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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Turkey's asylum/refugee regime and its gendered effects on women asylum seeker/refugees.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on Turkey's asylum/refugee regime and women asylum seeker refugees' experiences from a gender perspective. Previous research shows that gender is a determining factor in asylum seeker/refugee women's experiences and women face different difficulties than men both during accessing asylum processes and afterwards. In Turkey, women asylum seekers/refugees have conditional and limited rights such as limited access to health, education and social benefits for those who are registered and living in satellite cities as asylum seeker applicants and/or with refugee status given by the UNHCR. Most women asylum seeker applicants, however, find it difficult to live in those satellite cities especially when they have no socio-economic support from Turkish government or UN's Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Founded on empirical research with a qualitative methodology approach, I will focus on the experiences of individual asylum seeker women from different nationalities. I will seek answers for the question of "What are the gendered effects of Turkey's asylum/refugee system on women?" Based on the preliminary results of an empirical research, it will be argues that the restricted rules on refugees, gender neutral asylum processes and no support mechanisms for asylum seeker and refugee women structurally produce vulnerabilities for women asylum seekers and refugees in Turkey. Their experiences show that both the application process itself and keeping the asylum status is very difficult and involve in gendered risks for women.