Women Refugee Voices from Asia and Africa

Travelling for Safety

ActionAid Association

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000430776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents experiences of women refugees in a variety of contexts across Asia and Africa and builds a framework to ensure robust and effective mechanisms to safeguard refugees' rights. It highlights the structural challenges that women who are forcibly displaced face and the inadequacies of the response of governments and other stakeholders, irrespective of the country of origin, ethnicity, and religion of the refugee community.

This volume:

? Focuses on contemporary issues such as the Rohingya and the Syrian crisis.

? Brings first-person accounts of women refugees from Asia and Africa.

? Draws on an interdisciplinary approach to analyse a host of issues, including public policy, cultural norms, and economics of forced migration.

Bringing together first-hand accounts from women refugees and interventions by activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, humanitarian workers, and international law experts, this book will be a must read for scholars and researchers of migration and diaspora studies, development studies, sociology and social anthropology, and politics and public policy. It will be of special interest to NGOs, policymakers, and think tanks.

Part I

Overview

1 Introduction

Divita Shandilya and Sandeep Chachra

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047094-1

We are at a critical juncture in history where the number of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes is the highest it has ever been. At the end of 2020, 82.4 million people had been forcibly displaced due to war, violence, persecution, and disasters, including 48 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 26.4 million refugees.¹ In their search for safety, these people are increasingly facing highly militarised borders, hostile government policies, and unfriendly local populations.

The global refugee system seems to be failing them as it struggles to cope with the challenges of large-scale displacements, mixed migration flows of asylum seekers, refugees, stateless persons, and migrants, and protracted situations of conflict and displacement. Moreover, a growing number of people, including displaced women and children and refugees living in slums in urban areas, are unable to access the protection and support mechanisms set up under this system.

These shortcomings are the result of years of ineffective governance due to a lack of political will, absence of accountability, inadequate responsibility sharing, and insufficient and inefficient funding. In a deeper sense, these shortcomings are also rooted in global and national economic development trajectories which continue to create an extreme concentration of wealth at the one end, and masses of dispossessed people living in poverty and assetlessness at the other end. The World Refugee Council has characterised this crisis aptly: “Our world suffers not so much from a refugee crisis as from a political crisis – a deficit of leadership and vision and, most fundamentally, a shortfall of humanity and empathy.”²

The crisis has extracted a huge cost from forcibly displaced persons. It constantly undermines their physical security and mental well-being. The material deprivation of asylum seekers and refugees becomes more entrenched in most cases, with few opportunities for future generations to improve their conditions. Their rights are curtailed and denied in various ways, relegating them to the margins of society. In this context, there is an urgent need to critically engage with current refugee policies and reshape them based on the lived experiences of refugees.

This book presents to its readers these experiences in the form of narratives from women refugees. The introductory chapter authored by Rebecca Eapen and Sweta Madhuri Kannan reflects on international legal protections and support mechanisms and how they could be better utilised and expanded to protect the rights of refugees. Part II of this book presents stories of women travelling for refuge, captured in narrative accounts, sketches, and photographs of women in refugee camps across Asia and Africa. These two continents generate and host the largest number of refugees in the world.

The narratives cover relatively recent situations of mass displacement such as in Syria and Bangladesh. It also looks at protracted conditions of Tamil Sri Lankan refugees and displaced Hindus from Pakistan in India, Western Saharan refugees in Algeria, and refugees from Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda living in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Part III explores varied themes related to refuge and being a refugee. These include the challenges faced by people in accessing safety at the time of displacement and their struggles and survival strategies in displacement. Part IV looks at issues of integration, relocation, and repatriation of refugees, and explores their trepidations and hopes and attempts to draw out the contours of the needed resolution.

The rampant misgovernance has been fuelled by public apathy, which in turn is stoked and exploited by politicians who are wont to whipping up paranoia for short-term gains, often through falsehoods and exaggerations. We see this in the way that far-right populist and nationalist parties have gained credence across the world. They may have different roots and trajectories but are united by their anti-immigration stance and the strikingly similar language and tools that they deploy to garner support. At the receiving end are asylum seekers and migrants.

There is a manifold increase in institutionalised racism and xenophobia against displaced populations. They are being routinely denied asylum, detained, subjected to violence, and sent back to countries that they have fled, with little regard for their security and well-being. Riding on the back of increasing inequalities, contracting opportunities, and lack of jobs, rising chauvinistic “sons of the soil” tendencies are further pushing displaced people into precarity. Governments and people have become too narrowly focused on highlighting those aspects of a displaced person’s identity that they perceive as a threat, be it religion, race, ethnicity, or country of origin, and excluding them for it. In the exclusion of others, people appear to reaffirm their own sense of belongingness.

There is also a tendency, an emphasis almost, on grading the trauma and suffering of displaced people to determine who among them deserves asylum and who does not. Distinctions in circumstances certainly exist, which merit differing levels of protection for different groups. But asylum policies and procedures have today morphed into laborious exercises to qualify whether one is a refugee or an immigrant, often through extremely narrow prisms. This is the case even as governments are constraining the legal pathways to migration and asylum and attempting to delegitimise the presence of existing populations within their territory, especially from minority communities. Through all these extremely fraught and contested processes, the voices of refugees remain unheard and ignored.

But the narratives of otherisation and vilification need to be countered. The representation of refugees in media and popular imagination should be supplemented by stories which speak truthfully to their circumstances, to the difficult choices that they have had to make, to their motivations, and to their hopes and aspirations. Refugees have had their humanity chipped away little by little by people refusing to engage with their experiences and by the constant undermining of their agency. We must help in restoring this sense of agency by listening to them.

