To prevent Syrian refugee women from sexual and gender-based violence, humanitarian actors should increase knowledge of sexual and gender-based violence programmes. It will also help to develop recommendations for future sexual and gender-based violence programmes UNHCR In this situation, female interests are rarely recognized.
Organizations should support women as equal decision-makers. More precisely, in situations where there are refugee women representatives, their appreciation as leaders and their inclusion in leadership structures has led to increased presentation of sexual and gender-based violence issues. They provide Syrian refugee women with leadership participation and support a number of young Syrian women to develop their advocacy skills in decision-making processes.
Hence, refugee women will have the skills to make their voices heard. Another project carried by Sawa Association for Development in Lebanon targeted 30 Syrian women aged between 25 and 45 years. The main goal of the project is to empower Syrian refugee women in Lebanese camps by raising their awareness to their civil and social rights, and provide awareness on rights to reduce the vulnerabilities of Syrian women refugees subjected to sexual and gender-based violence, stress and trauma resulting from war.
The United Nations, Governments, NGOs and humanitarian authorities in general should define the kinds of threats Syrian refugee women face during migration. Gender-based analysis, interviews and research programmes should be made to understand the gender-based human security perspective of refugee women. A gender-based human security perspective, during and after forced migration, will empower refugee women. Putting refugee women at the centre of a human security approach will help to decrease their vulnerabilities and number of threats to their individual security UNHCR and Besides, creating awareness via mass media will help to disseminate information on available services, rights of refugees and host country laws.
This advocacy work emphasizes how to prevent sexual and gender-based violence incidents at individual, family and community levels, and how to support would-be survivors UNHCR This chapter tried to illustrate the vulnerability of Syrian refugee women and the need of gendering human security during migration. Because of their gender roles, needs and status, refugee women are differently affected and particularly vulnerable. In that, forced migration creates specific threats and insecurities for Syrian refugee women throughout their journeys to their final destinations and while in transit areas.
Therefore, gender sensitivity and gender awareness are important issues for the human security of refugee women, enhancing not only the protection of refugees from violence but also their health and livelihoods.
Instead, they will be considered as people with different experiences and facing diverse insecurities during migration. First of all, priority should be given to the voices of refugee women. Wherever possible female experts from the host community should be engaged to provide sexual and gender-based violence training and service delivery.
Funding should be given to experts to institutionalize plans and protocols to address the violence. Females should be actively recruited to international security or security forces to enable women refugees to freely talk about their witnesses.
When refugee women are empowered economically, socially and politically, they will have the ability to play a key role in preventing the spread of violence. On the other side, security forces should improve their monitoring of personnel who may directly or inadvertently contribute to coerced or forced prostitution, sexual exploitation, trafficking and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence Ward Host governments and NGOs, and humanitarian agencies should establish sexual and gender- based violence cases databases.
A strong methodology for addressing the needs of women refugees will be available for adoption in future crises Ward Of course, it is not easy for authorities and researchers to collect or gather the data on these different types of vulnerabilities and threats that Syrian refugee women face during migration, as they are mostly reluctant to talk about their experiences due to cultural and social pressures such as honour killing or exclusion, which creates an important limitation for research on women and migration.
This is a critical difficulty, because qualitative rather than quantitative data-gathering methods are mostly employed. As emergent and short-term policies, easy access to health services, gender specific security precautions, paying attention to cleaning facilities and hygiene, accommodations for unaccompanied women, and trusted service providers will help to decrease the number of threats.
More important than this, international organizations such as the United Nations, NGOs and official authorities should develop a gender-based perspective paying more attention to the specific needs of refugee women. Therefore, besides the official emergent efforts on the ground to elevate the status of refugee women, careful analysis of the practices, experiences and needs of female refugees should be undertaken to determine long-term policies to maintain safer environments for refugee women during and after their journeys.
Amnesty International. Baczynska, Gabriela and Sara Ledwith. Basu, Soumita. Betts, Alexander. Forced Migration and Global Politics. Bilgin, Pinar. Williams, 89— New York: Routledge. Booth, Ken. Bunch, Charlotte. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Collett, Elizabeth. March Dearden, Lizzie. Diskaya Ali.
Feinstein International Centre at Tufts University. Freedman, Jane. The Freedom Fund. Gasper, Des and Thanh-Dam Truong. Graham, David and Nana Poku. Migration, Globalisation, and Human Security. Huysmans, Jef. London: Routledge. International Rescue Committee. New York: International Rescue Committee. Yet, this legal distinction is often hard to draw in practice, and for the purpose of economic analysis the distinction is even fuzzier.
Confronted with a threat, they will consider the risk and cost of migration, and prospects at different destinations. Like voluntary migrants, a family fearing persecution or war may decide to send first a young, able-bodied and enterprising member to explore. Conversely, some economic migrants may, to all purposes, be forced to migrate by hunger and disease. From an economic perspective, the passage of time may make the distinction between forced and voluntary migrants, or between refugees and economic migrants, even less meaningful.
