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Violence Against Women and Girls in the Horn of Africa The Untold Story

Imagine you are a woman, forced to leave your home and community because there is no food or water to feed your family. You must walk hundreds of miles with your children to a refugee camp in another country. As you make your long trek, you watch other mothers carrying their own starving and malnourished children, on the brink of death — or already dead — and pray that your own children will survive, in the sun, in the heat, with only a few sips of water to keep them going. You encounter violent militias and armed bandits along the way who leer at and threaten you and your daughter. Imagine that you cannot ward them off, and your daughter is kidnapped and raped.
This scenario plays out every day in the Horn of Africa as thousands of Somalis, the overwhelming majority of them women and children, flee their country to find food and shelter in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia. Yet when they finally reach the camps, which are supposed to be safe havens, they find that the dangers continue, and are sometimes even worse.
Thousands of refugees have reached camps like Dadaab in Kenya — the biggest refugee complex in the world. Built for 90,000 people, it now hosts nearly five times that number. While we have been hearing news stories about the desperate need for food, water and basic health care, we have heard little about the appalling sexual violence women and girls there face every day.
Many of the displaced Somalis are in areas on the outskirts of the established camps; they live in ad hoc settlements that lack security and basic services like latrines. The International Rescue Committee found a fourfold increase in reports of sexual violence at Dadaab in June 2011 compared to January-May. The real numbers are likely much higher, because many women and girls fail to report attacks for fear of their safety, because they don’t want to be ostracized by their families and communities or because they don’t trust that their rapists will ever be caught or prosecuted. Some of those living in the camps also face violence from their partners, and some are being forced into early marriage or survival sex, because they have no other way to support themselves.
The world can — and must — act quickly to stop this. While managing the sheer number of people at the camps is a daunting challenge for those on the ground, getting it right now will more effectively protect women and girls than trying to fix problems after they have become entrenched.
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