Challenges Facing Refugee Women. A Critical Review
The fear of being persecuted has led to thousands of refugee women fleeing from their homelands to seek safety in other countries. Concerns have been expressed about the security, safety and the rights of female refugees who have not been given the protec
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Challenges Facing Refugee Women. A Critical Review Sinehlanhla Memela and Brij Maharaj
Abstract The fear of being persecuted has led to thousands of refugee women fleeing from their homelands to seek safety in other countries. Concerns have been expressed about the security, safety and the rights of female refugees who have not been given the protection offered to male refugees in host countries. This chapter critically assesses the challenges facing women refugees and effectiveness of policies and intervention from international agencies like the UNHCR. Refugee women have less human agency, especially when newly arrived in the destination country. They have no or few legal rights and are powerless and marginalised, and their voices are rarely heard. Sadly, the atrocities encountered in their home countries could be repeated in the destination country. A key concern is that despite policies designed to protect refugees, women were still vulnerable, and they have been subjected to social exclusion, prejudice and discrimination. These experiences have only recently been recognised by the UNHCR. A holistic approach is required in order to solve the problems experienced by women. The needs of female refugees must be included in all phases of a refugee’s life starting with the refugee determination process. In most countries, refugee laws have incorporated gender perspectives in the asylum application process. However, poor and inconsistent implementation of gender-sensitive refugee policies in host countries adds to the vulnerabilities of refugees. Keywords Refugee • Women • Integration • Exclusion • Policies
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Introduction
The twentieth century has been marked by an increase in refugee populations around the world as a result of socioeconomic and political instability. This can be attributed to the formation of new states after colonial rule, the end of the Cold War, the adoption of external policies and the legacy of military action (Martin
S. Memela • B. Maharaj (*) University of KwaZulu-Natal, Howard College Campus, King George V Avenue, Durban 4041, South Africa e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 J. Domı´nguez-Mujica (ed.), Global Change and Human Mobility, Advances in Geographical and Environmental Sciences, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0050-8_4
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2004). Prominent episodes of forced migration have been marked by Russian refugees during the 1920s, Jewish refugees in the 1930s, Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, Rwandan refugees in the 1990s and Zimbabwean, Somalian, Sudanese, Congolese and Eritrean refugees in the twenty-first century (Bollaert 2008). Between January and June 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were 46.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 13 million were refugees (UNHCR 2015, p. 3). The top 10 refugee-producing countries were Syrian Arab Republic (2,902,100), Afghanistan (2,700,000), Somalia (1,100,000), Sudan (670,300), Democratic Republic
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