Female Refugees and Sexual Violence

The conflicts in South Sudan and Syria have caused some of the greatest humanitarian implications in 2017, primarily the displacement of millions of human beings in East Africa and the Middle East. Female refugees and children from these countries are spread across refugee camps and are often subjected to gendered and sexual violence. A survey done by UNICEF in February of 2017 reported that three quarters of refugee children travelling from Africa to Italy said they were sexually harassed while half of the women surveyed reported that they were sexually harassed. An article done written by Reuters stated that women and children are often times victims of sexual harassment in camps in exchange for blankets, food, and other necessities. Because of the lack of resources or protection for victims, women and young girls are forced into marriages to avoid being raped. The problem of sexual harassment in these refugee camps is a huge one; however, there are very few international policies that work to protect victims of sexual violence in refugee camps. Since The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s policy “Sexual and Gender-Based Violence against Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons” is one of the most updated policies that attempts to combat sexual violence in refugee camps, I will thoroughly examine this policy to understand the level of effectiveness it has in combating sexual violence in refugee camps. It will be studied in order to see in what areas it can be improved and what revisions/steps it should take in order to effectively decrease the amount of sexual harassment. In order to understand more about gendered violence in refugee camps, I looked at statistics of sexual violence towards female and child refugees in South Sudan and Syria from the Refugee Rights Data Project’s (RRDP), UNICEF reports/surveys, news articles from Reuters, NBC, and others, studies from the Women’s Refugee Commission, studies from Amnesty International, and studies from various INGOs and scholarly articles. In these modern-day conflicts, victims of sexual harassment and rape in refugee camps are often times the last thing that the international community focuses on. With my paper, I hope to shed light on this issue and find ways so that that the problem of sexual harassment and rape disappears from refugee camps forever