 |
| Celebration under tension for the International Refugee Day 2015 in Dakar, Senegal. |
Von Agathe Menetrier
These few powerful words are L.’s. She has been living
as a refugee in Dakar for years. We sat in the office she shares with her
colleagues from the refugee women’s committee. The room also serves as workshop
for soap production, an activity in which the UNHCR offered them a training to
enhance their financial autonomy. The budget is though too scarce to buy
supplies, so that the room rarely sees a soap produced.
Asylum is
currently at the centre of the public debate. The political debate largely
focuses on who deserves a refugee status and who does not. In this
context refugees’ biographies are commonly narrated as journeys that start with
the flight and end with the obtainment of a legal status in the hosting
country. While asylum is understood to correspond to a legal status ensuring
protection for persons accessing it, few raise the question of how this
protection is ensured along refugees’ long experience of exile. When the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) allocates its budget to new refugees crises as a priority,
long-term refugees elsewhere are expected to become independent from the
organisation and its partners, after years, or sometimes decades, of assistance.
For refugees interviewed for this research, it is time to consider their long
relationship with relief organisations and remember the promises that have been
honoured and those that have not. One of the UNHCR’s missions has notably been
to “promote the equal right of women and girls” (2007, 3). In this paper I want
to explore how the UNHCR’s advocacy of gender equal protection is maintained in
the field over the years, that is to say
once the emergency of the mission has past.
The case study upon
which this work draws is the situation of long-term urban refugees in Dakar.[1] West
Africa has historically been a place of population mobility, from forced
displacement due to slave trade and colonial forced labour, to work migrations
facilitated by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Over
recent decades, the hundreds of thousands of West Africans who had fled
violence and persecution in their country of origin, had to turn to an
international body, the UN, to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.
Considering its number of national offices and its significant budget, the
UNHCR is undoubtedly the main actor of refugee protection and relief,[2] although
the implementation of its activities relies much on local partners. Over the
last twenty years, the UNHCR has supervised the protection and assistance to
Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, Ivoirians, Gambians and Mauritanians seeking asylum
in Senegal.[3] Today
the organisation is in an exit strategy. Considering that long-term refugees
are in the end of a process of ‘local integration’ into the Senegalese host
society (culminating in naturalisation), the UNHCR asks its implementation
partners in the field to gradually withdraw from a system of direct assistance
to refugees. Refugees and asylum seekers who live in Dakar find
themselves in an ambiguous situation. Because of their geographical proximity
with UNHCR’s and partners’ offices, their everyday life followed the rhythm of
regular visits to these offices. Interestingly, refugees’ relationship with
those street-level humanitarians does not stop together with the cessation of
aid.[4] Through
a focus on programs and discourses targeting refugee women, this paper
contributes to understanding the evolution of this relationship.
Exile: a
gendered experience.
Especially in
times of violent conflict, women are often reduced to the duties of essential biological reproduction
(Anthias/Yuval-Davis 1993). Historically, wars have been fought by men to
protect the “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1990). Within nation building and protection,
different contributions are expected from citizens
according to their gender. From these different
kinds of citizenship arise different experiences, and experiences during times
of wars or armed conflicts provide a poignant illustration of this difference
(Yuval-Davis et al. 2005).
Having
understood war as a gendered phenomenon, it is not surprising that the aftermath
of violent conflicts entails gendered differences, too (Jones 1994). When a
conflict explodes next door, it tends to violently affect civilians (women,
older men and children) as well as the men in combat, with the difference that
men often remain the primary targets of killing and imprisonment. The civilians,
of whom the majority are women, who have remained at home to take care of the children
and the elderly, are the ones who will flee. If one includes internally
displaced persons, a large majority of the world’s refugees are indeed women
and children (Lindsey 2001). Becoming a refugee is inevitably a
gendered experience, since war is a gendered experience. But how well has this
gender aspect been taken into consideration within asylum law and refugee
assistance?
Gendering
asylum law and refugee assistance.
