Seema Shekhawat is a political scientist with a PhD on the intersection

of gender, conflict and displacement. She has researched and taught at the
Universities of Jammu and Mumbai, India and is the author of Gender,
Conflict and Peace in Kashmir (2014) and editor of Female Combatants in
Conflict and Peace (2015).

Emanuela C. Del Re is a tenured Professor of Political Sociology at the

University Niccolò Cusano of Rome. She is the chair and founder of EPOS
International Mediating and Negotiating Operational Agency and creator
of the My Future project for Syrian Refugees funded by the Italian Foreign
Affairs Ministry and by the European Commission.
“Borders affect all sections of the population, with multiple consequences
for vulnerable sections, particularly women. State-centered bordering
practices are highly restrictive and even discriminatory, targeting women
in specific ways. The engagement of women with borders, contested
or even settled, hence can be exploitative leading to victimization and
alienation. Border regions are prone to violence towards women residing
nearby, while crossing or even after crossing. This book, focusing on the
intersection of gender and border, uses case studies featuring refugees and
migrants and brings to the forefront a highly relevant issue of concern for
academics, practitioners as well as policy makers. Through examining an
array of related issues and developing further the innovative concept of
‘gendered borders’, this volume is certainly a great addition to the existing
literature on the issue.”
Padraig O’Malley, John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor
of Peace and Reconciliation, John W. McCormack Graduate School
of Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Women and
Borders
Refugees, Migrants and
Communities

EDITED BY SEEMA SHEKHAWAT

AND EMANUELA C. DEL RE
 Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright Editorial Selection © 2018 Emanuela C. Del Re and Seema Shekhawat.

Copyright Individual Chapters © 2018 Suhail Abualsameed,

Andreanne Bissonnette, Vanessa Grotti, Leila Hudson,
Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, Cynthia Malakasis, Duncan McDuie-Ra,
Olga Davydova-Minguet, Carolina Montenegro, Pirjo Pöllänen,
Suse Prosser, Chiara Quagliariello, Emanuela C. Del Re, Nina Sahraoui,
Seema Shekhawat, Elisabeth Vallet, Daniela Arias Vargas, Melinda Wells.

The right of Emanuela C. Del Re and Seema Shekhawat to be identified as

the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

International Library of Migration Studies 9

ISBN: 978 1 78453 957 3

eISBN: 978 1 83860 986 3
ePDF: 978 1 83860 987 0

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd

 Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction: Borders, Violence and Gender 1

Seema Shekhawat, Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra
and Emanuela C. Del Re
Theory and Practice of Bordering 1
Juxtaposing Border and Gender 7
Gendered Violence is Omnipresent 9
1 Gendering the European Borders: The Role of
Female Migrants and Refugees 21
Emanuela C. Del Re
Male and Female Borders 22
Vulnerable Groups Crossing 26
Concrete Border 28
European Union, Gendered Borders 31
2 The Refugee’s Passage: Liminality, Gendered
Habits and the Emergence of Difference in Flight 39
Leila Hudson
Separation: Internal Checkpoints and Neoliberal Lebanon 44
Borderlands of Chronic Liminality 47
Acute Liminality: Trial by Water Crossing 49
Incorporation, Camps and Biopolitical Striations 53
Old Gendered Habits and New Habits of Differentiation 56
3 Pregnant Crossings: A Political Economy of
Care on Europe’s External Borders 63
Vanessa Grotti, Cynthia Malakasis,
Chiara Quagliariello, Nina Sahraoui and
Daniela Arias Vargas
Introduction: Gendered (In)Visibilities 63

v
 Contents

Fragments and Networks of Care at the Border 65

Undocumented Motherhood at the Border 74
Conclusion: Childbirth and Political Economies of
Care at the Border 79
4 Acknowledging and Addressing the Risks of
Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees
Across Borders: Escalation of Domestic
Violence in Refugee Populations 87
Melinda Wells, Suhail Abualsameed
and Suse Prosser
Gender Equality and Non-discrimination 90
Engaging Men and Boys in Preventing
Gender-based Violence 94
Normative Framework for Humanitarian
Intervention in GBV Prevention and Response 96
Collateral Repair Project: Community-based Model for
Violence Prevention 98
Collateral Repair Project: Human Rights and Violence
Prevention 100
Next Steps 106
Conclusion 107
5 Trapped in a Cycle of Abuse and Violence:
A Case Study of Nigerian Women in Italy 113
Carolina Montenegro
Introduction 113
Trafficking in Persons: Definition and Worldwide Status 115
Nigerian Women: A Special Case 116
Key Elements 120
Limitations of the Protection Programs 122
Conclusion and Recommendations 125
6 Unhindered Flow of Gendered Suffering
through the India-Nepal Open Border: Trafficking
and Commercial Sexual Exploitation 131
Seema Shekhawat
India-Nepal Border: The Openness 133
The Problematique 133
Human Trafficking 135
The Narratives 142
Conclusion 147

vi
 Contents

7 Migration, Border Crossing and Women:

Female Migrant Sexualities Between
Objectification and Empowerment 151
Andreanne Bissonnette and Elisabeth Vallet
Sexual Objectification as a Liability 152
Sexuality as an Asset 160
8 Gendered Everyday Bordering: An
Ethnographic Case Study on the Border
Between Finland and Russia 175
Olga Davydova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen
What, Where and Why? 175
Everyday Bordering in Transnational and
Precarious Conditions 177
Everyday Transnational Care and Gender 182
National Celebrations as Everyday Bordering 185
Discussion 191
9 Gendered Geographical Edges: Border,
Contestation and Women in Kashmir 197
Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra
Border in Kashmir 200
Life Along the Border 202
Conclusion 212
10 Kakching Gardens: Experiments in Normalcy
in Manipur 217
Duncan McDuie-Ra
Introduction 217
Manipur; Sensitive Space 221
Kakching Gardens: Beautifying the Militarized
Landscape 225
Women, Men, Selfies 229
Conclusion 233

Select Bibliography 237

Index 245

vii
 Acknowledgements

In the post-Cold War globalized world, in which border violence, intra-

state conflicts and consequent migration and refugee crises have become
significant features, the discourse on the border and its intersection with
gender is not confined to a particular geographical region. Rather, it has
encompassed the whole world. Whether it is the conflict in the Middle East
and the migration from the south to the north, or the violence in South
Asia, including the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir, or the recent elect-
oral debates on migration in the USA and Europe, the myriad nuances
of the border practices and their intersection with gender have become
increasingly perceptible. Though borders and gender have become increas-
ingly prominent in policy debates, we feel their intersection have not been
significantly analyzed. The current volume aims to fill this critical gap.
Keeping in view the scarcity of literature on the intersection of borders and
gender we decided to bring out this volume through carefully drawing case
studies from different parts of the world. It may not be possible to include
all case studies in a single volume, but we firmly hope that the select cases
amply demonstrate the myriad nuances of the intersection of gender and
borders, and argue that a fresh look at these nuances can help develop new
frameworks to address the issues of border violence, migration and refugee
crises, through crafting effective humane policies.
We are thankful to the International Mediating and Negotiating
Operational Agency (EPOS) Rome, Italy, as this anthology could not have
been possible without the financial support from this organization.
We would like to thank the contributors for agreeing to be part of this
compilation. They enthusiastically participated in the project and abided
by our schedule in delivering the chapters. We hope that their rich experi-
ence and insights from the field, as reflected in the chapters, will recast
the traditional analyses on gender and borders. We are also thankful to
the respondents, many of whom either lived in the borderlands or crossed

ix
 Acknowledgements

the borders and negotiated violence, for providing valuable insights. We

dedicate this book to these respondents and other women who negotiate
with borders as border residents or transient communities. Their rich nar-
ratives, which have been featured in this volume, bring into focus many
hitherto underemphasized and underresearched aspects of borders, con-
flict and violence, and provide an alternative humane lens to look at their
intersection.
We are thankful to our lovely families. Without their support and
encouragement, this volume could not have seen the light of day.
Finally, we are thankful to Lester Crook, our commissioning editor
from I.B.Tauris, and his team for making the publication process smooth.

Seema Shekhawat (Florida, USA)

Emanuela C. Del Re (Rome, Italy)

x
 Notes on Contributors

Suhail Abualsameed has 15 years of experience in gender, sexual and

gender-based violence, project coordination, cross-cultural education
and community-based research. He has a thorough knowledge on issues
faced by diverse populations and minority groups with respect to gender
and equity and extensive experience on refugees and migration, sexuality,
and cultural competency. Abualsameed has worked in the Middle East and
southern Europe designing and delivering capacity building and training
initiatives linked to the current refugee crisis, as well as situation analysis
and support on policy, program and service delivery levels.

Andreanne Bissonnette is a graduate student in political science major-

ing in women’s studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She is a
research fellow at the Raoul Dandurand Chair in strategic and diplomatic
studies. Her research interests are the impact of the securitization of bor-
ders and changes in migration policies on migrant women – mainly on
the Mexican-American border. She has published papers on immigration
in the US in Relations (May 2016) and Diplomatie (October 2016) and is a
co-author of L’Effet 11 septembre, 15 ans après (April 2016).

Vanessa Grotti is a part-time professor at the European University

Institute, where she leads the EU Border Care project, funded by an ERC
Starting Grant. She is an anthropologist interested in the study of health
and healthcare systems, migration and borderlands, gender and minor-
ity rights, especially in contexts of social change and crisis. Over the last
13 years, she has worked in South America, Europe and West Africa. She
was trained at Cambridge University and has held research and teaching
positions at the Collège de France, the London School of Hygiene and
Tropical Medicine, and Oxford University.

xi
 Notes on Contributors

Leila Hudson is Associate Professor in the School of Middle Eastern

and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. An anthropolo-
gist and historian, she is the author of Transforming Damascus: Space and
Modernity in an Islamic City (I.B.Tauris, 2008), Middle Eastern Humanities:
An Introduction to Cultures of the Middle East (2010), and Media Evolution
on the Eve of the Arab Spring (2014).

Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra is a social scientist with a PhD in Conflict

Resolution. He received the Scholar of Peace Award (New Delhi) in 2007
and the Kodikara Award for Young South Asian Researcher (Colombo)
in 2010. Mahapatra has published extensively on issues related to conflict
and peace. His recent publications include Conflict and Peace in Eurasia
(editor, 2013), Making Kashmir Borderless (2013), “The Mandate and the
(In)Effectiveness of the United Nations Security Council and International
Peace and Security” (Geopolitics, 2016) and “Examining the Evolution of
the Borderland in Kashmir” (Journal of Borderland Studies, 2016). His
forthcoming book is Conflict Management in Kashmir (2017).

Cynthia Malakasis is a post-doctoral research associate at the ERC-

funded EU Border Care research project. She received her PhD in Global
and Sociocultural Studies (Anthropology track) at Florida International
University. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in nationalism, eth-
nicity, race, post-colonial dynamics with an emphasis on intra-European
hierarchies, immigration, citizenship rights, and Greece. Her doctoral pro-
ject examined whether and how post-1989 mass immigration to Greece
had challenged the country’s nationalist norms of collective belonging.

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of Development Studies at the University

of New South Wales, Sydney. His most recent books include Northeast
Migrants in Delhi (2012), Debating Race in Contemporary India (2015) and
Borderland City in New India (2016). His work has appeared in journals
such as South Asia; Contemporary South Asia; Geoforum; Urban Studies;
Energy Policy; Men and Masculinities and Violence Against Women. He is
Associate Editor for the journal South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
and for the book series Asian Borderlands, and Editor in Chief of the ASAA
South Asia monograph series.

xii
 Notes on Contributors

Olga Davydova-Minguet, PhD, holds a tenure-track position at the

Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland. Davydova-
Minguet’s main research interests fall, to a large degree, within the inter-
section of migration, cultural and transnational studies. She is conducting
three research projects which concentrate upon the transnational polit-
ics of memory in the border areas of Finland and Russia, media use of
Russian-speakers in Finland and the images of Russia in Finland.

