Gender Violence: The In R-A- Aylum Case Saga
Students in Birdsong’s Refugee Law seminar and others should know of the now ‘infamous” aylum case concerning abused women. It is the case of In R-A-, a case of gender violence wherein the victim sought asylum in 1995. The case, after many reversals and proposed INS regulations is yet to have been resolved. This excerpt is from a Birdsong article pusblished in the Nova Law Reveiw which appeared in the Spring of 2008:
Iin 1995 came the gender violence case that continues to cause controversy with respect to how we apply asylum law to women who are subjected to extreme domestic abuse. In In re R-A- a Guatemalan woman, Rodi Alvarado Pena, sought asylum in the United States. She had fled her country to escape a husband who, for at least ten years, had abused her, beaten her, broken a window and a mirror with her head, kicked her in her vagina when she was pregnant, raped and sodomized her, and had threatened to kill her if she ever left him. The police would not help her. The IJ found her testimony credible and granted asylum