There
is no doubt that, thanks to women’s groups’ and feminist lobbying of the UN and
the EU in the late 1980s and early 1990s, gender-related persecutions have been
put on the international agenda. However, its transfer into policy of national
asylum regimes have been much slower or non-existent (Freedman 2007, 93). Local
constraints, political interest or cultural beliefs have often prevented
national institutions and local actors from legally interpreting gender-related
persecution as a continuum of structurally embedded gender inequalities (Moser
1993; von Braunmühl 2013).[5]
Pressure
by human rights feminist defenders and women’s groups, as previously touched
upon, have initiated attempts to gender asylum law as well as the entire
system of refugee relief. At the first World United Nations Conference on Women
held in Mexico in 1975, the First World
Survey on the Role of Women in Development, published by the UN, uncovered
the scale of sexual violence suffered by women not only while they flee but
also once they obtained the status of refugee. The UNHCR reacted by presenting
a paper titled The Situation of Refugee Women the World Over at the
World Conference for the Decade on Women in 1980 in Copenhagen. It marked the
beginning of a growing international attention towards refugee women. At
the end of the 1980s the UNHCR mandate had adapted to states’ reluctance to
host refugees and its mission evolved towards emergency relief; providing
material aid to refugees sheltered in camps in regions of conflicts (Glasman
2016). Highlighted by the closed setting of the camps, the number of women
among the refugee population became much more visible. The unequal access to
food and non-food items (NFI) and the lack of opportunities for women to
participate in decisions regarding the organisation of the camp highlighted the
need for a more gender-sensitive method of assistance (Freedman 2007, 41). In
reaction to the critiques climaxing in the creation of an International Group
for Refugee Women, the UNHCR appointed a Senior Coordinator for Refugee Women
in 1989 and a series of reports focusing on refugee women were published by the
UNHCR.[6]
According to its self-assessment, the organisation has managed to evolve from
an approach of “targeting women as a special group” to “mainstreaming gender,
diversity and age” (2013a, 4). In other words, the UNHCR
acknowledges that the needs for protection and the expression of these needs
differ not only between refugee men and refugee women, but that they also vary
according to a person’s sexual orientation, age and social environment. This
intersectional intention has been welcomed by scholars, who however criticised
the limited effort to operationalise according to the needs (Freedman 2007;
True/ Parisi 2013).
Making refugee women visible.
Making UNHCR guidelines operational is precisely the
task that street-level humanitarians are left with in the field. As is
customary for UNHCR missions, a local NGO is paid by the UNHCR to run
activities with refugees in Dakar. Each year a convention has to be signed,
regulating the management of programmes and the funding allocated. The signing
of the convention for the year to come depends upon the results presented by
the partner NGO and the UNHCR’s satisfaction with those. Evaluating
results is a central task in street-level humanitarians’ work-life. They are
thus confronted with the difficulty of making their mission of mainstreaming
gender (along with Age and Diversity) traceable, quantifiable.
Communicating on refugee women is easier than communicating on gender
inequalities. The number of sensitisation sessions organised during a period of
time and the percentage of women participating in symbolic celebrations is
easier to determinate than the degree to which these sessions address refugee
women’s preoccupations. It is therefore not surprising that the often denounced
shortcuts about gender unequal protection seem to be at stake when one observes
activities targeting refugees living in Dakar: refugee men (or men in general)
are completely absent from talks about what is depicted as refugee women’s
issues, and refugee women are displayed as a homogenous group, a group which
must be made visible. Five years after the introduction of the UNHCR’s policy
on Age, Gender and Diversity Mainstreaming from the 2010s onwards, little trace
of an intersectional endeavour is to be found in UNHCR and partnering NGO
practices of assistance.
Giving priority to refugee women “at
risk”.