Carolina Montenegro is Field Communication Manager for the Aleppo

Response at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). She has worked for the
World Food Programme (WFP), the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Folha de São Paulo newspaper
in Brazil. For the last five years, she has extensively covered humanitar-
ian crisis and human rights issues in the Middle East and Africa, particu-
larly Haiti and South Sudan. In 2016 she also wrote articles for IRIN, the
BBC and Oxford’s Forced Migration Review about the migration crisis in
the Mediterranean. She is the author of a book on the Arab Spring, Sobre
jasmins, bombas e faraós (2014).

Pirjo Pöllänen, PhD, is a researcher of migration and social policy at the

Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland. Her doctoral thesis
was about Russian “wife-migrants’” transnational care in Finland. During
recent years Pöllänen has been researching the processes of the hollowing-
out of the welfare state policies from several angles, namely precarization,
rural areas, migration and gender. Currently she is working on a project
which investigates the images of Russia in Finland.

Suse Prosser was a refugee and human rights lawyer in Canada until 2003
and has worked internationally for UNHCR in Kenya, Syria and Jordan,
focusing on protection in large refugee flows. At UNHCR and the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) she contributed to growing
and shaping gender-based violence prevention and response policy, pro-
graming and practice. Her current passion is the nexus between gender,
trauma and domestic violence in conflict and post-conflict settings and
she works closely with the Collateral Repair Project in Jordan on related
projects.

xiii
 Notes on Contributors

Chiara Quagliariello is Research Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre

for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute within the EU
Border Care project. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University
of Siena and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Paris VIII. Between
2012 and 2014, she was a lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Social
Anthropology at the University of Reims. In 2015, she was a lecturer in
Medical Anthropology and Medical Sociology at the Universities of Paris
Descartes (Paris V) and Paris Vincennes (Paris VIII).

Emanuela C. Del Re is a tenured Professor of Political Sociology at the

University Niccolò Cusano of Rome. She is the chair and founder of EPOS
International Mediating and Negotiating Operational Agency and creator
of the My Future project for Syrian Refugees funded by the Italian Foreign
Affairs Ministry and by the European Commission.

Nina Sahraoui is a post-doctoral research associate at the ERC-funded EU

Border Care project, at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
at the European University Institute. Sahraoui received her PhD at London
Metropolitan University supported by the Marie Curie Innovative Training
Network ‘Changing Employment’. Her doctoral research focused on a gen-
dered political economy analysis of the articulation of migration, care and
employment regimes through the study of migrant and minority ethnic
workers’ experiences in older-age care in London, Paris and Madrid.

Seema Shekhawat is a political scientist with a PhD on the intersection

of gender, conflict and displacement. She has researched and taught at the
Universities of Jammu and Mumbai, India and is the author of Gender,
Conflict and Peace in Kashmir (2014) and editor of Female Combatants in
Conflict and Peace (2015).

Elisabeth Vallet is the scientific director of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair

and Adjunct Professor of Geography at the University of Quebec at
Montreal, as well as Quebec Lead of the Borders in Globalization Project
at the University of Victoria, Canada. She is the lead researcher for the
SSHRC-funded Border Walls project and frequently works with media
such as The Economist, GEO, and Courrier international on border fences
infographics.

xiv
 Notes on Contributors

Daniela Arias Vargas holds a master’s degree in Development and Gender

Studies from the University of Melbourne. From May to September 2016,
she worked on the ERC-funded EU Border Care research project at the
European University Institute, and conducted field research in Andalusia.
Her main interests are transnational practices and identities, politics of
place, and embodied experiences of change in migrant settings. She has
engaged in mapping the ongoing changing values, aspirations, and knowl-
edge stemming from transnational place-making(s)/re-emplacements as
well as migrants’ self-assertion strategies through artistic expressions and
alternative methodological approaches.

Melinda Wells has over 15 years of humanitarian, gender and migration

experience. She began her career with the Centre for Victims of Torture,
and consulted several years for organizations including the World Bank
and UNICEF in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has also held sev-
eral management positions with the International Operations team of the
Canadian Red Cross. She spent 2012–15 in Jordan working in multiple
capacities on the Syrian refugee response. She is the Board Chair of the
American NGO Collateral Repair Project.

xv
Introduction: Borders, Violence and Gender

Seema Shekhawat, Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra

and Emanuela C. Del Re

While engaged in a discourse on bordering practices and vulnerable

demographies, we identified gaps in the existing literature. This collection
on the intersection of border and gender is an attempt to address some
of these gaps. We aim to provide a comprehensive picture of gendered
engagement with carefully selected borders from across the globe to tease
out the nuances of the intersection. And, we are doing so through focusing
on the experiences of women engaging with borders in multiple capacities.
We locate gender along geographical edges of states, and critically examine
the gendered experiences of women as border residents and border cross-
ers. Broadly, we explore two questions. First, what are the experiences of
women’s engagement with borders? Second, where are women positioned
in theory and practice of border marking, remarking and demarking?

Theory and Practice of Bordering

Amidst various conceptions of border, physical demarcation drawn
between states has drawn significant attention. Borders traditionally sep-
arated states and regulated, marginalized and constricted cross-border
movement.1 The regulation of borders is considered an essential duty of

1
 Women and Borders

a state. Borders particularly “are viewed as constituting a given territorial

fact, a static, unchanging feature, rather than one which has its own internal
dynamics and which influences, and is influenced by, the patterns of social,
economic and political development which take place in the surrounding
landscapes – the frontier regions and/or borderlands.”2 Traditionally, these
“symbols of power” were perceived as non-negotiable and non-flexible
markers of the state limits and “domains of contested power, in which local,
national, and international groups negotiate relations of subordination and
control.”3 Van Schendel notes, “The state’s pursuit of territoriality – its strat-
egy to exert complete authority and control over social life in its territory –
produces borders and makes them into crucial markers of the success and
limitations of that strategy.”4 Johnson and Graybill argue, “national bor-
ders represent the territorial embodiment of a bundle of ideas that modern
states have propagated and enforced. They tell us that all of humanity is
divided up among discrete nation states; that these nations have sovereign
powers over particular territory to the exclusion of other nations; and that,
collectively, nations exercise this sovereignty over all the earth.”5 The link-
age of state, territory and sovereignty has entwined many modern states
into a “territorial trap.”6
The characterization of borders as fixed and non-negotiable can be
attributed to the Realist school of International Relations.7 For the Realist
school of thought, states are at the center of international politics. And
international politics is competitive and conflictual where the Darwinian
theory of “survival of the fittest” governs state to state relation. The actions
of states are governed by the narrow definition of security, in relation to
gaining power, survival and the pursuit of national interests in an inter-
national system that continues to remain anarchic and hierarchical.8 Here,
borders are thrust upon people, with scant consideration for the concerns
of those living along these dividing lines and little attention paid to their
identity, group relationships and shared culture. This was done frequently
during colonial times across the globe, with perceptible repercussions per-
sisting even now. Border discourse as a whole revolved around the issue of
power contestation and territorial aspirations.
The post-Cold War border discourse witnessed change as scholars
moved away from the traditional conception of borders as static divisions.

2
 Introduction

Besides geographers, scholars from other disciplines such as political sci-

ence, international relations, anthropology, history and sociology engaged
in exploring intricacies of the borders. A debate for re-placing of the border
in border studies through more critical attention on theory and practice of
bordering was initiated.9 The widening of the debate is crucial to bring in
questions related to human life. There is no dearth of questions which can
be posed in the context of physical boundaries dividing humanity across
the globe. However, the larger issues of human concern, their impact on
adjoining life, on mobility, on aliens, need critical attention. As points of
passage for illegal migrants and refugees, borders pose life-long challenges
in new countries, with new socio-cultural setups, new languages and new
identities. As places of residence for a substantial global population, bor-
ders pose life-long challenges for adjoining life.
A growing community of scholars is engaged in analyzing the nuanced
practices of bordering.10 In the past two decades, border discourse has
been widened to include habitations around the markers of territorial
state integrity.11 Factoring the concerns of people, including the border
residents, is essential for making the concept of security inclusive and rel-
evant to existing realities. And, state security and human security cannot
be mutually exclusive, as they are interlinked. Edward Newman argues, the
notion of human security does not “exclude the importance of traditional
ideas of security, but it does suggest that it may be more effective to reorient
the provision of security around people – wherever the threat comes from.
Traditional conceptions of state security – based on the military defence
of territory – are an important but not a sufficient condition of human
welfare.”12 The security and welfare of people needs to be given as much
importance as is accorded to territorial security. Border and human secu-
rity cannot remain mutually exclusive; borders need to be problematized,
interrogated and humanized, for which it is quite crucial that the people’s
perspectives are factored in the analysis.
Many post-Cold War globalized borders are no longer considered
static, rigid and inflexible lines of separation. The changes in border dis-
course have taken into account changes in borders across the globe. Since
the early 1990s, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, end of the Cold
War and the advent of the twin forces of globalization and liberalization,

3
 Women and Borders

many borders, especially in the Western world, became increasingly flex-

ible. These borders witnessed progressive evolution and allowed capital,
people, and products to move across, argues Martinez.13 Such borders
offered rich material for the scholars to flirt with the post-modern concep-
tion of borders, as porous spaces rather than sacrosanct and rigid boundar-
ies. The idea of a “borderless world” gained increasing currency.
Borders are evolving as several closed borders are opening to facilitate
free flow of people and goods. Ironically, it is also true that the recent dec-
ades have witnessed intensive bordering with the idea of distinct state ter-
ritories and populations being further inscribed onto maps, imaginations,
and the Earth.14 Though it is commonly held that boundaries are created
and nature made the world borderless, such a notion in practical terms
appears utopian as borders continue to profoundly shape inter-state rela-
tions and adjoining lives. “Political limits in geographic space have been
and remain a major source of tension and conflict,” contends Gottmann.15
Agnew argues, “the map image of the borders of the state still exercises a
major influence on the territorial imagination of whose security is at stake
–and who most threatens it.”16 And, Newman contends, “If there is any-
thing that belies notions of a deterritorialized and borderless world more,
it is the fact that boundaries…continue to demarcate the territories within
which we are compartmentalized, determine with whom we interact and
affiliate, and the extent to which we are free to move from one space to
another.”17
Many borders are in flux, which can be attributed to forces such as
globalization, terrorism, religious extremism and illegal activities across
them. The transformation of borders from rigidity to flexibility, from
ignored wastelands and highly securitized frontiers to dynamic centers of
trade has impacted the nearby habitations along the borders by paving the
way for functionalities earlier restricted. At the same time, their flexibility
has produced new challenges. The export of prohibited activities through
an open border including, but not limited to, drug trafficking, money laun-
dering, smuggling of goods, human trafficking and unlawful migration are
considered threats to state security.18 Demand to close many open borders
and make the closed borders further sacrosanct is directly related to the
perceptible threat to state security due to the influx of unwanted people

