Essay Contest Winners

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate

Violent or Victimized? Race, Gender, and the Rights of Male Migrants under the Global Refugee Regime

Abstract

Since 2015, the European Union (EU) has experienced a heightened level of asylum seekers arriving in search of formal protection under international law. Male refugees have been particularly vulnerable to high levels of sexual abuse and exploitation, self-harm and suicide, and arrest, detention, and harassment amidst the increasing criminalization of migration. This paper argues that intersectional biases rooted in social constructs of race and gender permeate the global refugee regime, causing male migrants to be coded as security threats and therefore obscuring their vulnerabilities as victims of war. The impact of racial and gendered biases on constructed perceptions of male migrants has jeopardized the refugee regime’s ability to sufficiently provide and protect fundamental rights enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention, namely rights to health and security.

Mailman School of Public Health, Graduate

Sexuality and “Right to Privacy” in Bowers and Lawrence

Abstract

The “right to privacy” has been a mainstay of human rights discourse, most notably in Article 12 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in a variety of state constitutions and legal codes. How this “right” is understood and legally operationalized, however, varies given time and place and especially when it intersects with different domains, such as sexuality. The legal and cultural understandings of privacy are key to conceptualizations of the individuals and groups allowed the benefits of rights affirmations and protections based on this principle. Unexamined assumptions about sexuality can also shape legal interpretations that, far from being neutral and objective, often invoke normative assumptions that constrict ideas of what individuals or dimensions of sexuality fall within the privacy sphere. Two significant U.S. Supreme Court cases addressing anti-sodomy law serve as instructive case studies of the way the principle of privacy has been invoked concerning rights pertaining to sexuality, and in particular, how conceptions of sexual rights can be both bolstered and narrowed by this principle. In analyzing the cases Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003), this paper explores how Constitutional understandings, “folk” ideas about sexuality, and other contextual factors interacted to determine whether and to what extent state intrusion in consensual adult sexual behavior was perceived as a violation of an individual’s right to privacy.