If gender mainstreaming remains a women’s
issue in street-level humanitarians’ assistance to refugees in Dakar, it seems
to be based on refugee women’s intrinsic vulnerability. Refugee women are
considered at risk, even though the risks they are specifically facing
are never stated explicitly. Refugee women’s vulnerability is aligned with
their role as mothers, whereas here again, the types of risks they specifically
face as mothers remain blurred. Activities directed at refugee women (mainly
sensitisation sessions and rare material distribution) all involve subjects
that concern their bodies (nutrition, hygiene, uterus cervix cancer). Sexual
assault is also treated as a women-only issue, since sensitisation sessions target refugee women and aim at
changing their risky behaviors.[7] Handling these subjects as refugee women’s
problems creates an amalgam between the consequences of these issues, displayed
on women’s bodies, and the structural social roots behind them, which obviously
go beyond women’s bodies.
Refugee
women are categorised as vulnerable per
se, women heads of household as particularly at risk, and sexual
assault as being central to the risks they face. This prioritisation might have
been operational and even justified in situations of emergency relief in camps,
where interveners[8]
had to be careful that women were not left out of camps organisation; to
distribute more food and other NFI to women heads of household; and to protect
refugee women from sexual assaults at the fringes of the camp (Freedman 2007).
But it is questionable whether this focus on vulnerability is adapted to
address the preoccupations of long-term refugee women living in an urban
setting and to whom direct aid is no longer distributed. Indeed, if one
agrees that a sick person no longer necessitates care when he*she[9] is healed or that a child
is no longer vulnerable when he*she grows up, when is a refugee woman
considered to have overcome her vulnerability? Street-level
humanitarians interviewed have presented women’s vulnerability to be a
tool to measure priority for aid distribution. Simultaneously vulnerability
is advanced as the reason behind the very risks that refugee women are
considered to be facing. One must note the apparent tautology of this
relationship between women and vulnerability. It is therefore hard to
conceive that refugee women will ever be considered by street-level
humanitarians for other activities than those emphasising their risks.
Making entrepreneurial
refugee women.
As the UNHCR gradually withdraws from
direct aid to long-term refugees residing in Dakar, the organisation and its
partners increasingly emphasise the importance for refugees to become
financially autonomous. Street-level humanitarians consider that most urban
refugees in Dakar have resided long enough as refugees amidst the local
population to be assimilated and treated as Senegalese.
They celebrate refugees who have managed to find a job in the city and now earn
a relatively good income, presenting them as examples to follow. This path
of integration through a successful career does not seem to be open to refugee
women. Indeed refugee women are considered to have a poor entrepreneurial
spirit, and are therefore trusted with smaller micro-loans[10].
They are though still expected to prove their enthusiasm and motivation to
become financially autonomous, as the contrary is regarded as profiting from
relief organisations. On the one hand UNHCR and its partners train refugee
women, teaching them the importance of becoming financially autonomous, because
they consider them to be better providers for their family than refugee men.[11]
On the other hand it is precisely this social responsibility or
carefulness that is reproached to them by interveners (when they prefer not to
trust them with important micro-loan amounts, for example). Refugee women are
expected to become financially autonomous from the UNHCR and its partners but
considered unfit for the entrepreneurial ideal celebrated by street-level
humanitarians.
Refugee women’s
continuous adjustment to contradictory incentives.
The refugee women I met, who have resided in Dakar for several years (sometimes decades), try to adapt to the
aforementioned incentive of financial autonomy. To manifest their will to
become autonomous from interveners’ aid, they even often themselves use UNHCR and
partners’ vocabulary of becoming autonomous, go to trainings.[12]
Their willingness to
become autonomous economically extends as far as the private sphere. For
example they would agree to open their homes to a micro-loans company who
assesses mortgageable belongings, in order to prove their ability to reimburse
a potential loan. But their belongings do not suffice as a guaranty to be
granted a micro-loan. In general refugee women’s adjustments to incentives of
financial autonomy do not suffice to be taken seriously as economic agents by
the UNHCR and its partners.