4
 Introduction

(refugees and illegal migrants and in recent times terrorists) and unwanted
goods (arms and drugs). The recent developments in the Western world,
particularly in Europe, makes it safe to make an argument that from a state
perspective the problems, both real and perceived, seems to outweigh the
problems of an open border. Some recent developments like the United
Kingdom’s exit from the European Union and the debates and discussions
over the US-Mexico border during the United States presidential elections
in 2016 reflected some of these concerns.
Continued discourse on the prospects of a borderless world notwith-
standing, the recent developments suggest that borders remain a major site
of contestation and conflicts. Borders continue to be an inseparable part
of modern states as their critical geographical edges. The much-debated
debordering process, which aim at making borders as bridges to connect
states and peoples, has recently been diluted by the rebordering discourse
and strategy within Europe and beyond. Apparently, the increased secur-
ity practices and the resecuritization processes at borders are growing glo-
bally.19 The rebordering strategies are in the process of being reinvented to
counter the outcome of the debordering process. The developments have
generated conflicts, overt or covert, physical or non-physical, real or per-
ceived. Many borders, hence, have regained the status of being vulnerable
zones with militarization and fortification reappearing even in erstwhile
borderless regions. Borders in many places remain or are re-emerging as
a concrete place through which states gain their physical and symbolic
shape, reinforcing varieties of violence along these geographical margins.
Borders are not simply materialized at the designated site – at zero-point –
but manifest across the landscape in the form of barracks, barriers, and a
raft of spatial controls. In many ways, both the actual border crossing point
and nearby lands represent a point of condensation of power, supremacy
and domination.
Borders, settled or contested, violent or silent, closed or open, have
specific implications for several demographies – those living nearby, those
attempting to cross and even for those succeeding in crossing, particu-
larly refugees and illegal migrants. For Martinez, “as frontline zones of
contact, borderlands encountered opportunities previously unavailable to
them. Their functions underwent substantial redefinition, from frequently

5
 Women and Borders

ignored wastelands to dynamic centers of trade, commerce, and even

industrialization. Many closed borders became open, allowing capital,
people, and products to move from country to country in search of new
opportunities. Borderlands that were enmeshed in this process developed
economic activity sufficient to spur the growth of existing population cent-
ers and the emergence of new ones. Borderlanders affected by such trends,
especially from developed nations, found a new place in the world, playing
roles long denied to them by an international system driven by the ideol-
ogy of national sovereignty.”20 Some open and flexible borders positively
impact the life of transient demographies. At the same time, there are spe-
cific vulnerabilities related to engagement with borders. International bor-
ders may represent dangerous iron curtains, where exploitation and abuse
for people crossing them or living in proximity to them, is humdrum. The
militarization and crises along the borders subjugate the place and the very
positioning of people in these marginalized areas specifically affects them.
The vulnerable communities, whether transient or resident, may employ
strategies to resist and defy the bordering practices, but the significant level
of rights violations along the geographical edges of states remains a persist-
ent reality. The structural violence appears endemic in these regions. The
borders may become omnipresent in everyday practices of the residents as
well as the transient communities.
While the resident as well as the transient demographies are vulner-
able, the women engaging with the borders become further vulnerable as
they engage with the borders in several gendered forms: as a border resi-
dent and as a transient demography, attempting to cross a border to reunite
with family members, to seek economic opportunities, or to escape domes-
tic violence or political strife and instability in their homelands. Women
may confront several kinds of violence, uncertainty and abnormality as
a consequence of their engagement with borders. Gender may interlock
with border regions to reinforce and shape violence. Gendered violence
embodies gender oppression in the border regions where women’s status as
residents in transition as well as refugees and illegal migrants translate into
exploitable demography. Threats and violent episodes in border regions
may further be facilitated by hyper-patriarchal, misogynistic, and repres-
sive socio-cultural practices.

6
 Introduction

The concept of gendered borders aptly fits into the ways women engage
with these geographical edges of states. Women may challenge and desta-
bilize gendered borders and at the same time, and more often, the gendered
borders may challenge and destabilize their lives in multiple ways. Along
the borders, women suffer in specific ways because the state’s geographical
edges in a way reinforce an environment that condones the violation of
human security, human rights, and more importantly from the perspective
of this volume, women’s rights, under the garb of national security. In these
marginalized zones, violence, perpetrated by the state as well as non-state
actors may be overlooked and dismissed. Women’s rights get severely jeop-
ardized when borders reinforce an environment that condones violence.
Violence in the border areas is too often regarded as normal and thereby
incidents of violence against female migrants, refugees, trafficked and bor-
der residents often remain underreported and unattended. The vulnerable
communities, and more specifically women, get exposed to state-centered
rigid bordering practices, paving the way for their alienation as well as
exploitation. The gendered constraints confronted may not only be polit-
ical but also cultural. Market-driven cross-border economies can also vio-
lently impact the life and survivability for demographies engaging with the
border.

Juxtaposing Border and Gender

The unique positioning of the border regions, both as transit zones as well
as abodes of people, creates the necessary condition for the materialization
of a gendered subjectivity that incite investigation. Since the ideology of
bordering is embedded with the issues of hyper-masculinity and patriarchy,
the gendered effects of engagement with borders need specific attention.
At the risk of omitting much that merits attention and overlooking con-
spicuous overlaps, this volume places women at the center of the analysis
largely as victims and in part as negotiators. There is increasing literature
on borders as well as gender, but these are usually treated as separate sub-
jects of analysis. Gender is often a neglected category in border discourse.
Most of the existing literature on borders refers only fleetingly, if at all, to
issues related to gender. Women experience the engagement with borders in

7
 Women and Borders

specific ways but largely remain neglected in border theory and practice. A
growing community of scholars cutting across disciplines is engaged in dis-
secting the nuanced practices of bordering to comprehend the dynamics of
and explore the life along the state edges but with perceptibly less attention
to the gendered aspect of the border. Seldom has the linkage between bor-
der, violence and gender been emphasized. Scholars have mostly been con-
tent in focusing on the individual concepts and have not factored how their
intersection may offer rich insights, new theories and enabling policies. The
US-Mexico border is a key site for ethnographic research on gender-based
issues from a multidisciplinary perspective but the research on the cross-
roads of gender and border in other regions is in its infancy.
This volume integrates these areas of study, through arranging a cock-
tail of some well-known and some lesser-known case studies, to address
the complicated realities that this intersection entails. It compiles carefully
selected research pieces on the intersection of border and gender to bring
out the gendered intricacies of bordering practices wherein, we argue,
border becomes gendered and gender becomes bordered; hence the inter-
section of border and gender is a two-way process with gender impacting
border and border impacting gender. Going beyond the overly simplistic
portrayals, this book suggests that the research on borders and violence
needs to diversify. The ethnography explores how women engage with
highly gendered terrains during flight and while residing nearby to make
an argument that it is essential that the marking, remarking and demark-
ing of the borders be questioned and integrated into the larger discourse
of women’s rights since border stagnation, evolution as well as involution
impact women in gendered ways. This book encourages methodological
pluralism and engages with an array of issues shaping the gendered engage-
ment with a variety of borders. The issues include forced migration, trans-
gression, trafficking, cross-border linkages and lives within borderlands.
The volume argues that the intersection of border and gender is highly
complex and deserves specific scholarly attention. It draws on the expe-
riences of vulnerable populations in the border regions and documents
the engagement of a section of vulnerable people with these subjugated
regions. We contend that it is essential that the construction and perpetu-
ation of the militarized border system be questioned and integrated into

8
 Introduction

the larger discourse of women’s rights and the interventions to address vio-
lence along the borders. It argues that it is essential to position women
in discourses on border related violence towards ensuring their due place
in bordering practices, policy making and the literature. It will be a cru-
cial addition to the emerging discourse on gender and border with policy
implications. The volume is an attempt to mainstream gendered intersec-
tion with border through unearthing theoretical and practical aspects of
this intersection so as to make a valuable addition to the multidisciplinary
fields. It suggests that the research on borders and conflict needs to diver-
sify the use of gender as an analytic tool to delve deeper into the ways
border and violence shape everyday expressions of gendered identities and
norms – and ways in which these are challenged. We aim not only to enrich
the ongoing debates on gender, violence and border but also to open up
avenues for further research on such under-explored issues.

Gendered Violence is Omnipresent

We argue that gendered violence is omnipresent; it does not matter
whether the vulnerable demographies have moved away from the border
or continue to be in close proximity to it. The chapters in the anthology on
diverse areas related to border, gender and violence, from diverse regions,
corroborate our argument. We might have compromised on the width of
topics selected, but the depth of analysis in the carefully selected case stud-
ies suitably compensate the limitation. The selected studies amply establish
permeability of gendered violence along the borders into the lives of those
women who come in contact with these geographical edges daily, once in
a while or even once. Also, it is not possible to scrutinize all the borders
in a single volume keeping in view the fact that borders are a harsh reality
of human life in modern times. Borders are everywhere and they impact
everyone who comes into their contact, including women, as borderland-
ers, refugees and migrants.
Emanuela C. Del Re in her chapter “Gendering the European Borders:
The Role of Female Migrants and Refugees” delves deep into the issue of
women’s engagement with European borders which are considered por-
ous. While providing recent data that shows a higher percentage of female

9
 Women and Borders

and child refugees over male refugees, Del Re argues that though female
migration is not a new phenomenon, the last few years present new elem-
ents. These include mixed migration flows, involving refugees and eco-
nomic migrants, as well as migrants running away from droughts and other
disasters; migrant and refugee women travel alone with children, travel
when they are pregnant, when they are adolescents, or elderly. Their vul-
nerability is present in all these different stages in various forms. She quotes
an Amnesty International report, which suggests that refugee women from
Syria and Iraq face sexual harassment, violence, assault, discrimination “at
every stage of their journey, including on European soil.” Her documenta-
tion of the narratives through extensive field research amongst Syrian refu-
gees in Iraq, Jordan and Syria, amongst women belonging to minorities in
Syria and Iraq – in particular Yazidi and Christian women – and amongst
migrants from Afghanistan crossing the Mediterranean, suggest that the
movement of people appears gendered. The most traumatic experience
is derived from being abused by those who were expected to be saviors.
She reveals how the centers of identification, in which transient women
are put in Turkey and Greece once captured at the border, are “prisons.”
This critical situation, in which movement of people across the borders
have become a political instrument, has obliged the European Union to
introspect on its core values and functions. She notes that the presence
of vulnerable groups amongst the refugees and migrants has forced the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to recommend to the
member states to take into account the gender-based violence and gender-
related persecution in their asylum systems, beginning with the collection,
analysis and publication of statistics and information on these issues.
Carrying Del Re’s argument further, Leila Hudson’s chapter “The
Refugee’s Passage: Liminality, Gendered Habits and the Emergence of
Difference in Flight” draws from the displacement and refugee crisis due to
the Syrian war. She argues that the crossing of state borders punctuates the
process of flight by introducing new physical, cultural, linguistic, legal and
administrative environments. For Hudson, borders act as membranes sep-
arating social worlds as well as geographic spaces and shaping the evolv-
ing subjectivities that accompany the flight. She argues that the process of
border crossing in the Syrian context has become increasingly fraught and