This book intends to facilitate this process by bringing voices of refugee women to the fore, whose issues and needs are often sidelined. By focusing on their stories, we wish to bring out the individuality of their experiences, which often get lost in a bucket of generalisations. At the same time, we hope that readers would appreciate the commonalities in their situations across religions, race, ethnicities, and nationalities; there seems to be a lot more in common than that which divides.

The special vulnerability of refugee women

Women and girls make up an estimated 50 per cent of all forcibly displaced people worldwide.³ It is widely agreed that they are extremely vulnerable in displacement contexts. The everyday structural discrimination and violence that women and girls face across the world gets further exacerbated in times of conflict and displacement. They are often targeted for sexual abuse and exploitation and face rampant gender-based violence, with little recourse to authorities and legal mechanisms. In addition, they are denied or are unable to access services and resources as well as education and job opportunities. When people are forcibly displaced, and resources and opportunities are at a premium, women and girls are usually the first ones to bear the brunt.

It is widely acknowledged that addressing vulnerabilities specific to women is central to effective responses to refugee movements. There are several international resolutions which emphasise the need to enhance protection for refugee women and girls and enable them as independent actors. The Conclusion on Refugee Women adopted by the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in its 39th session in 1988, for example, elaborates on the special vulnerability of refugee women and the problems they face, notably in the area of physical security. It calls for the need to promote the participation of refugee women as agents as well as beneficiaries of programmes on their behalf.⁴ More recently, the Global Compact on Refugees adopted by the United Nations General Assembly states that women and girls may experience particular gender-related barriers that call for an adaptation of responses in the context of large refugee situations.⁵

Yet standard policy approaches to refugee situations have been largely homogenising. They do not consider the differential needs and circumstances of women, sexual minorities, children, and persons with disabilities. This allows for discrimination, exclusion, and violence based on gender, sexuality, caste, class, ability, and other similar factors which may exist within refugee populations to be ignored or worsen. It also leads to the invisibilisation of certain sections of the population to a system which by design cannot see them, thereby depriving them of access to aid, education, healthcare, and livelihoods. For example, in most refugee responses, registration to receive aid and other services is done in the name of the head of the household, typically a male member, regardless of the power dynamic within the household which can be critical in determining whether women can access these services.

When we talked to the refugee women, the detrimental effects of gaps in protection policies and welfare programmes were laid bare. These women belong to different age groups and are of diverse nationalities, religions, and ethnicities, but their experiences in displacement are remarkably similar. They have faced tremendous atrocities and hardships, both in the process of fleeing to safety and seeking asylum and while living in camps or slum-like situations in new countries.

They remain at high risk of intimate partner violence as well as sexual and gender-based violence by other men from within the communities or from local populations in host countries. They are very likely to be excluded from decision-making spaces due to societal constraints and patriarchal norms and because they are not seen as being representative of their communities. In situations where women are keen to or have been pushed into taking leadership roles by their circumstances, for instance in the case of women who may have lost their husbands in conflict, they are not provided the avenues and means to fulfil them.

Most of the women we spoke with do not have access to decent livelihoods and their families are either entirely dependent on aid or on the meagre incomes of the male head of the household. This further impedes the choices and freedoms available to women. They and their families are thus trapped in a cycle of poverty and violence that is not only pernicious for women but even for the families and communities. Despite being out of the dire straits that forced them to move, they are beset by a near-constant state of uncertainty and anxiety about whether their future generations might lead better lives.

The book delves into each of these aspects. It provides readers an opportunity to understand the various facets of refugee issues through a gendered lens. The narratives are based on semi-structured interviews enabling women to share their experiences in detail. And the deep dive into each story hopefully lets the reader discern the universal – in terms of what is shared – and that which is unique about each experience.

Crisis of identity and other themes

The narratives of refugee women form Chapter 3 of this book. Based on their stories and the recurring themes that were brought up, our contributing authors have written chapters that speak to these issues. They have drawn upon their expertise and fieldwork in countries as varied as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Niger, Kenya, and South Sudan.

Chapters 4 and 5 are visual chapters. In Chapter 4, Molly Crabapple’s sketches document the families of Kurdish Syrian refugees and the work of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) at the Domiz camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. In Chapter 5, Mahmud Rahman presents the plight of Rohingya refugees in the camps of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh in the early days of the mass exodus of August 2017.

In their stories, women share their experiences of profound loss. They had to leave behind their homes, their possessions and were often separated from their family members. Some would be reunited with them in the camps but most of them were not so fortunate. Their journeys were undertaken in highly dangerous circumstances and generally in a clandestine manner due to the lack of safe migration routes and lack of awareness, documents, and money.

In Chapter 6, Priyali Sur explores the reasons which forced women to flee, the difficult journeys that they had to undertake, and the brutality they were subjected to by traffickers, smugglers, and border guards. Dr Jane Freedman elaborates on the structural and systemic gender inequalities before, during, and after forced displacement, which put women and girls at risk in Chapter 7.

The women highlight the near permanence of the state of displacement. Several refugee families report living in refugee camps and settlements in host countries for multiple generations. Some of the women interviewed were born in the camps and have continued living there for more than three decades. Among refugees mired in such protracted situations, it is also common to hear stories where people have been displaced more than once – either having to move from one area to another within the host country or from one coun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Overview
• PART II The path they travelled: Stories of refugee women
• PART III The particular vulnerabilities of refugee women
• PART IV The contours of a long-term resolution
• Index