As I start my fourth week with the Turkish Red Crescent, I am no closer to actualizing a summer project than when I began. My plans to circulate a multi-sectoral questionnaire to field teams embedded in a pre-identified cluster of camps have been frozen somewhere between the Head of the Department of International Operations and the higher echelons of organizational management. I was told earlier this afternoon that upper management did not find such an assessment "practical" or "applicable" to current or future programming within Syrian refugee camps. The idea was a nifty one, but moving forward with a serious assessment just wasn't going to happen.
Being as obsessed with gender(ed) implications as I am, I can think of 1.2 million reasons why this assessment is absolutely practical and applicable, but the reality of the situation does not afford me any opportunity to pursue this exercise through official channels. Has anything of the sort been done thus far at TRC, as a way of measuring program impact on men and women? No. Would the Turkish Red Crescent benefit from a "gender audit" of sorts? Yes. Are donors asking for the kind of gender reporting that has slowly but persistently woven its way throughout implementing priorities and best practices? Of course.
This leaves me with the imperative to chip away at carefully-erected information firewalls using unofficial mechanisms, which is something I have been working hard at since I arrived nearly one month ago. When it first became clear that I would not be able to access anything close to a wealth of information about the day-to-day realities of Syrians living within Turkish camps, I very deliberately reached out to the US Embassy here in Ankara.
Through a series of interviews with officials who have been closely following the unfolding crisis in Syria, I was connected with one individual who has been working diligently on the not minuscule task of improving and expanding women's access to social, cultural, political, economic, and legal resources, first, in the US during the second-wave social movements that characterized the Western feminisms of the 1970s and 80s and most recently, in parts of the world where women are not yet burning undergarments in protest (note: I do not think bra-burning is a universal sign that female/feminist consciousness is perfectly crystallized; I simply wanted to leave the reader with one of the more memorable images of modern, US feminism).
With the help of this contact, who has seen a great deal of several camps and spoken to Syrian women (with the help of a third-party translater) about what they need to begin what will be a long and exhausting healing process, I have been able to piece together a composite of what is missing in these camps, lavish as they are with indoor plumbing, laundry facilities, wedding halls and rugmaking classes. What is missing is the freedom and space to pinpoint exactly what kind of damage has been done and what is needed to address it.
What does this even mean? According to my contact, there is an intensely strong cultural imperative to keep quiet about sexual and gender-based violence. A recent Atlantic article covering a project sponsored by the Women's Media Center's Women Under Siege project, documented and collected data to figure out exactly how women and men were being targeted by armed factions in Syria. The following graph is a representation of the data collected (keep in mind that an unknown quantity of violence does not - and may never - figure into these data sets because victims either did not survive the attacks or have not and will not report what happened).
What is even more upsetting is the environment - and attendent dearth of opportunities to heal and seek justice - survivors of SGBV find themselves in once (if) they make it to refugee camps in neighboring countries. "'The reality is that [Syrian refugee women] have much to lose and little to gain by [coming forward publicly] at this point in time, for many reasons... it takes a lot of courage and strength for a victim to speak up and they may be on their own without support as they do it. In addition to the shame and isolation a victim may feel, they are now in an insecure environment due to the war. They may now be living in a large refugee camp with no privacy, surrounded by people they don't know or trust." (Wolfe, "Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis", 2013).
Therein lies the biggest issue facing female survivors in Turkish camps - no.privacy.whatsoever. And no trust, either. The government has not invested commensurate resources in capacitating and training up and spreading out public health officials to deal with the massive amounts of traumatized men, women and children pouring into the camps (keep in mind that 75% of total camp residents are women and children). Syrians started fleeing their towns en masse in October 2011 and the UN is just now building out a pilot program to tackle the enormous task of rehabilitating traumatized and injured men, women, and children. Simple arithmetic will tell you that at least two years of untreated, trauma-related stress (along with every other physical and emotional injury connected to sexual violence) have passed with untold numbers of individuals suffering in silence.
Based on several interviews with my source, queues to access medical services are long and public, with very few opportunities to privately voice culturally sensitive concerns or requests. Overwhelmingly, women are not comfortable seeking assistance from Turkish practitioners and are doubly uncomfortable - and, sometimes, disallowed by their husbands - to see male practitioners. Many women are choosing to have their children in their tents or containers with the help of Syrian midwives who, by the way, cannot obtain even a temporary work visa in order to receive compensation for the services they deliver.
There is so much at work under the surface of these camps, and so much that is missing from official accounts of camp living. While I may not be able to procure information of this kind from the Red Crescent itself, I am learning that a little persistance mixed with very clear overtures to maintain confidentiality yields great benefits. And rather than look to Angelina Jolie's most recent trip to the region for insight, I will continue to seek out expert sources deeply committed to pushing past bureaucracy to ensure equitable and fair results for communities deeply in need and undeserving of the cruelty of the past two years.