10
 Introduction

loaded with administrative and political and human formalities, besides

discomfort, disease and life threatening danger. And, international borders
are the places where ordinary women and their families encounter the full
force of states in varied forms and particularities as paperwork, fences and
corruption. Through extensive interviews with a number of Syrian women,
Hudson documents the gendered nuances of the border crossing, which
include but are not limited to, the trauma and bureaucratic minutiae of
family separation and reunification, physical discomfort and the threat of
sexual harassment, the experience of communal living and processing in
transit and camp spaces. From pre-2013 travel to Morsi’s Egypt (“as easily
as going from one Syrian province to another”), to the impenetrable bar-
riers to refuge in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, to the tightening
and closure of the once permeable Jordanian and Lebanese borders, to the
politicization and corruption of the Turkish borders, to the militarization
of the Eastern European borders, to the life-threatening crossing of water
borders, the experience for Syrian women (and their families) at the borders
encountered along the migration is a heightened one of both subjectivity
and space formation.
Women comprise a vulnerable demographic as the existing socio-
cultural and political set up is highly masculinized and patriarchal. The
vulnerability of women is universal, cutting across socially constructed
identities and human-made borders. It is important to note that women
are not part of a homogeneous vulnerable group. There are sub-groups
within this vulnerable group, for whom an engagement with borders is
even more problematic. The vulnerability of expecting mothers at border
crossing pose a crucial challenge not only for law enforcement agencies
at the borders, but also for the expecting mothers who bear difficulty in
crossing the borders, besides taking care of unborn babies. Vanessa Grotti
et al., in “Pregnant Crossings: A Political Economy of Care on Europe’s
External Borders,” argue that the steady increase in the numbers of
migrant women entering the European Union in the past two decades is
documented, particularly in the case of domestic work, healthcare, fam-
ily reunification, and human trafficking. A rapidly emerging phenom-
enon is the growing presence of pregnant women among newcomers
to some of the European Union’s most densely crossed borderlands; in

11
 Women and Borders

particular, along the southern (Spain and Italy) and south-eastern (Greece)
European borders, as well as along European peripheries. Situating their
analysis amidst the tension between care and control in the day-to-day
governance of migration in the broad context of maternity care processes
in EU borderlands, the authors offer a comparative perspective on preg-
nant crossings in these European borderlands to make an argument that
migrant maternity represents a significant challenge to frontline services.
They provide an insight into these women’s encounters with diverse actors
involved in maternity care – encounters mediated across social, cultural,
gender, and other hierarchies. They argue that because they are pregnant or
have recently given birth, these women are classified as vulnerable, and are
therefore eligible for various degrees of “free” care and emergency services,
but undocumented pregnant migrants embody the ambivalence of being at
once subject to legal prosecution and beneficiaries of humanitarian protec-
tion under exceptional legal clauses.
The ordeals related to crossing alien borders do not end once the vul-
nerable demographies negotiate their survival. As illegal migrants and as
refugees, the women border-crossers continue to confront several kinds of
violence in their new places. For these women, violence or fear of violence,
in multiple forms ranging from physical to sexual, does not stop at the
border. The succeeding chapters details two different kinds of violence suf-
fered by women border crossers as refugees and illegal migrants- domes-
tic violence and sexual violence. Melinda Wells, Suhail Abualsameed, and
Suse Prosser, in their chapter “Acknowledging and Addressing the Risks of
Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees Across Borders: Escalation of
Domestic Violence in Refugee Populations,” argue that the refugee problem
in Jordan is acute and the position of women is deplorable. Jordan is home to
well over 600,000 refugees and much attention has been devoted to Za’atari
Refugee Camp and to the other smaller refugee camps though 80 percent of
the refugees in Jordan live in urban areas, not camps but continue to struggle
with trauma-related health issues, family separation, poverty, shifting gen-
der roles, and other stressors related to their status as refugees. The authors
focus on Hashemi Shamali, a low-income community in Amman that has
long been identified as a “poverty pocket” by the Jordanian authorities, and
is currently hosting a disproportionate number of refugees from Syria and

12
 Introduction

Iraq, and argue that in this community, refugee women have experienced
domestic violence. There is an increase in violence within homes with both
men and women describing increasing pressure in the form of financial
pressure, conflict-related trauma, frequent bad news from home, and the
ongoing stress of life as a refugee. The authors document the narratives of
women claiming that men in the community are not getting the necessary
support to deal with prior trauma and stress, and attribute this to a pattern
of increased violence in the home. The severity of domestic violence often
increases in the aftermath of humanitarian crises and this observation has
been borne out by assessments conducted in Jordan. While arguing that
there is a need to engage men in finding healthy strategies for coping with
stress, and shifting norms in the community around gender-based violence,
they examine the current scenario and the steps being taken to address the
predictable and preventable risks of interpersonal, gender-based and self-
directed violence. The attempts to contain domestic violence in the demog-
raphy under scrutiny in this chapter may be instructive for other cases but
the fact remains that violence continues to haunt women in one or an other
way when they engage with border.
While escaping war, poverty and hunger by crossing borders, the transi-
ent women may end up trapped in an endless cycle of violence, which is not
private, as is domestic violence, but also public, such as selling sex. Carolina
Montenegro’s chapter, “Trapped in a Cycle of Abuse and Violence: A Case
Study of Nigerian Women in Italy,” offers a closer look at the dangers of
flight, arrival, as well as the residence of women from a conflict-ridden
African country in a European country. She examines the case of Favour,
a 9-month-old girl from Nigeria rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by the
Italian coast guard when the boat she had boarded capsized and killed
dozens of people including her pregnant mother, and argues that though
the tragedy of the unaccompanied child moved the authorities and they
quickly initiated procedures to find her a legal guardian, Favour is not the
first one to cross the sea borders. What is rare is the fortunate outcome des-
pite the Mediterranean Sea becoming an increasingly dangerous and gen-
dered “border.” The transient women represent one of the biggest groups
subject to smuggling, human trafficking, prostitution, abuse and violence,
even while also confronting challenges such as lack of medical care, housing

13
 Women and Borders

and employment. The threats of abuse and exploitation increase manifold as

more and more unaccompanied girls cross the Mediterranean from North
Africa with most of them relying on human smugglers, getting a “free ride”
on the boat in exchange for work or sexual exploitation. Citing the recent
UNICEF report titled “Danger Every Step of the Way,” published in June
2016, she argues that this complex situation makes one think about the fate
of the 9-month baby from Nigeria: what would have happened to Favour if
she was a teenager arriving alone in Italy or if she was a pregnant woman
or a woman with children? What kinds of risks would she have faced after
crossing the Mediterranean in search of a new life?
Nigerian women are not alone in being trapped in an unending saga
of sexual violence in Italy. Thousands of women are trafficked each year
through all kinds of borders, which may not necessarily be contested or vio-
lent, and, the majority of these women are forced to join the much-loathed
but still flourishing industry of commercial sex. Seema Shekhawat, in her
chapter “Unhindered Flow of Gendered Suffering through the India-Nepal
Open Border: Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation,” details the
trafficking, mostly realized through deceit and coercion, along the open
India-Nepal border. Most of these trafficked women engage in commer-
cial sex. She tracks the trafficking of women and elaborates how India has
emerged as both a destination as well as a transit for the trafficked women
for commercial sexual exploitation. The recent case of a foreign diplomat in
India sexually abusing his domestic help of Nepalese origin, brought into
focus a crucial but often less-focused issue of women trafficking through
international borders. She argues this open border can be characterized
as a conduit for dehumanizing women, keeping in view the unrestrained
flow of the trafficking and the consequent suffering and stigma the women
undergo. Trafficking through the open border for forcing vulnerable women
to engage in commercial sex is flourishing as a low-risk and high-profit
business. The vulnerable women are mostly sold to brokers in exchange for
a meager sum, who in turn sell them to Indian brothels at exorbitant rates.
Shekhawat argues that the consequences for these trafficked women are
life-long and notably, many of these women blame the open border for their
suffering. Through documenting narratives of the Nepalese women cross-
ing an open border to become sex workers, Shekhawat aims to broaden the

14
 Introduction

prevailing discourse on border and violence contending that amidst the

hype of a borderless world, it is crucial to understand that an open bor-
der can be an equal tormentor and the intersection of gender with border
and violence in the case of India-Nepal is instructive for understanding the
complex nature of borders in this part of the world.
Unlike the India-Nepal border, crossing is not easy globally. In the search
of greener pastures men and women continue to dare to cross over to the
regions of their dream. This daring endeavor entails all kinds of violence, and
particularly for women, sexual encounters. The reality of migrant (illegal)
women is often overlooked in studies on the impact of migration on demog-
raphies. For many studies, sexual violence is often the only impact; creating
the image of migrant women as victims of sexual violence, objectified by
other migrants or by criminal organizations. Elisabeth Vallet and Andreanne
Bissonnette in their chapter, “Migration, Border Crossing and Women:
Female Migrant Sexualities Between Objectification and Empowerment,”
drawing on interviews with migrant women along the Mexican-American
border, present a different picture of sexuality and migration. While it is
true that women are particularly affected by violent encounters that lead
to sexual abuses of varied nature, there are instances when women present
the articulation of their sexuality in the context of migration as positive.
Some of the interviewed women prefer to reclaim their sexuality in order
to articulate it within a framework that would benefit them in achieving
their goal of migration and crossing the border. The authors focus on the
relationship of migrant women to their own sexuality as well as its instru-
mentalization at the border. They document the way women are regaining
control of their sexuality, instrumental along the migration route but also
at the border to facilitate their migration and/or to manage the risk of both
border crossing and illegality so as to redefine instrumentalization of their
sexuality/gender to their benefit. For these women, sexuality becomes an
instrument to gain protection from risks inherent to migration. Citing the
instances of how some women chose to be intimate with one male migrant
for the journey, which secured them and diminished the possibility of rape,
the authors contend that through such “simple” acts, women regain power
over their sexuality; using it as an asset to avoid risk. The question, however,
would remain: are these actually “simple” acts?

15
 Women and Borders

Precarity not only defines the lives of women who engage with borders
as transient communities, but also of those who live along the geograph-
ical edges of states, as life along the borders too present myriad challenges.
The last three chapters in this compilation focus on this argument. Olga
Davydova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen in their chapter, “Gendered Everyday
Bordering: An Ethnographic Case Study on the Border Between Finland
and Russia,” critique the argument that the world is getting smaller and bor-
ders are becoming more transparent and unrecognizable. They argue that
this notion of a borderless world is not applicable to the case of the Niirala–
Värtsilä border area located on the border between Finland and Russia.
Through concentrating on the analysis of bordering processes in the area
of North Karelia (in Finland) and the Republic of Karelia (in Russia) in the
era of the shift from debordering to rebordering, the authors examine how
gender is present and constructed in these processes. They argue that during
the Soviet era, the border under scrutiny acted as the dividing line between
states and their blocs. Now it is considered to be “the border between con-
tinents,” i.e., the European Union and the non-European Union. During
the debordering era and relative openness of the border, the areas on the
both sides of the border have become transnational: the interpenetration of
people, transnational families, ideas, material goods, cultural activities, and
administrative contacts have been vivid. The majority of Russian migrants
and administrative in the region of North Karelia on the Finnish side are
women who migrated to Finland through marriage with Finnish men from
the nearby Russian areas. The recent developments between the European
Union and Russia, namely sanctions and counter-sanctions that followed
the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, and decrease in the tourism from Russia to
Finland, the tightening of the border-crossing regime are tangible in this
border area. Moreover so, it can be said, that after the period of opening up
the Iron Curtain in the local area of Niirala-Värtsilä, the border has become
more controlled. The case study comprises several data-sets, ethnographic
interviews, ethnographical observations of the border crossings in Niirala-
Värtsliä checkpoint and ethnographical observations of national celebra-
tions in Joensuu (Finland) and Sortavala and Petrozavodsk (Russia) to make
an argument that the period of debordering of 1990–2000s has changed into
the new rebordering in the mid-2010s with specific implications for women.

