Jansen, Sabine, ‘Trots of schaamte?’ (‘Pride or shame?’), 2018, COC Nederland

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) uses fixed criteria to assess whether people who flee to the Netherlands for fear of persecution because of their sexual identity are LGBTI. The most important criterion, according to the file investigation that the COC carried out at the IND during the past two years, is whether the asylum seeker has gone through a so-called ‘process of awareness and self-acceptance’ of the sexual identity.

Researcher Sabine Jansen concludes in the COC report Pride of Shame? that this criterion is an inadequate stereotype without scientific substantiation. Many LGBTI asylum seekers do not live up to the stereotypical image: they have never experienced a ‘process of awareness and self-acceptance’, do not understand what is meant by it and / or can not tell about it in detail.

Please see the English translation here.