The refugee
women I interviewed in Dakar thus continue positioning themselves as vulnerable
in front of street-level humanitarians. Consciously
portraying oneself as victim has often been pointed out by scholars as a tactic
among others to survive and gain access to aid from relief organisations (Utas
2005; Ratner referenced in Freedman 2007, 115). In Dakar, long-term refugee women
have learned the vocabulary and criteria of vulnerability upon which
direct aid might be distributed. Even though direct aid has been cut, they
plead for their case in the hope to be granted the scarce remains of financial
or material aid. This incentive of proving one’s vulnerability to access aid
extends to the private sphere, as refugee must be
open to an inspection of their home at any time for surprise visits aimed at
assessing their living conditions. I find home visits quite striking as
examples of refugee women’s adjustments to interveners’ contradictory incentives.
Indeed the micro-loan company can visit a refugee woman’s home on a Monday
morning to verify her entrepreneurship potential (finding mortgageable goods,
as mentioned before), then in the afternoon the same person can receive a
surprise visit from the NGO social worker coming to verify the vulnerability
of her situation, according to which she might be granted direct financial aid.
But again, neither adjusting to incentives of entrepreneurship nor
vulnerability can insure a regular income in this time of UNHCR’s exit
strategy. Indeed none of the refugee women I met in Dakar had beneficiated
of a micro-loan, and material or financial aid has become so scarce that it is
impossible to count on it on a regular basis.
Refugee women’s
body as site of collision of contradictory incentives: the example of paid sex.
 |
| Street-level humanitarians taking a break in Dakar, Senegal. |
It is hard to
know how many or how often refugee women practice paid sex in Dakar. Noting
that every refugee woman I interviewed raised this topic without me previously
asking about it, I had to conclude that many refugee women relate to the
subject, directly or indirectly. Considering their lack of opportunities to
become financially autonomous through entrepreneurship, and the impossibility
to count on regular aid, refugee women seem to see prostitution as one option
to earn money in order to meet their basic needs:
“If someone offers: ‘I will go out
with you in exchange for money’, do you think that you will refuse? Sometimes
you do not have a choice. I do not have another source of income.” (L., refugee
women’s committee)
Receiving money in exchange for sex
is not illegal in Senegal, and the UNHCR does not criminalise prostitution[13]
(UNHCR 2003; Department of State 2009).
Fouquet’s extensive research on night life and paid sex in Dakar has shown that
it covers a multitude of different practices. From occasional paid sex in night
clubs to continuous financial support by a much older partner, those whom he
calls city adventurers reinvent their
social positioning and try to enter new worlds through their practices (Fouquet
2011). It is interesting to note that refugee women who talked to me about paid
sex never mentioned the word prostitution. They live in Dakar for years,
sometimes decades, and all of them have a legal status. They consider
themselves protected from the persecutions they fled (“You are not persecuted” L., refugee women’s committee)
in their country of origin. Their recourse to paid sex does not occur during
the emergency of war[14]
but rather in a context of economic emergency, within the safety of the host
country. The message transmitted by refugee women I interviewed in Dakar was
that being paid in exchange for sex is for them a constrained, but active
decision.[15]
Observed
on a financial level, the income that refugee women earn through paid sex
represents an amount that they will not ask in the form of aid. By (partially)
sustaining their needs, they thus successfully adjust to interveners’ incentive
of becoming financially autonomous. If one considers this activity through the
lens of the income it generates, refugee women who practice paid sex behave
like the entrepreneurs that the UNHCR and its partners encourage them to
become.
However,
paid sex does of course not correspond to relief organisations’ image of
entrepreneurship. Even though its financial outcome responds to incentives of
financial autonomy put forward by interveners, paid sex does not represent an
activity easily valuable, nor evaluable as such. It is hardly quantifiable as
source of revenue, it implies physical and health related risks and slippages
into situations of coercive or forced prostitution are hard to prevent. It is
thus difficult for street-level humanitarians to speak of refugee women who
live from paid sex as successful autonomous entrepreneurs.
