Home > Resources > Monthly Updates > November 2011 Update > Refugee Women – “Survivors, Protectors, Providers”
Refugee Women – “Survivors, Protectors, Providers”
© UNHCR/L.Padoan
Midow Hassan Noor sleeps at night on the ground in the transit centre, where 14,000 refugees wait to be transported to the camps.
By Frances Nicholson, Senior Regional Legal Officer
As part of the UNHCR’s 60th anniversary commemorations and its commitment to give female refugees a voice, UNHCR conducted a series of seven consultations with refugee women on five continents. The “Survivors, Protectors, Providers” dialogues have given us a clearer picture of refugee women’s concerns and their suggestions as to what should be done to tackle them.
UNHCR worked with the Centre for Refugee Research at the University of New South Wales in Australia to consult over 1,000 asylum-seeking, refugee, internally displaced, and stateless women and girls, as well as 200 men and boys. They spoke about the risks women and girls face in their country of origin, during flight and in asylum, about their protection needs and their proposed solutions to their problems.
The research found that women and girls are less likely than refugee men and boys to have access to even the most fundamental of their rights. This includes their right to food, health care, shelter, nationality, and documentation. They may face discrimination in many aspects of their lives and may be caught up in conflict, which forces them to flee. This can expose them to further risks during flight and in the countries where they seek safety.
The dangers women and girls face are often related to the gender roles assigned to them and to the lack of gender equality between the sexes. Gender is not static or innate but is continually changing, and the gender roles and functions that women and men fulfil are often changed as a result of displacement and all concerned must readjust.
The roles assigned to women and men and their position in society influence the types of harm to which they are exposed. Men and boys are, for instance, more likely to be subject to forced military recruitment. Women and girls are more often subject to sexual violence, including domestic violence and trafficking. They are also at risk of a whole range of harmful traditional practices, including female genital mutilation, forced or early marriage, “corrective rape”, and so-called honour crimes. Often this harm is inflicted in the domestic sphere by private actors rather than the state. This can lead to difficulties “proving” the persecution they have suffered. It can lead to poor assessment of issues such as the availability of state protection and of internal flight or relocation possibilities.
Many girls suffer sexual exploitation and violence during flight. Further abuse often takes place in displacement. Adolescent girls, many of them mothers and heads-of-households, are at particular risk of social marginalization and isolation, and are often overlooked within conflict-affected populations. Women and girls made up, on average, 47 per cent of the world’s 15.4 million refugees at the end of 2010.
UNHCR’s research found that women and girls face specific gender-based risks in every aspect of their lives. Their concerns differ depending on whether they are in camps or in cities, but everywhere refugee women and girls face sexual and physical abuse at endemic levels. They are discriminated against in legal systems, in access to work permits, at health centres, in schools and on leadership boards. Even people working with them, who were aware of the problems, were shocked at the extent and the horror of the experiences so many of the women described.
Young children face risks when there is no childcare. Mothers have sometimes to leave their children locked in huts or rooms when they go out to work, in an attempt to protect their children from abuse. In schools, teachers abuse their position of authority over refugee children, resulting in psychological trauma, sexually transmitted diseases, and teenage pregnancies, as well as high dropout rates and fear of school amongst many children.
Specific groups of women and girls face particular concerns. Disabled women – if they have been able to flee – cannot easily build their own shelter or fetch their rations. This leaves them vulnerable to exploitation. Only rarely can they access the specialized healthcare, education or livelihood opportunities they need. Single women, unaccompanied girls and female-headed households are at heightened risk of inadequate shelter, unsafe work conditions and of sexual and gender-based violence and other forms of violence. Older women, especially those without family support, are particularly vulnerable in remote areas and where the terrain is difficult. Access to water, sanitation, rations and medical care can pose insurmountable problems. Even these women are not free from the threat of sexual violence. Lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender women are the most hidden. They are often despised and reviled in their own communities and by some service providers. They face major problems in all these areas.
© UNHCR/L.Padoan
A young mother waits with her son at a health centre.
One issue that came out clearly during the dialogues was that the protection challenges women and girls face are interconnected. Discrimination and failure to protect in one area compounds problems in all other areas.
For example, without registration, women cannot obtain ID cards and, by extension, access to food, shelter, health care, education, and work. Poor quality, overcrowded shelter leads to health problems and family violence. Lack of access to income and self-sustaining activities forces many women to engage in survival sex to feed themselves and their families. This can lead to unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. It can lead to rape and exclusion from the community and from some services.
Without adequate health care, women cannot work. Inadequate reproductive health services lead to complications with pregnancies and the deaths of mothers and children. Without education, children stay at home and risk exploitation as child labourers or can be forced into child prostitution or early marriage. Lack of adequate sanitary materials forces girls to miss school; women cannot seek work or attend meetings when menstruating. Lack of access to legal remedies leaves refugees vulnerable to perpetrators who act with impunity.
Each protection problem increases the risks to which refugee women and girls are exposed, leaving them open to further abuse. As one refugee woman said: “We have to talk about everything – one thing leads to another – we have to break the cycles.”
The refugee women stressed refugees’ capacities and capabilities to be involved in their own protection and solutions. They suggested, for instance, that refugees be given building materials to build schools in camps and that training be provided for refugee teachers. They renewed calls for simple security measures such as locks on doors or lights near latrines and asked for more effective legal protection, including in camp justice systems, to reduce impunity for perpetrators of rape and other crimes.
The most powerful message the refugee women wanted to pass on was the need for asylum and immigration officials, service providers, and members of the community to understand their experiences of flight, loss and trauma before they arrived in countries of asylum in Europe. They want them to understand the survival of conflict, torture, and sexual abuse that are part of the experience of many refugee women. This experience can be affected by lengthy asylum procedures in industrialized countries, by waiting for a decision to be made on their asylum claims, how it affects their ability to build new lives, learn a new language, familiarize themselves with a new social system, and have confidence in a new future. Their strongest message was that service provision aimed at assisting refugee integration has to be grounded in a deep understanding of the impact of these experiences on their lives.
This year is also the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Gender discrimination is an important source of statelessness among women and their children because without a nationality they are often unable to access many other rights and services. Women and girls may be discriminated against in regard to birth registration and the issuance of personal identity documents. They may be obliged to renounce or may lose their nationality if they marry a national of another country. There are also at least 30 countries in the world where it is only men who can pass their citizenship on to their children. In these countries, the children of women who marry foreigners or who are born out of wedlock may end up stateless if their father is stateless, if he cannot pass on his nationality under the law of his state, or if he is unable or refuses to take the necessary administrative steps with the authorities of his country on behalf of his children.
So it is important that initiatives to tackle statelessness and the problems it causes take into account states’ responsibilities to ensure that women and children are able to enjoy this “right to have rights”.
There is still work to be done to ensure that in practice all female asylum-seekers in the UK are treated with fairness dignity and respect. Asylum Aid’s Charter of Rights of Women Seeking Asylum has highlighted the disparity in the treatment of women who are seeking asylum compared with women settled in the UK and successfully put the challenges faced on the public agenda. The challenges require a holistic approach that combines both preventive strategies with individual responses and solutions. The outcomes of the dialogues will feed into a ministerial-level meeting facilitated by UNHCR on 7th and 8th December in Geneva. It is hoped that participating States will make forward-looking pledges at this meeting that will address some of the most pertinent issues facing refugee women and girls.