Displacement, Human Rights and Sexual and Reproductive Health: Conceptualizing Gender Protection Gaps in Latin America

Focusing on the flight of women and girls from Venezuela, this book examines the gendered nature of forced displacement and the ways in which the failures of protection regimes to be sensitive to displacement’s gendered character affect women and girls, and their sexual and reproductive health.

Highlighting how categorical legal distinctions between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’ fail to capture the dynamics of forced migration in Latin America, it investigates how the operation of this categorical divide generates responsibility and protection gaps in relation to female forced migrants which act as determinants of sexual and reproductive health. Drawing on the voices of displaced women, it argues that a robust political ethics of protection of the forcibly displaced must encompass all necessary fleers and be responsive to the gendered character of forced displacement and particularly to effective access to sexual and reproductive health rights.

Natalia Cintra is Research Fellow for the ESRC funded project Redressing Gendered Health Inequalities of Displaced Women and Girls in contexts of Protracted Crisis in Central and South America (ReGHID) at the University of Southampton.

David Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton, and co-investigator in the ReGHID project.

Pía Riggirozzi is Professor of Global Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton. She is also Principal Investigator for the ReGHID project.