On the other hand, prostitution of
refugee women is a phenomenon which interveners can hardly ignore (as mentioned
earlier, every refugee woman interviewed openly mentioned the subject). As
field agents, they must therefore position themselves in relation to it. As the
UNHCR and partners do not directly criminalise refugees’ practice of paid sex,
their rejection of refugee women’s behaviours finds its expression under
the more excusable explanation of women’s vulnerability. Indeed being an
activity linked to refugee women’s bodies, prostitution is easily explained by
the intrinsic vulnerability they are considered to embody (“She is at risk,
that someone tells her that he wants to help her, but in exchange for payment,
that she has to sleep with him.” (N., NGO worker)) The subject of paid sex is
covered in sensitisation sessions together with the topic of sexually based
violence (“In terms of violence against women, sexist and sexual violence and
also fight against, how shall I say, because there are certain women who
prostitute themselves.” (A.D., NGO worker)) Paid sex is solely regarded as a
risk facing refugee women’s bodies, like sexual assault and rape. The subject
is solely framed in terms of forced prostitution, quite telling for this is the
appellation survival sex with which interveners systematically report
prostitution on official documents (it would be provocative but one could ask
if continuously asking for aid at interveners offices could be called survival
begging). Rape and prostitution are dealt with by interveners as
interchangeable illustrations of one and the same general risk to refugee
women’s bodies. Refugee women are therefore not considered as agents but as
victims of their decision to practice paid sex.
Essentialising
paid sex as yet another risk facing vulnerable refugee women
poses a problem for refugee women who try to adjust to street-level
humanitarians’ incentives both of financial autonomy and vulnerability. This
contradiction is quite evident in the way refugee women who work as relays
between interveners and their community[16]
have framed the topic. On the one hand, as mentioned before, they express that
prostitution constitutes a source of financial autonomy, on the other hand they
are also responsible for sensitising their peers against it (“We sensitise
against it a lot” L., refugee
women’s committee). This contradiction results in turn in their
alignment of refugee women being victims of rape –a crime of which they have
been passive victims– with refugee women’s –constrained but active– decision of
prostituting themselves:
“The person who
raped her will give her money so that she remains quiet. She will get a taste
and continue. She’ll tell you: ‘I do not have others means, that’s all I can
do.’ […] If someone comes to offer her money, it is not rape any more, she will
give herself freely to feed her child” (A.B. & L, Refugee women’s
committee)
In the words of
refugee women working as relays, paid sex is blamed on the woman’s wrong
decision, much like the position of street-level humanitarians interviewed, as
described earlier (“she will get a taste and continue”, L. refugee women’s
committee). This failure is simultaneously excused or explained by
refugee women’s general weakness. A.C., a refugee woman working as
community relay, said: “They are subject to attempts of prostitution for
example, if they want to take the easy option. They are easy targets, just like
children.” For A.B. & L.: “The more the woman notices she lacks certain
things, the most she would be ready to do, if she is not strong.” (Refugee
women’s committee)
Prostitution
is practiced as an active answer to economic misery, but simultaneously
justified as an illustration of refugee women’s vulnerability. These
justifications can therefore be analysed as adjustments to interveners’
contradictory incentives of becoming financial autonomous on the one hand and
being inherently vulnerable on the other.
C.’s story sheds light on how
violently these adjustments can play out. She left her country of origin with
her son after having been victim of persecution –including gang-rape– because
of her political engagement. She was transferred from her first country of
asylum to Dakar by the UNHCR in order to be treated after her cancer was
discovered. Now that the UNHCR entered an exit strategy in Dakar and cut
direct aid for refugees and asylum seekers, her treatment has been interrupted.
To provide for her son and herself, she occasionally practices paid sex.
Nationals from her country of origin are quite rare in Dakar, as it is
relatively distant geographically and culturally. She struggles learning French
and the most spoken local language Wolof. As a single woman head of household
with limited chances of local integration in Senegal and a serious medical
condition, she qualifies for the international Women at risk
resettlement programme (UNHCR 2013b). After having successfully passed UNHCR’s
successive steps to qualify for a resettlement to the USA (including interviews
by several UNHCR agents), a US official came to Dakar and interviewed her, a
couple of months before I met her. C. told her story as she had told it to the
other agents before. The US American interviewer closed the case after C.
mentioned that she had received money in exchange for sex to sustain her needs.