Since for the vast majority of forced migrants the capacity to work is the only asset, sooner rather than later they must settle and find a job. In many instances, this is sought in a region or country other than that of first arrival, or, less commonly, in the country of origin to which the forced migrant may be willing and able to return.
Thus, a migrant who was initially forced to migrate subsequently acts much like a voluntary migrant, and the analysis of the economic impact of voluntary migration can be even more useful in understanding the effect of forced migration.
Still, there are four economic challenges which are uniquely associated with forced migration and which require specific analysis. The short-term challenges include the job market mismatch problem, and the effect on the region of first arrival of large numbers of forced migrants. The long-term challenges relate to the region of settlement of the forced migrant, and specifically the overwhelmingly South-South nature of forced migration, as well as the international coordination problems caused by the phenomenon.
These challenges, which are all highly specific to forced migration, and are all related, are treated in turn below. Finding a job, even a bad job, is also the key to their becoming productive members of their adopted society. Yet, there are many impediments to this happening, including, in many cases, outright refusal of the permission to work. If they are not allowed to work, and are not permitted to move on, or are unable to cover the cost of another trip, or are simply unwilling to take the risk of moving, their living standards as well as their ability to contribute to society are severely compromised.
In those cases, the chances that a forced migrant will eventually find decent work are reasonable even if they may not be as good as those of well-connected natives. The problem arises when the inflow of forced migrants is large relative to the host population. Technically, the job mismatch problem facing forced migrants can be defined as an excess supply of workers which can only be corrected by a fall in wages, or by an increase in investment.
Such a decline in wages may not be allowed to occur because it is too large to be politically acceptable leading to work permit denial or because of the presence of other labor market restrictions that protect incumbent workers.
At the same time, new investments may occur too slowly or be deterred by a fragile investment climate or by political instability, which is sometimes made even worse by a large inflow of migrants. The result is that migrants are not absorbed into the labor force, become dependent on humanitarian aid. Where refugees are not allowed to work, many tend to become part of informal labor markets anyway, in a part of the economy which is largely outside the tax net, work at extremely low wages, and are subject to exploitation and abuse.
The evidence on the job market mismatch problem in both advanced and developing countries is partial and spotty, but, while it is discomforting in developing countries receiving large numbers of forced migrants, it is far from uniformly bleak in advanced countries. For example, Germans and Finns displaced after World War 2 and French and Portuguese displaced in the wake of colonization who returned to their country of origin, were allowed to work and fared fairly well according to the available studies comp.
However, these groups are not representative of present day forced migrations of people of diverse ethnic origins. In recent decades, most refugees — which tend to be overwhelmingly unskilled - arrived in advanced countries without knowing the language and, often, without being able to write in the Latin script. Some arrive illegally but even those who arrive legally often have to wait many months or years before they are allowed to work.
The refugees that have professional qualifications typically find that they are not recognized and they must accept a lower status or pass new exams which take many years of preparation. Even so, recent evidence suggests that, despite the increase in work permits granted to refugees in Germany — a country that received large numbers of asylum seekers in - the national unemployment rate continued to fall in every month compared to the same month in the previous year IAB , 2.
Unfortunately, systematic studies of how modern day refugees have fared in advanced countries over the long run are few and largely confined to the United States. These studies tend to concur that refugees find a job within a few months of arrival, that they earn significantly less than natives with equal qualifications at first, and that knowledge of the English language — which is often scant - is an important determinant of their income. Most refugees arriving in the United States rely initially on government aid, but very few still depend on aid within 2 or 3 years of arrival.
A disproportionate number of refugees are small-scale entrepreneurs. While the income of refugees rises quite rapidly over time, there is insufficient evidence to conclude that their incomes converge completely to those of natives. A recent longitudinal study of the United States by Cortes Cortes finds that refugees adjusted rapidly and — surprisingly - that their income progression significantly outstrips that of economic migrants.
She shows that refugees invested more in education. Cortes finds that these results cannot be attributed to differences in the ethnic composition of economic migrants and refugees, and speculates that they are due to the fact that refugees are more committed to remaining in the United States in the longer term because they cannot return or do not want to return.
The available studies of the insertion of forced migrants in developing countries are also few, but as mentioned, they offer a much less comforting picture.
This is as might be expected, because in the instances studied — unlike in the United States - the refugee inflow is very large relative to the domestic population, and the migrants, which are unskilled, tend to be directly competitive with the local population, which is also predominantly unskilled.
Moreover, in the instances studied, wages are low and the job market situation is precarious to start with. In a recent welfare assessment of Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, the World Bank found a high incidence of poverty, and -surprisingly - that access to labor market was not a significant determinant in poverty levels Verme a , presumably as the only jobs available to refugees are at wage levels which are extremely low.
