Navigating Refugee Life

By Mulki Al-Sharmani 25.02.2010
Internally displaced Chadian girls collect wood in Habile Village after it was attacked and burned by militiamen
Internally displaced Chadian girls collect wood in Habile village after it was attacked and burned by militiamen. Collecting firewood can be dangerous for the displaced, especially women, who are often raped in isolated areas. © UNHCR/H. Caux

Refugee women and girls are exposed to multiple forms of violence. The displacement resulting from living in places of armed conflicts subjects women and girls to murder, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, trafficking, abject poverty and to a higher risk of violence inflicted by an intimate partner, family relatives or community
 members.

By Mulki Al-Sharmani

Those of us concerned with violence against refugee women and girls may agree on two things: the first is that the magnitude of the problem is grave, and the second is that although there have
been numerous efforts to address the problem in the past three decades, the effectiveness of the outcomes remains to be debated.
 
Refugee women and girls are exposed to multiple forms of violence. The displacement resulting from living in places of armed conflicts subjects women and girls to murder, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, trafficking, abject poverty and to a higher risk of violence inflicted by an intimate partner, family relatives or community members. A recent report of the United Nations Development Fund for Women, which notes that half a million women were raped in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, demonstrates the severity of the problem.1 The report also states that 60,000 cases of rape against women had been reported in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Another recent publication, based on a study in 2000, reports similar alarming figures2: 50,000 to 64,000 internally ¬displaced women were sexually abused during Sierra Leone’s armed conflict. Furthermore, the same source reports that just between October 2004 and February 2005, Médecins Sans Frontiers treated 500 women who were victims of rape in Darfur.

 

 

 
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