Prostitution is considered a crime under US law, C. is thus considered a
criminal and disqualified for the resettlement program:
“When I don’t know what else to do,
sometimes if someone says: If you don’t mind lie down with me, I will give you
money for you and your son. Once in a while I do that. I told her and she said
I was doing prostitution and it is not allowed in the US. I told if you came to
know why and how I did that, you would understand. I made an appeal and they
said that my case was denied saying that (reading the letter): ‘There is no
appeal for a denial of an application of refugee status.’ The reason that they
are blaming me for is (reading): ‘you felt to establish that you are admissible
to the US.’ That is what I explained to them: I did it not because I wanted to
do it. It is not in my religion, it is not in my lifestyle, it is not something
I ever dreamt of doing. I did it because I am having a child in my hands whose
father has turned his back to.” (C., refugee woman)
I find C.’s case to be a quite striking illustration
of constant adjustment that is made to contradictory incentives. For over two
years during which she has resided in Dakar without direct aid from the UNHCR[17], she adjusted to
interveners’ incentive to become financially autonomous–she clearly describes
her recourse to prostitution as a means to pay for her and her son’s daily
needs. At the beginning of the interview she had explained that she had come to
Dakar for the resettlement programme because “I am a woman at risk” (ibid).[18] Her resettlement case was
first opened in November 2013 and for a year and a half she has been in contact
with the UNHCR and its partners on several occasions, trying to prove that she
qualifies to the category of women at risk [19]. Prostitution being, as
detailed previously, presented by interveners and community relays as an
illustration of refugee women’s weakness, it is therefore not surprising
that C. shared this information with interviewers, to prove her vulnerability.
It goes without saying that I did not witness the interview led by the US
American official. I can only imagine that C., just as she did with me, the
French interviewer, listed all the aspects of her hardship: fleeing from
persecution and gang-rape; suffering from cancer; providing for her son on her
own; having recourse to prostitution. Used to adjusting the presentation of her
case to criteria of vulnerability, C. did not know that the codes would change
as she spoke to the US interviewer. It cost her the resettlement she had been
hoping for, for two years.
Because of their habit to address issues touching
refugee women as women’s issues rather than considering those issues in
their social complexity, interveners do not consider prostitution as an
economical decision but rather align it with a refugee women’s weakness.
Without saying that interveners should encourage prostitution for financial
autonomy, I am questioning the benefit of handling paid sex indiscriminately as
forced prostitution, and yet another sexual violence that refugee women suffer.
In many cases it represents the only source of relatively regular income they
can count on. A regular income that they generate without UNHCR and its
partners’ aid nor their assistance. Shaming them for this activity and
undermining their decision to resort to paid sex by aligning it with the trauma
of sexual assault they have experienced or witnessed in their flight, traps them
in a state of emergency in which they are eternal victims. One of my
interviewees said: “We cannot flee war, and come into war, it’s a war against
our own body, our own health.” (L., refugee women’s committee)
Methods and reflection on ethics.
It has to be noted that the majority of refugee women I interviewed for
this paper were privileged in the sense that they were working as relays
for interveners or were presiding the refugee women’s committee. They might not
be representative of all refugee women living in Dakar, as I believe no sample
can represent a group of people as heterogeneous and complex as the refugee
population in Dakar. It was also a choice driven by my intention to limit the
scope of my intrusion in people’s lives, especially because I was only in Dakar
for a short term.[20] For this reason I decided not to interview the
highest possible number of people but rather to conduct participative
observation in places where refugees would meet with street-level
humanitarians. It explains how I came in contact with relays and committee
presidents, who are more present at such places of gathering. These first
contacts permitted me to get to know other, less connected persons though a snow
ball effect. This being said, I am of course conscious of the influence
that my presence might have had on the behaviours of my interviewees. As a
white European woman, UNHCR agents and NGO agents treated me like the interns
they regularly welcome in their offices. It of course poses ethical questions
on conducting fieldwork with refugees in such a relatively dominant position. Do
no harm guidelines guided my decisions in that regard.[21] This
being said, as I informed refugee women about my academic project and the
unlikelihood of a direct influence on their situation, many of my interviewees
responded that they were familiar with research methods and outcomes as they
had themselves submitted academic writings or thesis in the past or knew
someone who had. I believe that overall my presence did not induce more harm
than would the presence of a white European girl interning with the UNHCR or a
partner NGO. The extent to which my western understanding of gender has
influenced my analysis could of course be discussed. I chose to present several
topics in this paper but my analysis is not exhaustive and might have ignored
other aspects of equal importance to refugee women.
