WASHINGTON (CN) – Soldiers raped Stephanie because her husband, a pastor called Alain, preached to men in their Congo town about the need for education.
“He was preaching to the young men to go into politics too,” she said by phone from Idaho Thursday afternoon, asking that her last name be withheld.
“The soldiers raped me to punish him,” she said.
At the time that these events occurred, armed factions were challenging the rule of Congo's president, Joseph Kabila. During the unrest, women were regularly raped and otherwise brutalized as punishment for the men challenging Kabila's rule.
“They wanted to kill me. They wanted to kill him,” Stephanie, now 31, said.
Her ordeal ended when she was granted asylum by the United States. But for another group of women wanting to emigrate here, victims of domestic violence, that route of escape was closed by the Trump administration this week.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that a woman's fear of being subjected to domestic violence is not grounds for granting her asylum has drawn sharp rebukes from advocates for women and immigrants who say the decision is further proof the administration is out of its depth when it comes to basic human rights.
“If you are a woman in a country in which you have no power and are being subjected to extreme forms of violence on a regular basis … to say that this is not sufficient cause for asylum puts blinders up to a dire humanitarian situation,” said Jessica Therkelsen, attorney and director of the pro bono justice program OneJustice in San Francisco, California.
“It is completely unconscionable and not how [asylum laws] are supposed to be applied internationally,” she said.
Sessions, who as attorney general is also head arbiter of the Board of Immigration Appeals, rejected a plea for asylum from a Salvadoran woman who said she fled her country to escape a husband who raped and beat her.
In rendering his decision, which reversed an earlier grant of asylum to the woman, identified only as A-B, Sessions admitted the abuse she'd been subjected to was "vile," but said the key question before him was whether “specifically, being a victim of private criminal activity constitutes a cognizable ‘particular social group’ for the purposes of an application for asylum or withholding of removal.”
Ultimately, he said, it does not. The asylum statute, he noted, is not a “general hardship statute.”
But Therkelsen, who has studied human rights and asylum access in the U.S., Ecuador, Tanzania, Thailand and Malaysia, and other immigrant advocates contend that the statutory language Sessions relied on ignores the reality of hardship women face in places like El Salvador.
With a population of 6.5 million, El Salvador has the world’s highest homicide rate for people under 19. According to a study by Small Arms Survey, an international group monitoring armed violence, the nation is also the world’s second most deadly country for women, just under war-ravaged Syria.