Gender & Asylum Collaboration

At UC Hastings' Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS), students and faculty represent political asylum seekers and torture survivors, who are most often women seeking refuge from female genital cutting, domestic violence and sexual assault. With legal representation and medical and clinical documentation, asylum grant rates are 89%. Without such medical-legal support, however, the asylum grant rate falls to 37% of asylum applications. Thus, the need for medical-legal support in these applications is dire.

Toward this end. the Consortium is facilitating a collaborative arrangement between CGRS and faculty from UCSF's Psychiatry Department, which will include activities touching on all three tenets of the Consortium's mission.

Research: The faculty will be investigating the prevalence of credibility concerns in asylum application cases, the role of judicial perceptions of credibility, and the associations with judicial stress and burnout.

Education and Service: On September 21, 2009, the Consortium sponsored an education and training event entitled Forensic Training for Psychiatric Evaluation of Political Asylum Seekers and Torture Survivors, led by USCF's Stuart Lustig, M.D., M.P.H., and Susan Meffert, M.D., and Hastings' Karen Musalo, J.D. The seminar trained thirty psychiatric evaluators to serve as volunteers in providing essential clinical documentation of medical and psychiatric claims in asylum cases. These volunteer psychiatrists will be partnered with asylum seekers through CRGS and will work to support their applications.