Conclusion
Literature
on refugee relief has often denounced a system encouraging refugees’ material
dependency on aid, especially with regards to camps settings (Harrell-Bond
1986; Malkki 1995; Freedman 2007). In the case of long-term refuge in an urban
setting such as Dakar, direct aid has ceased but a relation of dependency
remains between street-level humanitarians and refugees. Focusing on relief
organisations’ gender sensitive practices (which turned out to be solely
targeting refugee women), this paper has shown that a withdrawal from direct
aid rather implied the emergence of contradictory expectations directed at
refugees, and not their disappearance. In response, refugee women have
developed the capacity to adjust to the criteria upon which aid or assistance
is awarded (at times it is vulnerability, at other times entrepreneurial
motivation). Refugee women have built their everyday life according to the
UNHCR’s criteria, hoping to correspond to one category or the other (material
aid for single mothers, professional training for motivated educated women,
resettlement for victims of rape). Their lives in the host country have
developed over the years in conjunction with interveners’ incentives (e.g.
become financially autonomous) and expectations (e.g. dress less provocatively
to avoid sexual assaults). Once tired of waiting for uncertain and scarce aid,
some refugee women take the initiative to find a source of income on their own,
through prostitution for instance. They are then called to order, required to
fit back into the categories provided by the UNHCR and its partners, sometimes
violently, as C.’s case of aborted resettlement has shown. These categories do
not seem to evolve in response to refugee women’s situations over time, refugee
women are rather those who adjust to the evolution of the UNHCR (budget cutting
in this case). Years, sometimes decades after their arrival in Dakar, the women
I met still identify themselves essentially as refugee women.[22] They
can hardly project themselves outside of an eternal emergency state as
they continue to be constrained by their assigned categories. A.B. & L,
presidents of the refugee women’s committee, expressed it as follows: “One
cannot speak of a goal, we tell ourselves that we are living a temporary time.
It cannot be forever.”
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Baines, Erin (2004): Vulnerable Bodies. Aldershot.
Braunmühl, Claudia von (2013): A Feminist Analysis of UN Security Council Resolutions
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Harrell-Bond, Barbara (1986): Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees. Oxford.
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[1] A month long ethnography of UNHCR practices of
assistance to long-term refugees residing in Dakar was conducted in June-July
2015. All interviews quoted in this paper are thus dated as such.
[2] Indeed while states or group of states (such as the
European Union) in the Global North have developed their own asylum systems and
institutions, many of the states of the Global South work with or delegate
asylum governance to the UNHCR.
[3] Today the UNHCR counts
about 16 000 refugees and asylum seekers in Senegal (‘OFADEC Page D’accueil’ 2016 ; UNHCR 2016). According to UNHCR
and partnering NGO agents’ assessment, between 2000 and 3000 urban refugees
live in Dakar. Approximately half of
them being refugee women.
[4] I understand street-level
humanitarians to be workers in charge of programme implementation (in this
case agents working for local NGOs partnering with the UNHCR. This expression
is based on Lipsky’s street-level bureaucrats (1977). Relief
organisations function thanks to the daily field work of a variety of local
actors that are often forgotten in refugee studies.
[5] An example of
national constraint would be an asylum administration lacking female
interviewers for female asylum claimants. By cultural beliefs, I refer to the UNHCR’s
principle of non-intervention, which, for certain staff members, means putting
down gender-related persecution to cultural difference (Baines 2004, 63). This
lack of structural approach is visible in administrators’ or judges’ refusals
to grant asylum to claimants fleeing violence such as rape or Female Genital
Mutilation (FGM) on the ground that those are traditional uses and limited to
the private sphere (for more details on this matter see Macklin 1995; Freedman
2007).
