For my friend’s elderly aunt in Austria, the picture of displaced people walking on railway tracks is a familiar sight. “We walked on the rails, too,” she sighs, recalling her days as a refugee during World War II.
Not since then has Europe seen such massive movements of refugees: over one million people arrived by sea in 2015, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Now nearly 60% of these are women and girls, compared to only 30% in June of last year. According to Amnesty International, these female refugees face violence and sexual harassment at every stage of their journey, and single mothers face particular hardships. But receiving states are not well prepared to meet the special challenges that women and girls face. “From experience, we know that there is no real security for asylum-seeking women, because whenever they are attacked, either physically or sexually harassed, nobody knows what to do. There’s no clear policy,” says Elizabeth Ngari, who co-founded Women in Exile, a group based in Brandenburg near Berlin.
On the last weekend in February, the International Conference of Refugees and Migrants in Hamburg brought together more than 1500 refugee activists from different camps across Germany and some European countries. As part of the concept there was a “Women*space”—a separate, beautiful room for women and transgender people only. Yet on the panels of the conference, 95% of the speakers were men. During one session, a group of about 150 women and transgender people, including activists from Women in Exile, entered the podium, interrupting the ongoing discussion about self-organising and solidarity and declaring that: “Women’s space is everywhere!” They raised their voices to demand full participation in the refugee movement and the visibility of their perspectives and challenges—something critical for female refugees everywhere.