16
 Introduction

Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra in his chapter “Gendered

Geographical Edges: Border, Contestation and Women in Kashmir”
details how the borderland in Kashmir is often characterized by a hos-
tile situation due to wars, intermittent cross-border firing and shelling,
mining, militarization and rigid controls, bringing in its trail suffer-
ing for the border residents. The partial opening of the border in 2005
opened vistas for cross-border cooperation with implications for nearby
residents including temporary unification of divided families scattered
along the contested border. Both the closed and now partially opened
borders have impacted women, one of the most marginalized and vul-
nerable groups residing along the tense border, in specific ways, argues
Mahapatra. He documents the gendered narratives of life along a con-
tested border, to make the argument that there are gendered nuances
which need to be documented. By making use of qualitative research
methods, including interviews and personal observation, he interro-
gates the dominant state-centric notion on the conflict, border and gen-
der in Kashmir by factoring the gendered nuances scattered across this
contested landscape in South Asia to answer the question: what are the
gendered dynamics of life along the India-Pakistan border in Kashmir?
He argues that women should acquire a central place in this discourse
on border and borderland as they are not only the victims of their prox-
imity to the geographical edges but suffer more acutely due to their very
location in a society in which everything, including their existence, is
viewed through the prism of patriarchy.
The highly militarized landscape in border areas shapes mobility for
border women and men in different ways and presents challenges for
everyday life as checkpoints are numerous and pedestrians, cyclists, and
vehicles are subject to constant inspection by armed forces personnel.
Duncan McDuie-Ra in his chapter, “Kakching Gardens: Experiments in
Normalcy in Manipur,” presents a vivid picture of such a militarized land-
scape in another Indian borderland. Kakching is close to India’s border
with Myanmar and, hence, is vulnerable and valuable to state, non-state,
and quasi-state actors operating in this region. In this landscape, even
the ATMs are inside barracks forcing customers to enter the masculine
and militarized spaces (within which women often experience gendered

17
 Women and Borders

violence) just to access cash. And on the hilltops surrounding this nar-
row stretch are more barracks and bases for various paramilitary forces
monitoring all movement in and out of the settlements with one excep-
tion, Uyok Ching, where Kakching Gardens is situated, a relatively recent
development funded by a local public-private partnership. It is a rare
space in the militarized landscape providing women an opportunity to
dress up, wear make-up, and occupy public space without being under
the constant gaze of the military, paramilitary and state police. Through
using spatial ethnography, the author explores alternative ways of think-
ing about gender, conflict and borderlands to make an argument that
everyday acts that challenge the militarization of life in the borderland
come in many forms – in the case of Kakching Gardens these come in the
seemingly mundane act of occupying public space away from the gaze of
the armed forces to express femininity, masculinity, and hetero-normative
procreation. Despite the seductive imaginary of connectivity, the border-
land still remains a militarized frontier and spaces like Kakching Gardens
are rare – and important – exceptions. Certainly, the episodes of women
negotiating feminity amidst a militarized landscape or negotiating safety
of border crossing through offering sex are rare and exceptions. What is
common and all pervasive is, as the compilation suggests, exploitation,
suffering and apathy.

Notes
1. A. I. Asiwaju, Artificial Boundaries, Lagos: Lagos University Press, 1984.
2. Nurit Kilot and David Newman, eds, Geopolitics at the End of the Twentieth
Century: The Changing World Political Map, London: Frank Cass, 2000, p. 9.
3. T. Wilson and H. Donnan, eds, Border Identities: Nation and State at International
Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 10.
4. Willem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South
Asia, London: Anthem Press, 2005, p. 3.
5. B. H. Johnson and A. R. Graybill, eds, Bridging National Borders in North America:
Transnational and Comparative Histories, Durham: Duke University Press,
2010, p. 2.
6. J. Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International
Relations Theory,” Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1994,
pp. 53–80.

18
 Introduction

7. D. Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to

the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of
International Politics, Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 1979.
8. Kenneth Waltz, “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security,
Vol. 25, No. 1, 2000, pp. 5–41.
9. See, for instance, P. Jukarainan, “Review Essay: Border Research in Practice and
Theory,” Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2006, pp. 470–3; J. Sidaway,
“The Return and Eclipse of Border Studies? Charting Agendas,” Geopolitics,
Vol. 16, No. 4, 2011, pp. 969–76; C. Johnson, et al., “Rethinking ‘the border’ in
Border Studies,” Political Geography, No. 30, 2011, pp. 61–9; N. Parker, et al.,
“Line in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics,
14, 2009, pp. 582–7.
10. See, for instance, K. Ohmae, The Borderless World. New York: Harper Collins,
1990; T. Wilson and H. Donnan, eds, Border Identities: Nation and State at
International Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998;
T. Wilson and H. Donnan, eds, A Companion to Border Studies, Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; D. Newman, “Borders and Bordering: Towards an
Interdisciplinary Dialogue,” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2,
2006, pp. 171–86; H. Eskelinen, I. Liikanene and J. Oksa, eds, Curtains of Iron
and Gold: Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction. Aldershot: Ashgate,
1999; D. Newman and A. Paasi, “Fences and Neighbours in the Postmodern
World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography,” Progress in Human
Geography, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1998, pp. 186–206; A. Buchanan and M. Moore,
States, Nations and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003; M. Albert, “On Boundaries, Territory and
Postmodernity: An International Relations Perspective,” Geopolitics, Vol. 3,
No. 1, 1998, pp. 53–68; J. R. V. Prescott, Political Frontiers and Boundaries,
London: Unwin Hyman, 1987; J. Anderson and L. O’Dowd, “Borders, Border
Regions and Territoriality: Contradictory Meanings, Changing Significance,”
Regional Studies, Vol. 33, No. 7, 1999, pp. 593–604; A. Paasi, “Bounded Spaces
in ‘borderless worlds’: Border Studies, Power and the Anatomy of Territory,”
Journal of Power, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2009, pp. 213–34.
11. See, for instance, H. Donnan and T. Wilson, eds, Borderlands: Ethnographic
Approaches to Security, Power, and Identity, Lanham: University Press of
America, 2010; W. Zartman, ed., Understanding Life in Borderlands: Boundaries
in Depth and Motion, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010; J. Migdal,
ed., Boundaries and Belonging, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004; V. Paviakovich-Kochi, B. Morehouse and D. Wasti-Walter, eds,
Challenged Borderlands: Transcending Political and Cultural Boundaries,
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004; Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen,
Borderlines and Borderlands: Political Oddities at the Edge of the Nation-State,

19
 Women and Borders

Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2010; P. Kumar-Rajaram

and C. Grundy-Warr, eds, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at
Territory’s Edge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
12. Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm, eds, Refugee and Forced Displacement:
International Security, Human Vulnerability and the State, Tokyo: United
Nations University Press, 2003, p. 8.
13. Oscar J. Martinez, Border People: Life and Society in the US–Mexico Borderlands.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
14. R. Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States,
India and Israel, New York: Zed Books, 2012.
15. J. Gottmann, “Spatial Partitioning and the Politician’s Wisdom,” International
Political Science Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1980, p. 433.
16. J. Agnew, Borders on the Mind: Re-framing Border Thinking, Ethics and Global
Politics, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2008, p. 185.
17. D. Newman, “Boundary Geopolitics: Towards a Theory of Territorial Lines?,”
in E. Berg and H. van Houtum, eds, Routing Borders Between Territories,
Discourses and Practices, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, p. 277.
18. W. Van Schendel and I. Abraham, eds, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States,
Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2005; E. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling
and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005; E. Bort, “Illegal Migration and Cross-Border Crime:
Challenges at the Eastern Frontier of the European Union,” in J. Zielonka, ed.,
Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European
Union, London: Routledge, 2002; L. Holmes, “Crime, Corruption and Politics:
International and Transnational Factors,” in J. Zielonka and A. Pravda, eds,
Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe: International and Transnational
Factors, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; P. Andreas, U.S.–Mexico: Open
Markets, Closed Border, Foreign Affairs, No. 103, 1996, pp. 51–69; J. Nevins,
Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the Illegal alien and the Remaking of the US–
Mexico Boundary, New York and London: Routledge, 2001; D. Bigo, “Frontiers
and Security in the European Union: The Illusion of Migration Control,” in M.
Anderson and E. Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe, London: Cassell, 1998.
19. See, for instance, M.B. Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and
the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,” Political Geography, No. 25, 2006,
pp. 151–80.
20. Martinez, 1994, p. 3.

20
 1
Gendering the European Borders: The Role
of Female Migrants and Refugees

Emanuela C. Del Re

When you are a refugee, you wonder why God the Almighty
decided that I should come to life as a woman. Am I strong
enough to please Him, to carry this burden on my shoulders?
I do not deserve His trust in me… I am just a human being, I
am worth nothing, I am only a mother, a wife…only! I knew
I was losing everything when I left my tent in the refugee
camp. Then I knew I was losing more at every border I was
crossing…. I was anxious to know what was there for me at
the end of this torture, my trip…at one point you only want
to know what is there behind that border. You cross it and
you find the same as before: a road, a tree, the same clouds in
the sky…new fears, new challenges, also when you arrive in
a rich town like this [Frankfurt-am-Mein] and you think you
are safe. But you are still nobody… The border is inside me,
I cross it all the time, I go forward and backward… forward
and backward…Can you tell me where I am now? [laughs]
Maybe I am in my town in Syria now…[covers her face with
both hands].1

21
 Women and Borders

Male and Female Borders

In 2016, women and children outnumbered men, constituting around
60 percent of the refugees and migrants crossing the borders to reach the
European Union (EU).2 According to the latest UNHCR statistics, there
were 2.856 persons dead or missing in the Mediterranean in the first half
of 2016,3 of which a third were women and children.4
Gender must be considered a fundamental element in the analysis of
the fluxes because of the role it plays in the migration cycle.5 Nevertheless,
sex-disaggregated data has begun to be gathered systematically only since
the 1980s. It has become a common practice in most countries, although
remaining short of covering all the related sub-areas (age, economic con-
ditions and other). Macioti and Coppola6 point out that the social inter-
pretation of migration is fundamental because gender norms define roles
and behaviors. Gender norms empower or reduce risks and opportunities.
The gender perspective in migration analysis allows the understanding of
gender relations in decision making, access to resources, power relations,
equality in economic, social and legal structures. Knowledge of these ele-
ments facilitate the making of adequate policies to address all the issues
related to gender and migration in all the phases of the process, and par-
ticularly border-crossing.
Here I focus on female migrants crossing borders, pointing out ele-
ments of vulnerability. However, I want to make clear that the concept of
“gendered borders” must necessarily be intended as inclusive and com-
prehensive. “Gender” must contemplate both women and men, who are
equally vulnerable although in different ways. “Young single man,” for
instance, constitutes a category of its own that deserves attention by schol-
ars and decision makers, for the abuses these men are subject to during
migration and for the risk of their radicalization or criminalization, as a
consequence of being marginalized after reaching the country of destina-
tion. Especially in Muslim societies, the community, due to what I call
the “testosterone factor,” controls young single men. At the same time,
they are offered a “compensation” in the form of privileged social status
and having access to a number of aggregative social activities to lessen
the tensions that this exclusion creates at individual and community level.

