later and the Italians later again, negative labels readily affix to suspect communities. Special targets have been anyone other than Stephen Harper’s ‘old stock’ Canadians whose sons can expect extended dependence and second chances to smooth their path to survival and dominance. For others, childhood is likely to be far shorter and less protected.
Observers of the current refugee tragedy readily forget the historical lessons of forced migration. For centuries, this has regularly first tossed young men on the road as part of family or community strategies. Sons are often presumed better equipped to deal with pervasive violence and more likely to find better-paid work than daughters. Their future earnings can help save those left behind.
The make-up of today’s refugee stream also reflects traditional relations that regularly leave girls and women heavily absorbed with the on-going, if often invisible, labour of preserving kin in troubled homelands. When Canadians glimpse mounting numbers of female refugees they should remember that such reluctant travelers, like the Jews escaping fascism in the 1930s (Troper and Abella) or the Mennonite girls and women who fled rape and violence after the Second World War (Epp), face situations that are no longer even minimally tolerable.
The emergence of refugee camps as feminized charitable environments designed to discipline residents, even as most endure years or lifetimes of insecurity, provides a further gendered counterpart to the threatening masculinized world of independent and unregulated movement across borders (Hyndman and Giles). Much like the girls and women left behind (or dying en route like Alan Kurdi’s mother), the “good and proper” refugees (Diop) housed in camps effectively often disappear from public attention. Unlike traveling men, residents of these feminized (perceived as dependent, deferential, lacking waged work) spaces are rarely presented as threatening the global relations of inequality. No wonder the 2010 Conservative Bill C-49, the Act Preventing Human Smugglers from Abusing Canada’s Immigration System (rolled into the omnibus 2012 Bill C-31, “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act”) favours (although with few concrete results) refugee ‘campers’.
With 9/11 and the subsequent wave of conservative xenophobia, Canadian governments have increased turned their backs on refugees on the move. Such so-called queue-jumpers, so often synonymous with the young male Syrians, Iraqis, and others captured on today’s newscasts, loom as simultaneously undeserving and threatening.
As the long incarceration in Guantanamo of Omar Khadr likewise reminds us, boys and young men struggle to receive fair hearings. Without grunt-heavy wars or shovel-ready jobs stoking demand, evidence of male brawn and initiative readily generates fear. Imprisonment in Canada’s refugee detention centres or rejection beyond our borders, however, only extend the catastrophe glimpsed in one small body lying on the shores of the Mediterranean. No less than Alan Kurdi, today’s older male refugees merit a life-line from safer shores. To treat them otherwise is to diminish prospects for good men.
Veronica Strong-Boag is a Professor Emerita in the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice/Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Dauvergne, C., Leonora C. Angeles and Agnes Huang. Gendering Canada’s Refugee Process. Ottawa: Status of Women Canada (July 2006).
Diop, Petra Molnar. “The ‘Bogus’ Refugee: Roma Asylum Claimants and Discourses of Fraud in Canada’s Bill C-31.” Refuge 30:1 (2014): 67-80.
Epp, Marlene. Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Troper, Harold and Irving Abella. None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1983.