"Treating gender as a separate category is dangerous," said Steven Wolfson during a presentation to Professor Margaret Jenkins' class on Gender, Violence and War on May 10. Wolfson, who is head of the Protection Training Unit of the UNHCR Global Learning Centre in Budapest, has been working on gender-related issues for decades, including in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Long at the forefront of gender issues within the UNHCR, Wolfson explained that he studied feminist law in a class taught by Catherine MacKinnon, and was the only male member of the women's rights caucus at the law school. Being a man who is interested and committed to acknowledging and addressing gender issues has not always been easy, he explained, as people often associate gender with women. For real gender mainstreaming to happen, he argued, men also need to be engaged with this work, and institutions need to see men as gendered. For example, boys are recruited to be child soldiers more often than girls due to their gender. Gender also affects the ways in which boys and girls, and women and men, experience violence, including sexual violence. While all people can be affected by conflict-related sexual violence, when boys and men experience sexual violence while in detention, it is often registered (and reported) as torture rather than sexual violence. Moreover, men and boys, and girls and women face very different social stigmas and ostracism as victims of sexual violence largely due to gender issues and gendered expectations.
Wolfson said that there has been broad agreement at UNHCR and at many other organizations for some time on the need to mainstream gender issues. Given UNHCR's long-time work on gender mainstreaming and leadership on gender issues, it came as a surprise to many in the class to see that the definition of protection at the heart of UNHCR operations does not mention women or gender. What this reflects, according to Wolfson, are efforts to really mainstream gender in UNHCR operations, and is not indicative of an exclusion of gender considerations. Adding "women and gender language" often just "casts the issue to one side." Instead, UNHCR works to integrate gender in all of its operations by using "an age, gender, and diversity lens." This lens, which is embedded in UNHCR programmatic software, requires UNHCR staff to consider the different variables and intersecting protection concerns that need to be addressed when responding to refugees and migrants. The only way UNHCR can offer effective protection, Wolfson explained, is by considering the gendered ways in which individuals' protection is threatened and compromised by displacement, and by conflict.