A recent study of internally displaced people in Colombia, which are estimated at 4. The job market mismatch problem, which is clearly much more severe in developing countries absorbing large numbers of forced migrants relative to their population than in advanced or developing countries absorbing small numbers, is only one aspect of the impact on the region of first arrival, discussed next.
Forced displacement typically takes place in a relatively short time frame and involves large numbers, unlike the more regular inflow of voluntary migrants. As mentioned, the refugee crisis affects specific countries and regions disproportionately, while the vast majority of advanced and developing countries receive very few refugees in a given year; this is a case where initial conditions and the size of the shock matter, and they matter greatly. Over and beyond the labor market impact discussed above, forced displacement can constitute a large demographic shock causing a sudden mismatch of supply and demand of public services and housing in the host community.
In countries or regions where the investment climate is inauspicious to start with and where the inflow of foreigners disrupts established social and political equilibria, business expectations can be adversely affected.
This can delay or indefinitely impede the private investment response to rising demand for housing and services. Fiscal constraints can limit the required investment in public services, and, in extreme cases, balance of payments constraints can lead to exchange rate devaluation and make the import of food, fuel and other necessities more expensive. The current media focus on the migrant crisis in European countries, most of which receive very few forced migrants relative to their population, diverts attention from the far more severe challenge in a number of host communities in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Over half of the refugees worldwide originate from Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia and over two thirds of displacement takes place within the region of origin UNHCR , in host communities where social, economic and institutional capacities are low to begin with, and where fiscal space and capacity to borrow is limited. How the arrival problem plays out depends greatly on the specific context of the host community as well as the socioeconomic profile of the displaced population.
By way of illustration, the cases of Germany, Italy, Jordan, and Lebanon, countries which have recently attracted large absolute numbers of forced migrants, are compared in Table 1. The difference in per capita incomes between Germany and Italy, and Jordan and Lebanon, after adjusting for purchasing power, is about 3 or 4 to 1 in the case of Jordan, and 2 or 3 to 1 in the case of Lebanon.
Lebanon and Jordan rank high among countries hosting refugees. However, they are not among the top 10 host countries when all forced migrants, including IDPs, are included. As Chart 1 shows. Syria, Colombia, and Sudan and South Sudan, which are much poorer countries host far larger numbers of displaced people. Lebanon, Jordan, Italy and Germany do not even currently feature among the largest hosts when all forced migrants are considered.
Germany received close to 1 million asylum seekers in , equivalent to 1. Still, even if most of these people were granted asylum, the stock of refugees in Germany less than 3 per thousand would be tiny compared to Lebanon per thousand and Jordan, 87 per thousand , as Chart 2 shows. In the United States, where Congress has just voted against admitting additional refugees absent a draconian vetting process, and only up to 10, Syrian refugees per year, the number of refugees represents less than 1 per thousand of the population.
To put the current flow of refugees in perspective, Spain attracted around 4. The flow of large numbers of displaced people in a short time affects the host community profoundly. Below, three dimensions are examined: public services, fiscal balance, and political stability. In developing countries, low incomes and fiscal constraints mean that the provision of health care, education and social services barely satisfies the needs of the native population to start with, and excludes many, even before the arrival of refugees.
Over the period of , a World Bank assessment found that to restore access and quality to these services in Lebanon to the level possible before the arrival of refugees would cost 1.
This sum represents about 5. Because the inflow of migrants is relatively small and public services are better developed and funded to start with, OECD countries have much larger capacity to deal with the immediate demand shock on public services than poorer hosts, even though the concentration of refugees in some regions or cities can cause the shock to be uneven, as in the case of some school districts receiving large numbers of immigrant children.
Since the population of both Germany and Italy is projected to decline with the natural increase across the EU turning likely turning negative for the first time in OECD , p. In contrast, the challenge for public services in the small number of developing countries confronted with a surge of forced migrants is compounded by the composition of the migrants. In Jordan and Lebanon, the Syrian refugee population consists of relatively vulnerable groups, placing even greater demand on education and maternal health.
Compared to the population of Syria, refugees are disproportionately children and the head of household is disproportionately female Verme b, p. In contrast, there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that those forced migrants who reach Europe have higher skills and larger assets. Still, while refugees in Jordan and Lebanon speak Arabic, those in Italy and Germany will require language training. No equivalent assessment is available for Jordan, but the fiscal burden is expected to be less, since policy has been to settle refugees in camps — which are funded by UNHCR — unlike in Lebanon where refugees draw directly on public facilities and resources.
