Representations of refugee women in policy and their material ‘real-world’ effects

Refugee women have commonly been invisibilised and their concerns treated with tokenism in the policy and research environment (Indra 1999). At least since the inception of the Refugee Convention, negative and limiting representations of refugee women have prevailed in policy environments pertaining to them. Of particular concern, for those with social justice interests, is the problem of balancing descriptions of refugee women’s acutely oppressive circumstances with representations that do not reinscribe a dominant notion of them as ‘victims’ only without agency.