A few months ago, #MeToo movement founder Tatiana Burke made a powerful call for sexual abuse victims to organize to provide resources for all who experienced similar trauma – saying that the time has come to put greater focus on the victims, rather than the aggressors.
It is, thus, a good moment to consider how much the momentum generated by the #MeToo movement is reaching the most oppressed women, and how can we help and support their own initiatives. And there is little doubt that refugee women are among the most oppressed communities on Earth, suffering from combined forms of abuse and discrimination.
They belong to the “second sex”, already carrying forms of discrimination from their country of origin. They are subject to sexual predation by smugglers – when already fleeing, very often, sexual abuse by armed men at home. They live in a foreign land, where difficult living conditions massively increase risk of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). The languages, legal systems and support mechanisms are often incomprehensible in asylum countries. When they belong to ethnic minorities or when they are disabled, additional layers of discrimination and disempowerment are added to the first two.
As with many humanitarian actors, refugee women have long been at the core of UNHCR’s endeavours for humanitarian protection. Our first Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women were issued in 1991. A gender perspective has been incorporated into policies and tools. Prevention and response to sexual and gender-based violence is one vital component of UNHCR’s protection policy and practice.
At the same time, it is also worth examining how refugee women themselves have responded to sexual violence and other forms of discrimination, and how humanitarian agencies can best help in this regard. In this post today, I want to focus on some historical examples, and also on how the issue is being addressed in the Bekaa valley of Lebanon, host to some 360,000 Syrian refugees.
Some memories and examples from the past
One of the most powerful examples I can remember is that of women organizations among Guatemalan refugees in Mexico. In 1990, two years before the historical return agreements, refugee women founded the Mamá Maquín association in Chiapas and later other refugee women organizations in other refugee-settled Governorates. With help from the Mexican Government, NGOs and UNHCR, these associations undertook ambitious training, livelihoods, education and women rights sensitization projects.
One of the effects of these programmes was an increase in self-esteem and even identity change and awareness. Women would often remark how before these efforts, back in Guatemala, they considered normal to be kidnapped for marriage. Once as refugees in Mexico, they would gather outside of the big dirt floored community halls in the refugee camps, looking across the flimsy wooden stick walls, listening to men discussing whether their future laid in return to Guatemala or staying in Mexico.
From then on, women refugee organizations became very active in return preparedness discussions, including on how to organize collective farms for returnees. Women became also much more proactive in denouncing rape, sexual harassment and domestic violence. Of course, all that came at a price: Mamá Maquín leaders were often aggressed back in Guatemala, sometimes by returnee men themselves, after they felt women organizations were no longer protected by the same concentration of humanitarian actors.
In other cases, such as in Cuarto Pueblo in 1993, women organizations organized demonstrations against the presence of the same Army which had massacred their families back in 1982. “The Army is like our husbands – they beat us and yet they want us to love them”, they said. The power hidden in this casual comment will not be lost to anybody who has reflected on the deep, toxic relationship between male identity and organized armed conflict.
Years later, in Colombia in the 2000s, UNHCR invested enormous efforts in helping communities to self-organize against violence. This included internally displaced indigenous, white or mestizo (called “campesino” in Colombia) and afro-colombian communities. In southern Colombia in 2004, we started to observe that among mestizo communities displaced by conflict in urban areas, women started to gain prominence as community leaders in IDP associations.
This was often helped by the fact that the skills of poor peasant women (cleaning, cooking but also community teaching and health work) were more marketable in urban areas than those of men, who could no longer till the land. This increased the number of women breadwinners, thereby improving their sense of empowerment and self-worth.
However, contrary to what we had seen in Mexico, there were relatively few women organizations, and the prominent presence of women among IDP organization leadership did not automatically translate into gender or women issues gaining prominence in their advocacy efforts with authorities or even with us at UNHCR.
We did discuss often this fact with women leaders, who usually did not have much time for these issues- being often involved in complicated matters of health policy or even discussions with magistrates of the Constitutional Court. These women had developed a strong identity around the fact of having been displaced by the conflict, and that identity had quickly morphed into a powerful tool for social mobilization and advocacy. However, that did not seem to build momentum towards a stronger identity as “displaced women”.
It is here difficult to know if this is, in itself, an issue or a problem. Hanna Arendt has written evocatively about how refugees choose between being an “upstart”, forgetting their refugee identity and trying to integrate and be successful, or a “pariah”: clearly self-identifying as refugees and fighting for their rights and paying with all kinds of discrimination and social discomfort the price of being at the right side of history. And of course, when refugee women and men choose to be “pariahs”, they do so in their own terms and according to their own feelings and social conditioning.
The issue of how being a refugee affects identity and how refugees themselves see and use these changes, including on gender roles, is one of the most complex, relevant and interesting in refugee work – and it affects men too. I have a vivid recollection, back in 2014, of a discussion with an ageing refugee man, sitting on the floor of a clean, white-washed, luminous small room in the town of Boulembe in eastern Cameroon. The praying mat where the man was squatting was scattered with small white plastic bags full of medicine, asthma inhalers, crumbled-up medical prescriptions and UNHCR identity documents.