22
 Gendering the European Borders

In migration processes this social construct collapses, with dangerous

consequences.
The perception of “young single men” in EU societies can acquire simi-
lar features to that of Muslim communities. In the EU, especially after sev-
eral sexual assaults in Cologne and other towns in Germany during 2015
New Year’s Eve, warnings have been raised against single men. The tone
of the reactions can be summarized by a headline in the British tabloid
newspaper the Daily Mail: “Why Britain should be worried by this flood
of young male migrants.”7 The motivations at the basis of this attitude are
mainly related to the idea that the influx of young, male migrants can cre-
ate an imbalance in Europe with security risks; the fact that the major-
ity of immigrants are unmarried young men and the fact that imbalanced
societies are prone to aggression. Hudson, who has studied similar cases in
Asia,8 affirms this contention. When life is abruptly interrupted by migra-
tion – with young men finding it difficult to emancipate themselves and
create their own family in a hosting society, individuals may become sus-
ceptible to mental diseases, with many likely to enter a dangerous tunnel
of extremist behaviors.
There are no significant efforts to deconstruct these elements and
ensure a better understanding of the phenomenon of young men migra-
tion. Even worse, this critical approach is reflected in the policies within
the EU, by which single men are isolated – for example, in specific “sin-
gle men” camps – rather than integrated through programs that can help
them restart their life and avoid radicalization and criminalization. The
case of Azad, a young Syrian refugee who I met in Domiz Camp in Iraqi-
Kurdistan is emblematic.9 His father had managed to migrate to Austria
just before the beginning of the great fluxes in early 2014. He succeeded in
making his wife and young children apply for family reunification process.
Azad was left out of this process because he was 18. He then decided to
travel to Austria in a clandestine manner and had to face innumerable dis-
tressing experiences – hiding in a truck to reach Greece, walking through
the Balkans and then living in an identification camp in Hungary. From the
camp, he escaped and reached Austria. He then applied for refugee status.
While his younger brothers have been enrolled in Austrian schools and
have received identity documents, Azad’s case is pending. He spends his

23
 Women and Borders

days taking selfies and hanging around with friends, who are all depressed,
being in a similar uncertain situation. Azad was a talented high school stu-
dent in Syria, aspiring to become a journalist. There are several others like
him. His cousin Muhammad, 25, who arrived in Austria alone, has been
residing in a camp for single men in the forests near Salzburg. He is also
severely depressed.
Schrover, Lenz, Morokvasic and others10 have suggested a comparative
approach to the issue of gender and migration, comparing men and women
regarding the legislation related to asylum and protection. Nowadays this
comparison is frequent, although the habit persists of segregating the issue
of gender from the issue of migration. I suggest that the approach to migra-
tion should include gender specificities since a gender-neglecting approach
results in inappropriate and problematic policies. As Taiwo, 23, a Nigerian
migrant said, “gender issues of illegal migrant women cannot be solved by
merely creating separate toilets in the identification camps.”11
The phenomenon is not new, as Sassen has demonstrated.12 But, the
recent fluxes of migration to the EU are characterized by two new elem-
ents: (i) migration flows are mixed, involving refugees, economic migrants,
and climate migrants (forced by droughts and other natural calamities);
(ii) migrant and refugee women travel alone with children, travel when
they are pregnant, when they are adolescents, or elderly. This impacts the
typology of vulnerability of women, which emerges in different stages of
their journey and in different forms. Women suffer violence in the country
of origin. They suffer violence during the migration journey. They suffer
from a different kind of vulnerability in the country of destination (for
instance, unable to understand social practices and regulations, prevented
from learning the local language by their men and abused).
The analysis of gendered borders must start from the assumption that
migration is a life-long process. The status of migrant/refugee is not only
an administrative condition but is also a psychological/mental status. This
is a reality even when the migration has been successful in terms of settle-
ment, not necessarily – or rarely – corresponding to an inclusive concept
of citizenship. In this sense, border crossing is a comprehensive experi-
ence that implies a repetitive scheme of ‘out-through-in’ always connoted
by different variables that are not constant and often unexpected. These

24
 Gendering the European Borders

include many challenges. The “out” phase implies risks related to the pay-
ment of passeurs and investment of all the savings, the dangerous journey,
the separation, the unknown and many others. The “through” phase includes
difficulties related to the new language, the knowhow, living conditions,
security, the responsibilities towards the family and the need to protect and
be protected, and many others. The “in” phase is also problematic because
it implies a high degree of vulnerability in being in an unknown place, not
knowing the language, the norms, risk of being arrested and many others.
This renders the experience of migration a traumatic exercise; a constant re-
balancing of the constitutive elements of the identity of the individual and
his/her group. This is also the reason why privileged migrations are through
the so-called “humanitarian corridors,” which provide a safe and tranquil
transfer to a hosting country. In my opinion, if these corridors are “humani-
tarian,” they should be open to all. The vast masses of refugees/migrants
are considered a “group of people” that can be moved from one place to the
other according to decisions taken at EU government-level, for instance the
plan suggested by the well-known ESI to Merkel and Turkey.13
An example of the decision making process of families who choose to
migrate is the story of Bahar, 29, a Yazidi woman living in Khanke IDP
camp (Iraqi-Kurdistan), whom I interviewed in June 2016:

We had decided to divide the family into two groups. My brother,

28, and my eldest son, 11, traveled together. My husband and I,
with our other three children, 9, 7 and 3, traveled together. I did
not want to cry to help my children remain calm, but when I saw
my eldest son go away, I felt my heart was torn off. We lost contact
with my brother and my son immediately. We managed to leave
Rojava [a region of Syria] and were taken to Turkey by bus. Then
one night we were put on a boat. The Turkish police intercepted the
boat. Thank God, the police caught us; the boat was going to sink
for sure…. We were put in a camp in Turkey for days. We had no
information about our relatives and especially my son because we
had lost everything, also the mobiles. One day I met an acquaint-
ance and called my brother from his phone. He told us that he and
my son were safe. After days of walking and sleeping in the woods,
they had managed to arrive in Germany. We managed to return
here, amongst our Yazidi people, but we are restless.14

25
 Women and Borders

It is difficult for a female migrant to capitalize on the acquired know-

how when traveling to the EU, for impediments deriving from their gen-
der. Women refugees, for instance, lament the difficulty in finding privacy
when they face the different phases of migration, which, in some cases,
imply long permanence in transit countries. Most women I interviewed in
Austria, in July 2016, informed that they felt humiliated and depressed.15
These women were prepared to face difficult conditions during the jour-
neys as illegal migrants. For them, however, the most challenging aspect
was the lack of privacy and personal hygiene. African women crossing the
Mediterranean sea, often hold their urine and do not drink water for hours.
Joyce, a young girl from Ghana, reported that she would rather die than use
a plastic bottle to urinate while traveling on a crowded boat.16

Vulnerable Groups Crossing

Every time women face a new stage in their migration process, they must
redefine the reference points and struggle to find the best conditions. This
implies a high level of distress, waste of energy and precarious solutions
to structural individual problems. In many cases, female migrants are
perceived within the EU as passive; their passivity often attributed to the
constraints imposed by their culture or religion. Their alleged passivity is
often, in fact, a strategy. Once these women obtain an acceptable condi-
tion in one of the phases of migration, they find it scary to change, fearing
the unknown. The restriction on the freedom to choose and dependency
on others’ decisions – in the whole process: when they depart, when they
cross and when they settle – have a devastating effect on female migrants/
refugees. In this sense, diasporas are fundamental because they can con-
tribute to the adjustment of female migrants to the new condition. This
is why it is crucial that the dialogue between local administrations in the
EU and the diaspora communities should be improved and their potential
facilitated, favored, and recognized at higher political level.17 As Collier
and Hoeffler18 point out, diasporas can support migrants economically,
act as cultural mediators for the newcomers and the hosting society, pro-
vide information and assistance on practical issues such as education and
health.

26
 Gendering the European Borders

All the phases of migration remain a matter of constant re-balancing

for women. Crossing the borders does not imply that women are safe.
When women cross the borders, their vulnerability emerges more, because
they lose their points of orientation, they lack knowhow, they can become
the object of blackmailing to have access to resources (even when they are
entitled), they are sexually harassed and abused. Amnesty International
reports that refugee women from Syria and Iraq face sexual harassment,
violence, assault, discrimination “at every stage of their journey, includ-
ing on European soil.”19 My research in Syrian refugee camps in Iraq and
Jordan, in transit areas in Turkey and in destination countries substanti-
ate this contention. In refugee camps in Iraq and Jordan, female refugees
report20 that local administrators and personnel frequently harass them
for various reasons: the Syrians are more liberal (wearing western clothes
and mingling with men), appearing as accessible; in some camps the sup-
ply of food and goods depends upon external providers and women may
be blackmailed to fulfil their needs; the management responsibility may
be used by some members of the camp administration personnel as a pos-
ition of power to exploit women. Crossing the borders, the most traumatic
experience derives from being abused by those who were expected to be
the saviors. The reasons for the abuse are multiple: lack of training and
awareness of humanitarian organization personnel or local administra-
tions of EU border countries on gender-based issues in migrations; lack
of facilities to protect vulnerable groups; lack of research and attention to
these issues; scarce control on guards in refugee reception/transit cent-
ers; lack of access to justice for victims of gendered crimes and lack of
counselling.
Many female respondents describe the centers of identification, in
which they have been kept in Turkey and Greece once captured at the bor-
der, as “prisons.”21 The issue of “dignity” emerges as the most fundamen-
tal in the experience of crossing the border. The need to be recognized
as “women” and the denial of such a need is strongly felt as humiliating.
Pietro Bartolo, a doctor who has been examining migrants arriving to
the island of Lampedusa (Italy) for the last 25 years, contend that women
departing from Libya, before boarding boats to cross the Mediterranean,
are often injected with anti-ovulation medicine to avoid pregnancy during

27
 Women and Borders

the journey.22 This practice is not to protect women as human beings, but
to protect them as consumption goods.
My field studies related to Syrian refugees in Iraq, Jordan and Syria,
women belonging to minorities in Syria and Iraq, in particular, Yazidi
and Christian women,23 and migrants from Afghanistan crossing the
Mediterranean, suggests that the gender dimension of the movement of
people is crucial. The experiences of men and women present differences
related to gender, typology, and degree of vulnerability. Vulnerability itself
acts as a criminogenic factor, in a precipitation sense, the vulnerable/vic-
tim, him/herself, creates the conditions to be criminally abused, or that the
vulnerability pushes the migrant/refugee to violate norms to reduce it; or
that the vulnerability creates the mental conditions – especially given the
impact of the traumas experienced in the phases of migration – for the
migrant/refugee to try anything to emerge from his/her economic, social,
emotional stalemate. The major consequence is that vulnerability suffo-
cates the entrepreneurial skills of migrants, their imaginations, their talent
and their innovations. This is a serious loss for the countries of destination,
where they are treated mostly as a group and not as individuals. The con-
cept of “innovators” theorized by Merton24 is notable. For him, innovators
in society create their own ways to obtain what they desire. Those who
relocate to another country are innovators, because they take the risks.
Some families of refugees do not wish to leave and remain in the camps
in Iraq or Jordan. The reason being they do not want to raise their chil-
dren according to the values and norms they do not share. Notably, most
of the time it is men who do not wish to be confronted with new lifestyles.
Generally, women are ready to take risks for the sake of a better future for
their family and children.