Costs of hosting refugees in OECD countries are higher per refugee than hosting them in developing countries but much smaller in proportion to GDP. Official statistics are difficult to find, but the German magazine Zeit, for example, estimates that hosting a refugee will increase public spending by EUR 10,, per refugee per year. Even if all the estimated 1 million asylum seekers in Germany in are granted refugee status, the costs would then come to EUR billion for In the most extreme scenario, Zeit estimates added total public expenditures of EUR 65 billion for asylum seekers and refugees through , which would be partly offset by about EUR 20 billion in increased government revenues reflecting the expansion of output.
The net costs of EUR 45 billion in the five year timespan would represent around less than. Italy is expected to receive a far smaller number of migrants but runs a fiscal deficit and, unlike Germany, has a structural unemployment problem. Still, the fiscal impact of hosting more refugees in Italy over the next five years is likely to be marginal. Whether they are hosted in a developing or advanced country, the fiscal impact of forced migrant inflows depends critically on policies designed to integrate them in the formal labor market, and the tax revenue they generate.
Refugees often have some limited assets to draw from on arrival, which tend to boost the consumption of local goods and services; however, these funds run out quickly if refugees cannot replenish them through gainful employment 2.
Settlement regulations also matter. Refugees in camps are less likely to become part of the formal labor market and to contribute through taxes. In Jordan and Lebanon the employment opportunities in the formal sector are scarce.
Refugees can also boost tax revenue by facilitating trade and investment flows between the origin and host communities, as appears to be happening in the case of Syrian refugees moving their operations from Syria to Turkey World Bank MFM GP , p.
While this analysis has mainly focuses in on the economic effects of the sudden inflow of refugees into a host community, there are also implications for the social and political fabric which can have economic repercussions.
Indeed, although real or perceived adverse economic effects can be an important cause of social tensions, concerns about maintaining the political balance, preserving local mores, protecting national security, not to mention the ever-present xenophobia and racism, have a dynamic of their own. Rwanda to Tanzania Reasons In there was a bitter civil war in Rwanda between two ethnic groups, the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi.
Effects Most of the refugees in Tanzania are found in refugee camps on the western borders of the country. The arrival of the refugees has had a substantial impact on the environment: Deforestation - as refugees seek wood for fuel and for shelter.
Overgrazing - by the cattle, sheep and goats brought by the refugees. Water shortage - resulting from the sudden increase in demand. Water pollution - since no proper sanitation system was initially available. The net loss of 20, was soon outstripped by people whose desire to move to Florida was not deterred by the hurricane Gainesville Sun Many of the emerging disaster trends and characteristics that have been noted will very likely increase the number and scale of forced migrations in the relatively near future.
The combination of increasing population, population density, increasing poverty, and occupation of hazardous sites has accentuated vulnerability to both natural and technological hazards and increases the probability of forced migrations.
Technology has also vastly increased the numbers of hazards to which populations are exposed. When socio-natural disasters trigger technological disasters, the resulting complex processes may force people to migrate because the disaster impacts, in combination with local environmental contamination, make the environment uninhabitable.
While many of the changes associated with increasing state and market integration have established more resilient infrastructures in some regions of the world, they have also frequently undermined traditional adaptations of rural populations to natural hazards. In addition, the effects of global climate changes, including increased risks of flooding, storms, deforestation, desertification, soil erosion, and sea level rise increase the probability of disasters contributing to internal and international forced migration.
The physical and social processes recently triggered by Hurricane Katrina underscore that emerging reality. Over the past twenty years, colleagues from the field of development-induced displacement, refugee studies and disaster research Hansen and Oliver-Smith , Cernea , Turton , Oliver-Smith in press have discovered that the displaced peoples we work with share many similar challenges.
Although the places and peoples are geographically and culturally distant and the sociopolitical environments and causes of dislocation dissimilar, there emerge a number of common concerns and processes. Refugees, earthquake victims and displacees experience uprooting and relocation and must cope with the consequent stresses and the need to adapt to new or radically changed environments.
All may experience privation, loss of homes, jobs, and the breakup of families and communities. All must mobilize social and cultural resources in their efforts to reestablish viable social groups and communities and to restore adequate levels of material life. These are important similarities that we must recognize and understand both to minimize displacement and to assist in the material reconstruction and the social reconstitution of communities.
The catastrophic losses from Hurricane Katrina demonstrate in horrific fashion the urgent need to develop the conceptual, strategic, and material tools to confront the increasing challenges of natural hazards made even more potent and complex by climate change, increasing population densities and environmental degradation in the 21st century. Anthony Oliver-Smith is professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. He has done anthropological research and consultation on issues relating to disasters and involuntary resettlement in Peru, Honduras, India, Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, Japan, and the United States since the s.
He is a member of the editorial boards of Environmental Disasters and Desastres y Sociedad. Barry, John M. Blaikie, P. Cannon, I. Davis, and B. Allen ed. El-Hinnawi, E. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds. Richmond, A. Addis Ababa. Wood, W. Zolber and P. Pp Social Science Research Council.
0コメント