Statelessness, Trauma and Mental Well-being instance, statelessness is linked to ethnic, gender or religious discrimination. An example is biological female-identifying mothers’ inability to pass on nationality to their children, i.e., citizenship laws based exclusively on patrilineal descent. Gender discrimination can leave children stateless in instances that their father is stateless, unknown, or unable to transmit his nationality. Thus, citizenship deficits affect women and men differently and it can also be experienced and claimed in gendered ways.19 iii) Technical causes refer to situations where statelessness is caused by gaps in a country’s nationality laws and conflicts between different countries’ citizenship laws. Countries most often grant nationalities through either blood relationship (jus sanguinis) or through birth in the country (jus soli). When a child is born to nationals of a country that grants nationality based on jus soli, a country that only confers nationality based on jus sanguinis may not be able to acquire any nationality at birth. Other ‘technicalities’ include: denying nationality to abandoned children; automatic loss of nationality of nationals residing out of their country of origin without registering with their national embassy or consulate in country of residence within a specific period; marriage practices of certain countries where the foreigner loses their citizenship when they marry a citizen of that country; and climate and environmentally induced displacement. Furthermore, inability to prove nationality for nomadic or internally displaced persons, undocumented migrants who face challenges registering births of their children especially if born at home or based on the unreasonable document and administrative processes.20 Although lack of birth registration by minority populations does not equate to statelessness, lack of documentation often leads to people being denied access to citizenship and state services. Statelessness can also affect whole communities because of deliberate exclusion of these ethnicities. Nationality laws can be drawn up in a discriminatory manner, whereby they deny minority populations access to nationality — such as the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar, denationalisation of Jews by Germany, and retroactively revoking nationality from persons of foreign descent, such as persons born in the Dominican Republic since 1929. These stateless groups suffer from intergenerational marginalisation and exclusion, which subsequently has consequences on the social fabric of entire communities.21 It is crucial to note that a person may become stateless due to a combination of factors mentioned above. A person may also very easily move from having citizenship to losing it and vice versa. These are all factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing a continuum of trauma-informed, trauma-transformed and 19 20 21 Roshni Chakraborty & Jacqueline Bhabha (2021) op cit note 3 237 at 239. Ajwang’ Warria (2020) op cit note 15 6 at 12. ISI (2014) op cit note 18 1 at 27. 45