The Temporality of Intimate Partner Violence – How an Understanding of Time and Gendered Threats Can Foster Protection-Positive Outcomes

Abstract

This article brings together temporality and gender in the refugee process and examines how refugee determination bodies and courts have interpreted gendered threats, as a specific form of intimate partner violence. A case law review of jurisdictions (that include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK) is conducted, revealing a flawed temporal phenomenon where decision-makers have focused primarily on the exogenous aspect of threats, namely, whether there is a real chance of a threat being actuated in the future, and have largely failed to assess the endogenous, psychological dimension of the threat, that encompasses past, present, and future aspects of time. The practice of treating threats of violence as a potential future harm rather than an already occurring harm exhibits an obvious privileging of the future over the present that is not rooted in the empirical evidence on intimate partner violence. Further, the predominant focus by decision-makers on isolated future events as harm fails to accommodate the broad temporal dimensions of systemic intimate partner violence, best suited to a predicament-based model of being persecuted. This article explores the temporal shortcomings and gendered interpretations that underpin this erroneous practice in case law, finding that the temporal governance of refugee law is still largely shaped by the male gaze and conceptualisations of masculinity and femininity, which contributes to the limited recognition of threats as a form of harm in themselves.