Sexual and gender-based violence and refugees: the impacts of and on integration.

In considering the state of knowledge around sexual violence and war Skjelsbaek notes the reluctance of researchers to “look into how this crime affects the victims” (2001:212). Given the prevalence of SGBV across the refugee journey, experiences need to be conceptualised as an ongoing and multi-faceted experience of trauma, with both immediate and long-term consequences. Pulling together the piecemeal evidence in the literature on SGBV, we describe distal impacts of SGBV on integration, wherein traumatic but largely sporadic events impact on integration. We also describe the proximal impacts of integration domains on SGBV survivors’ lives, whereby refugees’ exposure to, and ability to recover from, SGBV is shaped by experience within the integration domains. We conclude that the experience of SGBV can hamper survivors’ attempts to resettle and integrate into a new life through a number of distal impacts on and proximal impacts of integration, and embedded within these structural inequalities.