Concrete Border
Female migration is motivated by active and passive/coerced motivations.
Actively, women migrate under family reunion schemes, to study, work,
and follow their aspirations. Passively/coercively, women are object of traf-
ficking for the sex industry, within arranged marriages, to be exploited
as bonded workers or even slaves (African or Asian girls in rich Arab

28
 Gendering the European Borders

countries, an increasing phenomenon).25 The typology is articulated and

the intervening variables are complex.
The experience of crossing a geographical border is a traumatic as well
as a ‘totalizing’ event that affects all aspects of the life of a woman, affecting
her identity and all her roles as an individual and as a group member (fam-
ily, ethnic-religious-geographical community). The metaphor of “crossing
the border” is appropriate when defining the individual journey of women
who have to change their everyday life and face unpredictably difficult liv-
ing conditions, in which the abilities and responsibilities related to their
social role are diminished or humiliated. Femininity, motherhood, sister-
hood, being members of a community, everyday family chores, lifestyle
undergo a huge process of redefinition during the process of relocation.
Despite their vulnerability, women become entrepreneurs when they
decide to cross the borders alone or with their children. They have to organ-
ize their journey, make agreements with the passeurs, develop skills and
know how regarding departure points and arrivals, retain contact with rela-
tives in Europe, etc. These elements – risk and opportunity – are parallel in
the migratory experience. The border-crossing challenges women. Women
manifest a clear sense of what the border determines at a symbolic – yet
dramatically concrete – level. “Once I crossed the border and was travel-
ing in a van to reach Turkey, and onwards, I knew I could not look back.
I even started using a different name. Helen, yes, my name is Helen now,”
told Deema, a Kurdish young woman living near Aleppo with family.26
She sold all her belongings in Syria to facilitate migration to Europe.
Women’s imagination is fundamental in the decision making process, a
“dreaming” exercise, as defined in an interesting paper by Teo27 that chal-
lenges the typical economist view that the decision to migrate is based on
the will to improve human capital. In fact, as I have mentioned in a study
in Euro-Mediterranean migrations,28 perceptions fed and often distorted
by mass and social media are a strong incentive in migration. Borders with
the EU are gendered because women want to experience the European life-
style, especially regarding freedom of expression:29 “can you really decide
what to do all by yourself? How did European women succeed in this?” is a
frequent question women ask me. Men often comment that it is nice to live
in Europe and enjoy freedom, but freedom must be limited: “I was living

29
 Women and Borders

in Amsterdam for three years. I decided to return to Lebanon because

there is too much freedom there, it makes me dizzy,” told Awad, a 29-year-
old Palestinian man.30
The values of universal and individual rights are related to migration.
People who do not fit the prevalent gender model, such as homosexuals,
and also men and women who do not feel comfortable with the interpret-
ation of masculinity and femininity in their country of origin, or with the
roles imposed according to age, social status, education, may decide to
migrate. Europe, in the imagination of these people, becomes a “home”
rather than just a place. The EU is trying to approach migrations at a quali-
tative level. An example of this is the 2010 project “EU-magine: Imagining
Europe from the outside.”31 Here the migrants/refugees were asked about
their perceptions of democracy and human rights within Europe and their
origin countries. The subjects were also questioned about the relationship
between their perceptions and aspirations and their decision to emigrate.
Two types of perceptions of Europe were studied in the project: “migratory
imaginations” and “geographical imaginations.” The first concept refers
to what Mai called a ‘migratory project,’ a perception of migration as a
life-project.32 The decision process for a migrant is related to a multitude
of available information sources. These viewpoints are formed in the so-
called ‘emigration environment’ and include, for example, ideas about the
lives of people in Europe. “Geographical imaginations,” according to Said33
and Gregory,34 refers to the subjective conception of spaces and people liv-
ing within. EU-magine is an interesting project that shows how strong is
the responsibility of the EU in being imagined as the ‘promised land’, and
the EU should design appropriate imaginative responses to these dreams,
especially that of women.
Despite awareness regarding the risks and the horrifying stories of the
deaths in the Mediterranean, many women believe their story is unique,
and that unless they experience the journey themselves, they will not know
what their destiny entails. Yet the border is not a definite concept. The bor-
der remains in the life of refugees and migrants as an oppressive instru-
ment. For them, it is a “living creature:” It may be open or closed, it may
be controlled by friendly or enemy forces, it may be easy to cross or very
difficult, it may require a lot of money to bribe the guards and it is certainly

30
 Gendering the European Borders

a risk for women who can be abused. A most effective representation of

this kind of imagination is the film by Fiamma Montezemolo entitled
Traces35 that shows the border life between the United States and Mexico.
Montezemolo talks to the “wall” imagining that it has a virile nature, a
gender. And, this is not localized. “What do you want? Do you want to eat
me?” said Leila, a Palestinian woman from Bethlehem, looking at the wall
that surrounds the town, interrupting her conversation with me, in 2015.36
The border is omnipresent in everyday conversations. A border’s func-
tionality lies in the construction of the new social space and the shaping of
categories and roles – gender, patriarchy, modernity, tradition and globali-
zation. Refugee women redefine the border in a “bi-directional process of
gendering.” They take possession of the border as a concrete life boundary.
At the same time, they undergo a process of emancipation through expe-
riencing abnormalities that make them strong and eligible for a stronger
position in life.

European Union, Gendered Borders

The European Union is facing a strong re-definition of the concept of bor-
ders. In this context, refugee and migrant women play an important role,
especially because their presence contest the politically driven image of
migrants as single, male, unskilled and dangerous. The public opinion only
occasionally encompass a sense of compassion for the women and chil-
dren, shown by the media, in unbearable conditions. However, the pres-
ence of vulnerable groups amongst refugees and migrants has forced the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to recommend to the
member states to take into account the gender-based violence and gender-
related persecution in their asylum systems, beginning with the collec-
tion, analysis and publication of statistics and information on the issue.
The Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe that came into force in
2014,37 “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women
and domestic violence,” provides for the protection of refugee women
against violence. It also requires that the parties to the Convention elabor-
ate the legislative framework to recognize gender-based violence as a form
of persecution in line with the UN Refugee Convention. The interesting

31
 Women and Borders

element of the Convention is that it focuses in particular on the recep-

tion procedures and support for asylum seekers. While many countries
have signed, ratified and enforced the Convention, some others, including
countries that are currently on the frontline of the recent flows of migrants
and refugees, such as Hungary, have signed but not ratified the convention.
This Convention is relevant for the analysis I propose on the process of
gendering the European Union borders by female refugees and migrants.
There is a need to raise critical issues such as the concept of borders and
boundaries, as constructed lines of differences. In this critical moment in
which movement of people across borders for different motivations have
become a political instrument and have obliged the European Union to
undertake an introspection on its core values and functions, female refu-
gees and migrants can be a catalyst between contrasting views and reactions.
Their first and most important contribution is that the current and common
use of generic words such as “migrant” and “refugee” are inadequate. Gender
has an impact on borders as much as borders have an impact on gender.
The recent consistent flow of refugees and migrants towards Europe
has underlined the need to redefine the concept of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’
beyond the juridical-political definitions conventionally adopted by the
European Union. There is a need to encompass a more humanized and
inclusive perspective. The need is also to redefine the concept of border,
given that this concept has undergone a number of adjustments follow-
ing the Schengen Agreement38 and the enlargement of the EU, becoming
an ideological symbol of the different approaches to the crisis by States in
Europe (members and candidates).
The EU is currently the destination of migrants and refugees from many
areas. According to Frontex (European Border and Coast Guard Agency),
currently there are many routes towards the EU:

(i) the route that traverses West Africa and eventually reaches the
Canary Islands;
(ii) Western Mediterranean route originating in West Africa and reach-
ing Morocco and Spain;
(iii) Central Mediterranean route that traverses the Sahel and then
reaches Libya and Tunisia and eventually Italy and Malta;

32
 Gendering the European Borders

(iv) Central Mediterranean route that skips Lampedusa and arrives at

Apulia and Calabria in Italy;
(v) the circular route between Albania to Greece;
(vi) Western Balkan route;
(vii) Eastern Border routes;
(viii) Arctic route.39

The proliferation of maps and media discussions on the dimensions of the

phenomenon have created in the EU as well as in the transit countries sur-
rounding the EU a sense of siege, which is not at all justified by the numbers –
still manageable – but is magnified by the terrorist and criminal attacks perpe-
trated by foreigners within the region.
The dual nature of the EU Borders, external and internal, is problem-
atic. The internal borders are open between the member States except for
Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK. There are other
borders to be considered within the EU, that is the borders with non-mem-
bers, candidate states (Turkey, FYR Macedonia, Serbia, Albania) and poten-
tial candidates (Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo). This political scenario
explains how complex it is for migrants and refugees to cross several bor-
ders to reach the country they desire within the EU. They, in fact, confront
different situation in different countries, although there is overarching EU
legislation. Not all EU member states are bound by all the pieces of EU legis-
lation in the field of asylum, border management and immigration.40 The
geographical borders that had completely lost their restraint sense, given
the ease with which European citizens travel the Union, become an ideal
cultural boundary represented only by street-signs that mark the departure
from one country to the other, have re-acquired their physical represen-
tation with a strong impact on the imagination of the European demog-
raphy. Austria has planned to build a fence along the border with Italy, the
first country of arrival for many migrants from Africa, to prevent non-EU
people from entering the country. The plan has been suspended following
strong protests by Italy that has sustained that this would breach EU law and
is against the values the EU has been built upon.41
The images of fences built in other countries such as Hungary, which
has created a special corps called “Border Hunters” to prevent illegal

33
 Women and Borders

migration,42 have an effect on potential migrants and refugees wishing to

leave their present condition (for instance in camps in Syria). This devel-
opment makes them feel like animals, not human beings. Nevertheless, the
motivation to take a chance are stronger than the risk. Such measures are
hence a deterrent to an extent. What is certain is such developments are
leading to a debate within the EU affecting the perception of these people.
Gendering the border in the EU is difficult, although in the last few
years and especially in the current state, gender has emerged as a funda-
mental factor in legal matters related to asylum and granting of refugee sta-
tus. Gender is taken into account when the applicant’s position is assessed.
Acts of violence of a physical, mental and sexual nature are considered
acts of persecution and gender is recognized as grounds for membership
of a particular social group (Qualification Directive Art.4 (3), Art. 9 (2),
10 (1)). This normative provides that Member States ensure that gender-
based violence, FGM, and domestic violence are taken into account. When
the grounds for refugee status is not recognized, women may be granted
subsidiarity protection status (Art.15 Qualification Directive). This is pos-
sible upon demonstration by the applicant of being at risk of serious harm
(death penalty or execution, torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment in the country of origin, serious and individual threat to a
person’s life because of violence in situations of international or internal
armed conflict).
Differences in treatment within the EU Member States due to gender
emerge in cases such as the granting of dependent residence permit, which
are granted more easily to women than to men. It seems that in some cases
even the European legislation reflects old, traditional-customary views
and finds it difficult to keep the pace with new social developments and
dynamics, especially as regards migration. In Schrover’s view,43 the mul-
ticulturalistic policy applied by many Western European countries since
the 1970s has had a negative effect on migrant women because it has con-
firmed a model of women in a dependent position and has enhanced their
victimhood. He contends that this makes migrant women more vulner-
able than men, making them undergo more social monitoring, which can
become a double-edged sword as it can result in restricting women’s free
expression, movement and initiatives. What can be said is that these are

34
 Gendering the European Borders

not necessarily signs that EU Member States have interiorized the concept
of gendered borders.
However, an important step that has been taken in recent years in EU
legislation is the fact that interviews of Asylum applicants must be carried
out by competent people who must take into account elements such as
cultural origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or vulnerabil-
ity (art.17 of the Asylum Procedures Directive).44 This recognizes that the
process is not simply an administrative/bureaucratic one. It is a qualitative
exercise with a number of implications. The decision making process of
the applicants is eviscerated, and allows the understanding of motivations
and intervening variables, amongst which gender is clearly a priority.
The increased influx in the EU of migrants and refugees in recent times
has raised many preoccupations, which cannot be ignored. However, this
development has also drawn the attention of European Politics to funda-
mental issues, that the policies could be more individual-centered, taking
into account the gender element. What is still lacking is the real awareness
of the potential of a gendered approach to borders and migrations, and
the will to use this approach to define policies and strategies; this could be
an important innovation in a situation of fear and the benevolent attitude,
which stigmatizes the migrants as needy people.
Montezemolo considers the wall between Mexico and the USA as mas-
culine. I think that the borders of the EU are female: Europe was a nymph
whose name means “broad look.” I argue that gendering the EU borders
will help to broaden our outlook towards migrants and refugees.

