Book Review: Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum 

Guest post by Sonja Wolf. Sonja is an international relations scholar and the author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador (University of Texas Press, 2017). She is a Research Professor with the School of Government and Economics at the Panamerican University, Mexico City. Her research focuses on violence, gangs, and migration in Mexico and Central America. She can be reached at her e-mail: swolf@up.edu.mx. You can also find her on X: @scwolf5, Bluesky: @scwolf5.bsky.social, and LinkedIn: https://mx.linkedin.com/in/sonja-wolf-writer  

Review of: Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum by Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin (NYU Press, 2024) 

Migration and asylum are intensely political issues. Donald Trump, whose second term as president of the United States will begin in January 2025, has pledged greater border security and mass deportations. Private Violence: Latin American Women and the Struggle for Asylum is therefore a timely book. Its authors, Carol Cleaveland and Michele Waslin, are a social work professor and an immigration policy expert, respectively. They draw on feminist and critical sociology to illuminate the experiences of women who fled domestic abuse or gang violence in their country of origin and claimed asylum in the United States. The publication, the writers hope, will lead to greater recognition of the factors that spawn gender-based violence.  

The volume is structured into six substantive chapters that consider the US asylum system, violence against women in Mexico and Central America, the treatment and trauma of asylum seekers as well as asylum hearings. A methodological appendix follows the main body of the text. In this review I address three salient aspects of the study: its methodology as well as its discussion of the asylum system and asylum seekers’ trauma. 

Cleaveland had the idea for this project when she was making psychosocial assessments of asylum seekers. Unable to access this population for academic research, she offered immigration attorneys to do this work pro bono if she could use the evaluations in her investigations. Eventually, Cleaveland and Waslin interviewed 46 women in defensive asylum proceedings in Maryland and Virginia as well as ten immigration attorneys and judges. In addition, the authors were able to analyse 21 redacted legal decisions and observe 36 merits hearings. Both the documents and the sessions are typically closed to the public.  

The researchers’ presence in the courtrooms had the effect of putting the judges under a level of scrutiny that they are unaccustomed to. The book, however, says little about the writers’ own positionality and the timeframe of the study and the case histories it covers. The ethnography offers only sparse descriptions of the courtrooms and could have been expanded to include the asylum seekers’ lives beyond these sites. Similarly, the interviews explored how the women experienced violence and started building a new life for themselves. But we learn nothing about how the children who travelled with their mothers to the United States coped with their relocation to that country. Journalistic investigations suggest that youths who escaped gang recruitment in Central America paradoxically may end up joining a gang in the United States. What might be the emotional impact of such circumstances on an asylum seeker’s household? 

Cleaveland and Waslin note that the international asylum regime was created at the height of the Cold War to offer protection to victims of state persecution. That system, never intended to be permanent, is not equipped to assist individuals fleeing non-state violence. Who gets asylum, and who does not, is a political decision. In the United States, actions taken by the president and the Attorney General can reshape the asylum system quite dramatically from one administration to the next. Asylum grant rates vary dramatically by asylum seekers’ country of origin and ability to obtain legal representation as well as court location and individual judges. Women escaping abusive men must also contend with the fact that there are no clear guidelines on gender-based violence.  

Cleaveland and Waslin situate their research participants’ harrowing accounts of physical or sexual violence in country contexts marked by poverty, institutional fragility, and patriarchal culture. This structural and symbolic violence, the authors argue, means that “private violence” is anything but. Asylum seekers inhabit a space of “compounded marginalisation” marked by precarity, trauma, and uncertainty. They may work in the United States while awaiting their hearing, but they lack legal status and live with the prospect of potentially losing their case.  

In what is both an under-resourced and politicised asylum system, judicial bias works against asylum seekers. The writers, however, do not examine in detail in what ways the gender, ethnicity or professional background of immigration judges may impact the outcome of asylum cases. The picture that emerges is one in which the odds are stacked against asylum seekers. Typically, they have little to no knowledge of how to navigate the system and struggle to obtain pro bono assistance or raise funds for the substantial legal and expert fees. Cleaveland and Waslin mention El Salvador’s ongoing state of emergency, first decreed in March 2022. But they do not discuss how the changed country situation might affect pending asylum cases.  

Trauma haunts not only the women in Private Violence, but also accumulates in the attorneys and judges who listen to their stories. For Cleaveland and Waslin, gender-based violence is a collective experience that marks victims’ memories and identity in fundamental ways. If asylum seekers’ suffering could become established as “cultural trauma” or public narratives, these could help challenge the prevailing anti-immigrant discourse and garner understanding and support for this population. Cultural trauma, the authors hope, might also prompt the United States to accept moral responsibility for its own role in violence and oppression in Latin America. They recognise, however, that the individual and private nature of asylum cases makes it difficult for survivors of gender-based aggression to develop a common understanding of it. 

The writers conclude that countries of origin require reforms as does the US immigration and asylum system. The recommendations they offer are scant, such as the removal of judges from executive oversight and the creation of more legal migration pathways, and ignore political realities. There is, for example, no reflection on the possibility that a future administration might freeze asylum processes and revoke asylee status for certain nations. The latter, while rare, is conceivable when country conditions have substantially improved. After the fall of the Assad regime, European governments have indicated they would welcome it if Syrian refugees returned home, and the next Trump administration might take a similar view of Salvadoran asylum seekers. While Private Violence is at times unclear, it nonetheless shows how academics can give back to their research participants and contribute to the existing literature on asylum and immigration. 

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