The old man was sick and could not work. He was clearly depressed for having lost all his cattle at the hands of militia in the Central African Republic while flying, and not being able to provide for his family – he was being taken care of by his wife, who worked as a house cleaner, but this only contributed to his depression and his feeling of “not being a man any longer”. While we talked, his younger wife was sprightly running up and down in the small court, fetching water and preparing her kids for school.
A couple of years later, a few young men did start return to Muslim neighbourhoods of the Central African Republic capital of Bangui, around the central mosque, at the time still controlled by self-defence militias. They were often insulted by their former neighbours for having fled to Cameroon rather than defending the neighbourhood from enemy militias. One sophisticated form of insult by those who remained in Bangui was gifting the returnees with feminine-looking pieces of cloth to fashion themselves a skirt.
The situation in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon
Currently, in the Bekaa valley of Lebanon, the stuation of refugee women and men is not massively different from many other post-emergency refugee situations. Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is of course prevalent, and UNHCR, other humanitarian agencies and Lebanese authorities have made for years efforts to upgrade prevention, case management and response including legal and psychological advice and safe houses.
At the same time, the SGBV context present many context-specific nuances. To improve our knowledge and adjust interventions accordingly, UNHCR together with Lebanese partner NGO ABAAD have launched a comprehensive, qualitative baseline study on the problem[1]. The results were not completely surprising but nonetheless very worrying.
Verbal abuse and domestic rape continues to be prevalent inside refugee families – compounded by difficult living conditions, growing poverty and culturally sanctioned underreporting. Consistent reports also exist about refugee women being subject to abuse by men in positions of power outside of the family, in particular landlords and agricultural employers. The most vulnerable women groups seem to be those with lower education levels employed in agriculture. There is also anecdotal evidence that Dom women are in a particular situation of vulnerability. Fears exist too among the refugee community around sexual abuse of boys – which necessitates more evidence and research.
The reactions of the refugee community to the problem are varied. During the baseline study, many refugee women and men expressed the need to uphold conservative cultural values and limit contacts with the host community as a way to preserve women security and men’s sense of honour – further damaged, as it was the case in Cameroon, by the powerlessness brought about by refugeehood. Child marriage is prevalent – as a way by refugee parents to reduce the financial burden of feeding numerous children and also share responsibilities to preserve honour. Similarly, many parents are reluctant to send refugee girls to mixed Lebanese schools. This results in lower rates of school attendance for refugee girls.
There are also some good news. As it has been the case in other refugee situations, exile means that women need to take new responsibilities, such as becoming breadwinners. While some refugee women have complained that this harms their female identity, others have seen opportunities for long-term change in gender roles and growing women empowerment. At the same time, refugee women and men increasingly report that efforts for sensitization around, for instance, child marriage are starting to bear fruit. We are seeing an increased number of refugee women taking their own responsibility to sensitize other women and men around issues of, for instance, early marriage.
What should be the way ahead?
In response to this situation, a number of initiatives are being taken by UNHCR. Our budget for our existing, long running SGBV prevention and response programme has grown by 25% in the last two years. Our teams, together with NGO partners such as INTERSOS, are becoming much more active in supporting community-based sensitization initiatives. Building on national SGBV strategies, the baseline study and existing research, we are promoting the preparation of a common approach and action plan, bringing together humanitarian actors, refugees and authorities, to address SGBV among Syrian refugees in the Bekaa.
This common approach will need to address important challenges. One of the most daunting refers to the ethical conundrum of what can be seen as promoting cultural and behavioural change from the outside. It is important to understand that this outside has many layers and is not limited to the international community. The Bekaa is a relatively traditional environment and most of the local NGOs with SGBV expertise were created in the far more urban and modern Beirut.
Even inside the refugee community, women-led initiatives for community sensitization are often the initiative of educated, urban and comparatively more affluent refugee women coming from, for instance, Damascus or Aleppo cities – targeting women and men coming from much more conservative rural areas such as in Deir el Zor and Raqqa. Hundreds of refugee families are already returning and we will need to think how to make efforts sustainable across international borders. We will also need to reflect on how to reinforce existing efforts to involve refugee men as allies.
Perhaps more importantly, we will have to carefully avoid the trap of blaming the refugee community for their own ills. In a context were, after seven years of crisis, donors are losing interest in humanitarian aid and access to labour markets and livelihoods activities are limited, the sheer poverty of many Syrian refugee families will only increase, which may impact in yet more child marriage and less school attendance by girls.
At the same time, much of the abuse comes not from refugee men but from members of the host community in positions of power, such as employers, landlords and service providers. UNHCR is also stepping up accountability, sensitization and control systems for its own staff. More direct involvement of the local administration and law enforcement officials will also be needed, in order to reduce impunity.
Fortunately, and despite many challenges affecting host communities themselves, local authorities such as mayors and Governors have been very cooperative, and SGBV coordination mechanisms are efficiently co-led by the Ministry of Social Affairs. This, together with increasing efforts and hope transmitted by refugee women themselves, are very encouraging signs.
[1] The baseline is available at http://www.abaadmena.org/documents/ebook.1533039771.pdf.