The Cassandra complex in gender-based asylum procedures : listening as a feminist method in research on rape mythology

This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of listening to asylum applicants fleeing sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), arguing that centring their lived experiences is essential to countering epistemic injustice in asylum procedures and research on forced displacement. Despite international commitments to gender- sensitive asylum assessments, decision-makers continue to rely on gender stereotypes when evaluating applicants’ credibility. The result is a ‘Cassandra complex’, where survivors’ testimonies are met with disbelief and dismissed as unworthy of international protection. Drawing on participatory fieldwork with an NGO supporting asylum applicants in Belgium, this paper explores how feminist methodologies—particularly standpoint theory and the ethics of care—can reshape legal research practices. It highlights the necessity of listening as an act of epistemic justice, ensuring that applicants’ expertise by experience is not only recognised as such, but also contributes to practically implementable knowledge production. However, listening presents methodological challenges: researchers must navigate the emotional and ethical complexities of engaging with trauma while ensuring reciprocal, non-extractive relationships with participants. A key case study from the Belgian asylum procedure illustrates how credibility assessments hinge on SGBV myths about coping mechanisms after such violence. The case demonstrates how asylum authorities interpret survival strategies— such as maintaining contact with perpetrators or delaying flight—as indications of non-credibility rather than natural adaptive responses to trauma. By centring applicants’ own narratives, the research exposes these flawed assumptions and the need for experience-based research methods that can challenge this culture of disbelief. Ultimately, this paper advocates for ethical, reflexive, and reciprocal feminist research methodologies that centralise applicants’ standpoints and aim for social change. Only then can legal research fulfil its ambition to go beyond describing the status quo (Hewlêr, 2021) but challenge it by directly building on voices of applicants who themselves have navigated through asylum procedures after fleeing SGBV.