[6] Most notably, Policy on refugee women, Guidelines
on the protection of refugee women and Sexual violence against refugees:
guidelines on prevention and response (UNHCR 1990, 1991, 1995).
[7] For example provocative clothing is considered
a risky behavior (interview with NGO worker).
[8] I borrow the
term interveners from Harrell-Bond, a term which encompasses both the
UNHCR and local actors as well as cooperating NGOs or INGOs engaged in refugee
assistance (1986, xii).
[9] “*” indicates
the existence of a variety of gender identities between those commonly referred
to as male or female.
[10] As drawn from
my interviews with street-level humanitarians, although I did not meet a single
beneficiary of a micro-loan –even of a reduced amount- among refugee women I
came in contact with.
[11] This idea is
quite common in the development world, it corresponds to the WID (Women In
Development) approach that emerged in the early 1970s and advocates for investing
in women based on the assumption that they are untapped resources
for development (Ochola 2010).
[12] Thinking of
Goffman’s interactionism, the use of this vocabulary is quite telling of a
“front-stage” presentation due to the situation of the interview (1959). But
the very fact that my interviewees use this vocabulary shows how conscious they
are of the organisations’ incentives.
[13] While the UNHCR denounces forced prostitution and
trafficking, prostitution is not illegalised nor is it a reason for withdrawal
of status nor aid (Martin & Tirman 2009).
[14] One refugee woman I met expressed that she had
already recourse to prostitution on her journey from her country of origin to
Senegal, but most of the refugee women I met said that they started this
activity in Senegal.
[15] Unlike the situation that my interviewees acknowledged
as a threat especially for young girls who can be forced into domestic
prostitution. See Martin/ Tirman for definitions of forced prostitution in
situations of migration (2009).
[16] Their community is understood by interveners
as embracing refugee women in general. See Harrell-Bond for critiques of
assumptions that a group of refugees constitute a community (2004, 27).
[17] An operation to treat her cancer was paid by the
UNHCR but she had to pay herself for the biopsy and medication.
[18] Showing her knowledge of the organisation’s
vocabulary.
[19] The criteria being at “extreme risk of harassment,
physical or sexual violence or refoulement” (Freedman 2007, 119).
[20] The financial
means I am grateful to have been granted for my master’s thesis by a DAAD
funded PROMO scholarship sufficed for one month of field presence.
[21] See Krause for a
detailed reflection on ethical field work in situations of forced migration
(2016).
[22] This presentation might be linked to a front-stage
presentation in reaction to my presence, a European researcher. But as this
paper has shown, they live in a continuous front-stage presentation, in front
of street-level humanitarians.
Author
This article builds on the master’s thesis I submitted in spring 2016 at
the department of Diversity and Social Conflict of the Humboldt
Universität zu Berlin. It is important for me to study forced migration
with a focus on countries often solely portrayed as sending countries, a
Eurocentric view which tends to minimise the importance of South-South
(forced) migration. I am therefore glad to continue my research project
with long-term urban refugees in Dakar as a doctoral student of the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.
the department of Diversity and Social Conflict of the Humboldt
Universität zu Berlin. It is important for me to study forced migration
with a focus on countries often solely portrayed as sending countries, a
Eurocentric view which tends to minimise the importance of South-South
(forced) migration. I am therefore glad to continue my research project
with long-term urban refugees in Dakar as a doctoral student of the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle.
Bitte diesen Beitrag wie folgt zitieren:
Agathe Menetrier (2016): It’s a war against our own body. Long-term refugee women’s strategies of adaptation to the withdrawal of relief organisations in Dakar, Senegal. In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Preview (Weblog), https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863130166696833325#editor/target=post;postID=3697950972162993466;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link
Agathe Menetrier (2016): It’s a war against our own body. Long-term refugee women’s strategies of adaptation to the withdrawal of relief organisations in Dakar, Senegal. In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Preview (Weblog), https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863130166696833325#editor/target=post;postID=3697950972162993466;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link
