Single women face sexual violence

Esther was sleeping on the streets of Lagos when a woman approached her with the promise of a path out of Nigeria to a job and a home in Europe.

He especially dreamed of a new life in the United Kingdom. Having been kicked out of a violent and abusive foster home, she didn’t have much left to stay with. But when she left Lagos and crossed the desert to Libya in 2016, she had little idea of ​​her traumatic journey, during which she was forced into sex work and spent years seeking asylum from country to country.

The majority of irregular migrants and asylum seekers are men (70 percent, according to the European Asylum Agency), but the number of women like Esther coming to Europe to seek asylum is increasing.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of women traveling alone on both the Mediterranean and Balkan routes,” says Irini Contogiannis of the International Rescue Committee in Italy.

The 2024 report highlighted a 250% annual increase in the number of single adult women coming to Italy via the Balkan route, while families increased by 52%.

Migration routes are notoriously treacherous. Last year, 3,419 migrant deaths or disappearances were recorded in Europe by the International Organization for Migration (IOM); This was the deadliest year in history.

But for women, there is also the threat of sexual violence and exploitation, which befalls Esther after she is betrayed by the woman who promised her a better life.

“He locked me in a room and brought a man in. The man forcibly had sex with me. I was still a virgin,” says Esther. “That’s what they do… They go to different villages in Nigeria, select young girls and bring them to Libya as sex slaves.”

“Their experiences are different and often riskier,” IOM’s Ugochi Daniels told the BBC. “Even women traveling in groups often lack consistent protection, leaving them exposed to exploitation by smugglers, traffickers or other migrants.”

Even though many women are aware of the risks, they go anyway, packing condoms and even getting a birth control device in case they are raped on the way.

“All migrants must pay money to the smuggler,” says Hermine Gbedo of anti-trafficking network Stella Polare. “But women are often expected to offer sex as part of the payment.”

Ms. Gbedo supports female immigrants in Trieste, a port city in northeastern Italy that has long served as a crossroads of cultures and a major entry point to the European Union for those crossing from the Balkans. From here they continue to countries such as Germany, France and England.

After four months of exploitation in Libya, Esther escaped and crossed the Mediterranean in a rubber dinghy; From there he was rescued by the Italian coast guard and taken to the island of Lampedusa.

He requested asylum three times before being granted refugee status.

Asylum seekers from countries deemed safe are often rejected. At the time, Italy viewed Nigeria as unsafe, but that assessment changed two years ago when governments across Europe began tightening their rules in response to the massive influx of migrants arriving in Europe in 2015-16. Voices calling for greater restrictions on asylum claims have grown louder since then.

“It is impossible, not possible, to sustain mass migration,” says Nicola Procaccini, a member of parliament in Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government. “We can guarantee a safe life for women who are truly in danger, but not for all.”

“We must be decisive,” warns Rakib Ehsan, Senior Fellow at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange. “We need to prioritize women and girls at immediate risk in conflict-affected areas where rape is used as a weapon of war.”

She argues that this is not happening consistently at present, and while she sympathizes with the plight of women facing dangerous routes to Europe, “the key is controlled compassion”.

However, many women from countries considered safe claim that the abuse they face because they are women means that life in their home country has become impossible.

It was the same for 28-year-old Nina from Kosovo.

“People think everything is fine in Kosovo, but that’s not true,” he says. “Things are very bad for women.”

Nina says she and her sister were sexually abused by their boyfriends, who forced them into sex work.

A 2019 report by Europe’s OSCE security organization suggested that 54% of women in Kosovo had experienced psychological, physical or sexual violence from a partner they had been with since the age of 15.

Women persecuted as a result of gender-based violence have the right to asylum under the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which was backed by a landmark ruling by the EU’s top court last year. The convention details gender-based violence as psychological, physical and sexual, and also includes female genital mutilation (FGM).

However, according to charities, the terms of this law are not yet consistently applied.

“Many of the asylum officers in the field are not adequately trained to deal with such a sensitive issue.” [as female genital mutilation] – both medically and psychologically,” says Marianne Nguena Kana, Director of the End FGM European Network.

She says many women have their asylum claims rejected based on the erroneous assumption that because they have already undergone FGM, they face no further risk.

“The judges said: ‘You are already injured, so it is not dangerous for you to return to your country, because there is no way they can do this to you again,'” Nguena Kana says.

When it comes to sexual violence, Carenza Arnold, of the UK charity Women for Refugee Women, says it is often harder to prove because it does not leave the same scars as physical torture, and taboos and cultural sensitivities against women make the process even more difficult.

“Women are often rushed through this process and may not disclose the sexual violence they have experienced to an immigration officer they have just met,” explains Arnold.

The International Organization for Migration told the BBC that most of the violence women face occurs during the journey.

“Women often flee sexual violence from their partners in their country of origin and experience it again during the journey,” says Ugochi Daniles.

Such was the case as Nina and her sister journeyed away from their abusive partners in Kosovo to a new life in Italy. Together with other women, they went hiking through the forests of Eastern Europe, trying to evade the authorities. They said they were attacked by male immigrants and smugglers there.

“Even though we were in the mountains in the dark, you could hear the screams,” Nina recalls. “The men would come to us with a torch in their hands, shine it in our faces, pick what they wanted and take it further into the forest.

“At night I could hear my sister crying, begging for help.”

Nina and her sister told Italian authorities that they would be killed by their ex-boyfriends if they returned home. They were eventually granted asylum.

Esther’s fight for refugee status lasted much longer.

He first sought asylum in Italy in 2016, but after a long wait there, he moved to France and then Germany. According to the EU’s Dublin regulation, asylum seekers are generally expected to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter, so their asylum requests were rejected there.

He was finally granted refugee status in Italy in 2019.

Almost a decade after leaving Nigeria, he wonders whether his current presence in Italy is worth the pain he endured to get there: “I don’t even know why I came here.”