One Syrian woman who joined the stream of migrants to Germany was forced to pay down her husband’s debt to smugglers by making herself available for sex along the way. Another was beaten unconscious by a Hungarian prison guard after refusing his advances.
A third, a former make-up artist, dressed as a boy and stopped washing to ward off the men in her group of refugees. Now in an emergency shelter in Berlin, she still sleeps in her clothes and, like several women here, pushes a cupboard in front of her door at night.
War and violence“There is no lock or key or anything,” said Esraa al-Horani, the make-up artist and one of the few women here not afraid to give her name. She has been lucky, Ms. Horani said: “I’ve only been beaten and robbed.”
War and violence at home, exploitative smugglers and perilous seas along the way, an uncertain welcome and future on a foreign continent — these are some of the risks faced by tens of thousands of migrants who continue to make their way to Europe from the West Asia and beyond. But at each step of the way, the dangers are amplified for women.
Interviews with dozens of migrants, social workers and psychologists caring for traumatised new arrivals across Germany suggest that the current mass migration has been accompanied by a surge of violence against women.
From forced marriages and sex trafficking to domestic abuse, women report violence from fellow refugees, smugglers, male family members and even European police officers. There are no reliable statistics for sexual and other abuse of female refugees.
Among the more than 1 million migrants who have entered Europe over the past year, fleeing war and poverty in the West Asia and beyond, men outnumber women by more than three to one, U.N. statistics show.
“The men dominate, numerically and otherwise,” says Heike Rabe, a gender expert at the German Institute for Human Rights.
Susanne Hohne, the lead psychotherapist at a centre in west Berlin specialising in treating traumatised female migrants, says almost all of the 44 women in her care — some barely adults, some over 60 — have experienced sexual violence.
“We go to our own therapists for supervision twice a month to cope with what we hear,” Hohne said about her 18 staff members. Together they provide two weekly therapy sessions to each woman and up to seven hours of social work, including home visits, to help them with adjusting to life in Germany.
A 30-year-old Syrian mother of four fled the war with her family early last year. When her husband ran out of money to pay their smuggler in Bulgaria, he offered his wife as payment instead. For three months, she was raped almost daily to earn her family’s onward journey.
Soon her own husband was abusing her, too. A “twisted logic,” Hohne said. “What her husband made her do ended up tainting his honour. She became the guilty party.”
Trauma and stressThe woman now has asylum and lives in Berlin with her children. Her husband, who lives elsewhere in Germany but has stalked her on the street in Berlin at least once, is under a restraining order. But she remains too terrified to provide even her first name, for fear of being killed by him or another relative over the perception that she brought “dishonour” to the family.
Ms. Hohne says the woman displays all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including flashbacks, insomnia and trouble concentrating. “One moment she will seem perfectly healthy, the next she is in her chair opposite you dodging bullets in Damascus or reliving her abuse in Bulgaria,” she said. — New York Times News Service