Being as obsessed with gender(ed) implications as I am, I can think of 1.2 million reasons why this assessment is absolutely practical and applicable, but the reality of the situation does not afford me any opportunity to pursue this exercise through official channels. Has anything of the sort been done thus far at TRC, as a way of measuring program impact on men and women? No. Would the Turkish Red Crescent benefit from a "gender audit" of sorts? Yes. Are donors asking for the kind of gender reporting that has slowly but persistently woven its way throughout implementing priorities and best practices? Of course.
This leaves me with the imperative to chip away at carefully-erected information firewalls using unofficial mechanisms, which is something I have been working hard at since I arrived nearly one month ago. When it first became clear that I would not be able to access anything close to a wealth of information about the day-to-day realities of Syrians living within Turkish camps, I very deliberately reached out to the US Embassy here in Ankara.
Through a series of interviews with officials who have been closely following the unfolding crisis in Syria, I was connected with one individual who has been working diligently on the not minuscule task of improving and expanding women's access to social, cultural, political, economic, and legal resources, first, in the US during the second-wave social movements that characterized the Western feminisms of the 1970s and 80s and most recently, in parts of the world where women are not yet burning undergarments in protest (note: I do not think bra-burning is a universal sign that female/feminist consciousness is perfectly crystallized; I simply wanted to leave the reader with one of the more memorable images of modern, US feminism).
With the help of this contact, who has seen a great deal of several camps and spoken to Syrian women (with the help of a third-party translater) about what they need to begin what will be a long and exhausting healing process, I have been able to piece together a composite of what is missing in these camps, lavish as they are with indoor plumbing, laundry facilities, wedding halls and rugmaking classes. What is missing is the freedom and space to pinpoint exactly what kind of damage has been done and what is needed to address it.
What does this even mean? According to my contact, there is an intensely strong cultural imperative to keep quiet about sexual and gender-based violence. A recent Atlantic article covering a project sponsored by the Women's Media Center's Women Under Siege project, documented and collected data to figure out exactly how women and men were being targeted by armed factions in Syria. The following graph is a representation of the data collected (keep in mind that an unknown quantity of violence does not - and may never - figure into these data sets because victims either did not survive the attacks or have not and will not report what happened).
What is even more upsetting is the environment - and attendent dearth of opportunities to heal and seek justice - survivors of SGBV find themselves in once (if) they make it to refugee camps in neighboring countries. "'The reality is that [Syrian refugee women] have much to lose and little to gain by [coming forward publicly] at this point in time, for many reasons... it takes a lot of courage and strength for a victim to speak up and they may be on their own without support as they do it. In addition to the shame and isolation a victim may feel, they are now in an insecure environment due to the war. They may now be living in a large refugee camp with no privacy, surrounded by people they don't know or trust." (Wolfe, "Syria Has a Massive Rape Crisis", 2013).
Therein lies the biggest issue facing female survivors in Turkish camps - no.privacy.whatsoever. And no trust, either. The government has not invested commensurate resources in capacitating and training up and spreading out public health officials to deal with the massive amounts of traumatized men, women and children pouring into the camps (keep in mind that 75% of total camp residents are women and children). Syrians started fleeing their towns en masse in October 2011 and the UN is just now building out a pilot program to tackle the enormous task of rehabilitating traumatized and injured men, women, and children. Simple arithmetic will tell you that at least two years of untreated, trauma-related stress (along with every other physical and emotional injury connected to sexual violence) have passed with untold numbers of individuals suffering in silence.
Based on several interviews with my source, queues to access medical services are long and public, with very few opportunities to privately voice culturally sensitive concerns or requests. Overwhelmingly, women are not comfortable seeking assistance from Turkish practitioners and are doubly uncomfortable - and, sometimes, disallowed by their husbands - to see male practitioners. Many women are choosing to have their children in their tents or containers with the help of Syrian midwives who, by the way, cannot obtain even a temporary work visa in order to receive compensation for the services they deliver.
There is so much at work under the surface of these camps, and so much that is missing from official accounts of camp living. While I may not be able to procure information of this kind from the Red Crescent itself, I am learning that a little persistance mixed with very clear overtures to maintain confidentiality yields great benefits. And rather than look to Angelina Jolie's most recent trip to the region for insight, I will continue to seek out expert sources deeply committed to pushing past bureaucracy to ensure equitable and fair results for communities deeply in need and undeserving of the cruelty of the past two years.
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