When I ran away from house there was no safety, and after I got here to South Africa there isn’t any safety; it’s additionally occurring right here.
These are the phrases of a 20-year-old Burundian girl who fled her house nation to seek asylum in South Africa. Her expertise – which she instructed us about in our research on girls asylum seekers and refugees in South Africa – is, sadly, not distinctive. Many girls who flee violence in the hope of discovering safety and safety in South Africa as a substitute discover themselves nonetheless susceptible and in danger.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that South Africa at the moment hosts 250,000 refugees and asylum seekers. Many extra in all probability stay undocumented. And whereas there are nonetheless no correct knowledge about numbers of men and women, estimates counsel that in 2015, 35% of asylum claims have been made by girls. Many of them fled sexual and gender-based types of violence in their nations of origin.
South African asylum and refugee coverage has been praised in the previous for its willingness to combine gender issues. But there are gaps between intention and implementation. Women in search of safety stay susceptible and in danger. This creates a “continuum of violence” in opposition to asylum in search of and refugee girls: completely different types of violence intersect and happen throughout in completely different settings and places, from girls’s nations of origin to their vacation spot, South Africa.
Our research examined the particular gendered types of violence and precarity directed at girls asylum seekers and refugees in South Africa. This is to not say males aren’t victimised, too. But our analysis suggests that ladies are extra susceptible than males to those sorts of violence.
Ongoing conflicts in many nations in the area imply that ladies will proceed to flee in vital numbers to seek safety in South Africa. This safety merely isn’t out there in the present situations. Continuing precarity and vulnerability to violence has long run penalties for these girls’s well being and well-being.
Violence at house, violence in South Africa
Our research was carried out in Durban, South Africa in collaboration with Refugee Social Services and Refugee Pastoral Care, two native NGOs working straight with migrants and refugees. We spoke to girls from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. The interviews aimed to discover girls’s experiences of sexual and gender-based violence on their journeys and on arrival in South Africa.
Nearly all the ladies we interviewed had been subjected to sexual violence in their nations of origin, or on the journey to South Africa. Consequently many have been grappling with trauma, undesirable pregnancies, an infection with HIV or different sexually transmitted infections. One interviewee shared her harrowing expertise:
When we left Lubumbashi from the border, I used a truck and they simply put us in a container. There have been 5 folks in the container and I used to be the one girl along with 4 males … I simply met them contained in the container. They compelled themselves on me and they raped me alongside the way in which. (38 yr outdated asylum seeker from DRC)
Arriving in South Africa doesn’t imply an finish to their ordeal. It’s additionally laborious to make an asylum declare and acquire authorized standing. Three of the unique 5 refugee reception workplaces across the nation have been closed to new applications since 2011. The remaining workplaces have been closed utterly through the peak of the COVID pandemic and solely reopened in April 2022. It may be very troublesome and time consuming to get an appointment at certainly one of these centres. In the aftermath of the pandemic the Department of Home Affairs launched a web based system for asylum renewals and new purposes. However, asylum seekers nonetheless face challenges noting failures with the system, and most of these we met who had submitted their purposes had not obtained any suggestions.
When asylum permits have been granted, these lasted solely between three and 6 months. After that ladies needed to journey lengthy distances for renewals; generally appointments weren’t out there. In some instances, husbands had left their households to start out new households elsewhere. In such situations, wives who had been registered as a part of their husbands’ information discovered it troublesome to resume their declare. This left them undocumented. As one girl, a 33-year-old from Burundi, defined:
He left in September and I don’t even know the place he went. I don’t even have his quantity … I’ve the six month-to-month allow but then it expired through the (COVID) lockdown and now I don’t even know what I’m going to do if Home Affairs open as a result of I can’t renew there as a result of I don’t have a file there. I used to be a part of my husband’s file and I’ll solely know when they reopen if they are going to assist me.
The lack of documentation meant it was troublesome for girls to acquire fundamental social providers, healthcare or employment, and to register their kids in colleges. This authorized and financial insecurity strengthened their vulnerabilities to violence and created obstacles to accessing providers if they have been victims of violence.
Lack of lodging for asylum seekers and refugees implies that some girls find yourself sleeping in the road or turning into depending on others (typically males) for lodging.
Economic precarity is a significant component in creating vulnerability to sexual and gender-based violence. These circumstances additionally underpin engagement in transactional sexual relationships to outlive.
Serious gaps
The difficulties in gaining refugee standing, an absence of lodging and financial help, and lack of entry to social providers place girls in hazard of repeated violence. And whereas organisations comparable to Refugee Social Services do purpose to supply providers and help, they can not make up for the intense gaps in providers and provision for girls refugees.
Greater efforts ought to be made to create a system which facilitates the method of making use of for asylum and to supply help to asylum seekers, without charge, in acquiring their authorized documentation. This would imply they may entry schooling, employment alternatives, and social providers which would scale back a few of their vulnerabilities. Allowing particular person asylum claims, even when married, that don’t depend on the male accomplice being the file holder would take away gendered constructions that perpetuate authorized insecurities for girls and their kids.
More consideration must be paid to the psychological well being and well-being of refugees who’re survivors of sexual violence. Providing protected areas for refugees to satisfy and join and providing help by means of peer educator programmes in the group could also be an vital supply of knowledge, referral networks and social help.
Jane Freedman, Professeur de sociologie, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS); Marcia Victoria Mutambara, Research fellow, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Tamaryn Crankshaw, Programme Leader, Health Economics and HIV and AIDS Research Division (HEARD), University of KwaZulu-Natal
This article is republished from The Conversation beneath a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.