The Exclusion Trap for Women Refugee Claimants who Escape Domestic Violence with Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women who escape domestic violence with their children are being denied refugee status in Canada on the grounds that, by fleeing with their children, they have committed the crime of child abduction. Article 1(F)(b) of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which has been imported into Canadian law, specifies that individuals who have committed serious, non-political crimes are excluded from the protections associated with being a legal refugee. Consequently, women who travel to Canada with their children risk the denial of their refugee claims solely because they chose not to abandon their children in an abusive or potentially dangerous situation. In this article, I examine publicly available Federal Court and Immigration and Refugee Board decisions from 2000–2017 where the 1(F)(b) exclusion was raised on the basis of the crime of child abduction. More specifically, I focus my analysis on cases where the 1(F)(b) exclusion was raised as an issue in women’s refugee claims based on domestic violence. Domestic violence is the form of gender-related persecution most frequently cited as the basis for a refugee claim and presents special significance in the context of allegations of child abduction. Of additional concern for women in this situation is the interaction between their claims and applications for the return of a child under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. Ultimately, I conclude there are serious fairness and justice concerns around how decision makers have applied guidelines for women refugee claimants, conducted credibility assessments, and addressed interplay between Hague Convention applications and refugee claims in these cases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".