Notes
1. Personal interview, January 16, 2016, with Nerghiz, 29, Syrian Refugee, mother
of four children aged 9, 7, 5 years old and 6 months old, who traveled to Germany
through Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, overcoming all sorts of adversities.
2. Council of Europe, “Human rights of refugee and migrant women and girls
need to be better protected,” March 7, 2016. https://www.coe.int/sq/web/com-
missioner/-/human-rights-of-refugee-and-migrant-women-and-girls-need-to-
be-better-protected. (accessed on December 1, 2016)
3. UNHCR, “Refugees/Migrants Emergency Response – Mediterranean,” http://
data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php. (accessed on May 23, 2016)

35
 Women and Borders

4. S. Pickering and B. Cochrane, “Irregular Border-Crossing Deaths and

Gender: Where, How and Why Women Die Crossing Borders,” Theoretical
Criminology, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2012, pp. 27–48.
5. A. Petrozziello, Gender on the Move: Working on the Migration‐Development
Nexus from a Gender Perspective, UN Women Publications, Santo Domingo,
Dominican Republic, 2013.
6. M. I. Macioti and N. Coppola, “Migration and Gender,” in E. C. Del Re and
R. R. Laremont, Pursuing Stability and a Shared Development: Euro-
Mediterranean Migrations, Aracne: Rome, 2017, pp. 152–68.
7. N. Afzar, “Why Britain should be worried by this flood of young male
migrants: Leading lawyer who’s the son of immigrants gives a stark warning,”
January 8, 2016. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3389734/Why-Britain-
worried-flood-young-male-migrants-Leader-lawyer-s-son-immigrants-gives-
stark-warning.html#ixzz4TdIVM13e. (accessed on December 12, 2016)
8. V. Hudson, “Europe’s Man Problem. Migrants to Europe skew heavily male—
and that’s dangerous,” Politico Magazine, 2016. http://www.politico.com/maga-
zine/story/2016/01/europe-refugees-migrant-crisis-men-213500 (accessed on
December 4, 2016); V. Hudson and A. M. Den Boer, Bare Branches: The Security
Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
9. Personal Interview, Vienna (Austria), July 18, 2016.
10. M. Schrover and D. Moloney, Gender, Migration and Categorisation,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, M. Morokvasic, U. Erel, K.
Shinozaki, eds, Crossing borders and shifting boundaries, Gender on the move,
Opladen: Leske-Budrich, 2003.
11. Personal interview, October 22, 2016.
12. S. Sassen, “Europe’s Migrations. The Numbers and the Passions are Not New,”
in Fortress Europe: Migration, Culture and Representation, Vol. 20, No. 6, 2006,
pp. 635–45. See also S. Sassen, Guests and Aliens: Europe and Its Migrations,
New York: New Press, 2000.
13. ESI, “The Merkel Plan – A proposal for the Syrian refugee crisis,” 2015. http://
www.esiweb.org/index.php?lang=en&id=67&newsletter_ID=97 (accessed on
November 29, 2016).
14. Quoted in Del Re and Laremont, 2017.
15. Personal interviews, Austria, July 2016.
16. Personal interview, Crotone, Italy, October 16, 2016.
17. See M. Beine, F. Docquier and Ç. Özden, Diaspora Effects in International
Migration. Key Questions and Methodological Issues, World Bank Policy
Research Working Paper 5721, 2011.
18. P. Collier and A. Hoeffler, “Migration, Diasporas and Culture: an Empirical
Investigation,” Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of
Oxford, 2014.

36
 Gendering the European Borders

19. Amnesty International, “Female refugees face physical assault, exploitation

and sexual harassment on their journey through Europe,” January 16, 2016.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/female-refugees-face-phys-
ical-assault-exploitation-and-sexual-harassment-on-their-journey-through-
europe/. (accessed on May 23, 2016)
20. Personal interviews, from 2013 and 2016, in several refugee camps in Iraqi-
Kurdistan (Dara Shakran, Domiz 1, Domiz 2, Arbat, Kawergosk).
21. Ibid.
22. Private conversation with Petro Bartolo. His declarations on this matter
are public: A. Ditta, “Il medico di Lampedusa che salva i migranti e racco-
nta le loro storie,” The Post Internazionale, 2016. http://www.tpi.it/mondo/
italia/pietro-bartolo-medico-lampedusa-migranti. (accessed on December
3, 2016)
23. E. C. Del Re, “The Yazidi and the Islamic State, or the effects of a Middle East
without minorities on Europe,” Politics and Religion Journal, Vol. 9, No. 2,
Autumn 2015, pp. 269–96; E. C. Del Re, “We, the last Christians of Iraq,” Film-
documentary (50’), 2015, https://vimeo.com/139202991. (accessed on December
3, 2016)
24. Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” American Sociological
Review, Vol. 3, No. 5, 1932, pp. 672–82.
25. T. Khan, “Slave trade brought 800,000 Africans to the Gulf,” May 23, 2016.
http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/slave-trade-brought-800000-
africans-to-the-gulf (accessed on December 3, 2016); see also E. Kofman et
al., Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare and
Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 2000; see also “The Slaves of Dubai”
the known documentary by BBC journalist Ben Anderson, focused on Asian
slave workers, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMh-vlQwrmU
(accessed on December 4, 2016).
26. Personal interview, Zagreb (Croatia), November 26, 2016.
27. S. Y. Teo, “Dreaming Inside a Walled City: Imagination, Gender and the Roots
of Immigration,” Asian & Pacific Migration Journal, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2003.
28. E. C. Del Re, “Introduction Pursuing Stability and a Shared Development: Euro-
Mediterranean Migrations,” in E. C. Del Re and R. R. Laremont, Pursuing
Stability and a Shared Development: Euro-Mediterranean Migrations, Rome:
Aracne, 2017.
29. J. Carling, “Migration in the age of involuntary immobility: theoretical reflec-
tions and Cape Verdian experiences,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies,
Vol. 28, No. 1, 2002, pp. 5–42.
30. Personal interview, Tripoli, Lebanon, September 28, 2016.
31. See EU-magine, “Imagining Europe from the outside,” 2010, http://www.eum-
agine.org/ (accessed on November 29, 2016).

37
 Women and Borders

32. N. Mai, “Looking for a More Modern Life: The role of Italian Television in
the Albanian Migration to Italy,” Westminster Papers in Communication and
Culture, Vol. 1, 2004, pp. 2–22.
33. E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1978.
34. D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, Blackwell Publisher, Oxford and Basil,
1994.
35. F. Montezemolo, “Rastros/Traces,” video-essay (20’), 2012, http://www.fiam-
mamontezemolo.com/traces/ (accessed on December 4, 2016).
36. Personal interview, Palestine, May 23 2015.
37. Council of Europe, “Convention on preventing and combating violence
against women and domestic violence,” April 12, 2011, http://www.coe.int/en/
web/istanbul-convention/home (accessed on May 3, 2016).
38. The text of the Schengen Agreement, 1985, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/
LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:42000A0922(02):en:HTML (accessed
on December 2, 2016)
39. Elaboration from: FRONTEX, “Trends and Routes,” 2016, http://Frontex.
europa.eu/trends-and-routes/migratory-routes-map/ (accessed on November
29, 2016).
40. E. Fribergh and M. Kjaerum, eds, Handbook on European law relating to asylum,
borders and immigration, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights,
2014, http://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/handbook-law-asylum-migration-
borders-2nded_en.pdf (accessed on December 2, 2016).
41. “Migration crisis: Italians protest over Austria border fence plan,” May 7, 2016,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/07/migration-crisis-italians-
austria-border-fence-germany-merkel (accessed on December 3, 2016).
42. A. Faiola, “How do you stop migrants? In Hungary, with ‘border hunt-
ers,’” Washington Post, October 1, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/
world/ europe/ how- do- you- stop- migrants- in- hungary- with- border- hunt-
ers/2016/09/30/cd9736aa-818c-11e6-9578-558cc125c7ba_story.html?utm_
term=.55c21c205a29 (accessed on December 3, 2016).
43. M. Schrover, “Why make a difference? Migration policy and making differ-
ences between migrant men and women (The Netherlands 1945–2005),” in
M. Schrover and E. J. Yeo, eds, Gender, Migration and the Public Sphere 1850–
2005, New York: Routledge, 2010.
44. “Directive 2013/32/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of
26 June 2013 on common procedures for granting and withdrawing inter-
national protection,” See http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/
?uri=celex%3A32013L0032 (accessed on December 3, 2016).

38
 2
The Refugee’s Passage: Liminality, Gendered
Habits and the Emergence of Difference
in Flight

Leila Hudson

We got to the border and it was a disaster. It was full of peo-

ple from Raqqa which had just fallen (to ISIS). So many people
were standing around waiting to get into Lebanon, and the bor-
der guards were beating the young men. The Lebanese border
guards were part of Hezbollah and they hate us, even though
these crowds were running away from ISIS. So they were beat-
ing people and tearing up their papers, the entry visa which
cost 1200SP so they’d have to go back and buy another. It got
very ugly at the border that day. More than one time they were
going to tear up my husband’s passport. He was waiting in line,
and when he saw that they were tearing up papers, he’d leave
the line. He said “as long as this guard is here I won’t be able
to get in.” I was standing in the separate women’s line and they
let us in, no problem. When I got in, I was so relieved because
I had left my children and my baby back in Lebanon. It would
have been a disaster if they didn’t let me in. So my husband
waited until that officer took a bathroom break and in those two

39
 Women and Borders

minutes he got to the front of the line, had his papers stamped
and got through to where I was waiting by the bus. Two times
it didn’t work, then finally it worked. This all took 4 or 5 hours
standing under the glaring sun. Some people had children,
some people were sick, and so on.1

New narratives and ethnographies of mobility – of flight, refuge, and

asylum seeking – can lend themselves all too easily to a simplistic meta-
narrative of progress from a state of deprivation in the war-torn Middle
East to a state of fulfillment in a Europe of rights. The refugee’s teleological
imagined progress to redemption via trials leads from death to life, from
subjecthood to proto-citizenship, from tradition to modernity, and it is
especially tempting to apply the trope to women. The female refugee’s flight
in particular is easy for some to see as a gauntlet of challenges which pain-
fully extricate the individual from the bonds of patriarchy and prepare her
for the responsibilities of gender neutral citizenship.2
Seen theoretically, transnational flows of populations have contributed
to “mutations in citizenship” as the rights, entitlements and responsibili-
ties of national belonging are disaggregated and remixed in assemblages
and zones.3 But listening to the voices of Syrian refugees shows that cross-
ing borders and traversing borderlands is akin to transitional processes
that, without being formally ritualized, nevertheless reiterate the same
three stages of transformation – separation, liminality, and ultimately
incorporation – described by Van Gennep as rites of passage.4 Indeed for
the men, women and children I interviewed who made the flight from
war in Syria to asylum in Europe between 2012 and 2016, the crossing
of borders produced an acute awareness of their changing legal status as
well as disorientation as one world of experience receded and other unfa-
miliar vista loomed ahead. Having reached asylum in Europe, hindsight
allowed them to see a cumulative and personal transformation in their
flight.
The Syrian refugees’ ordeal is flight, not ritual. But the crossing of
thresholds and frontiers in historical time (not symbolically as timeless
ritual) impacts what Bourdieu called the habitus.5 A “mediating construct”
that bridges the cultural, social and environmental by “the internalization

40
 The Refugee’s Passage

of externality and the externalization of internality,” habitus captures the

way in which the socio-symbolic structures of society become deposited
inside persons in the form of lasting dispositions…which in turn guide
them in their creative responses to the constraints and solicitations of their
extant milieu.”6 Although the concept was designed to explain reproduc-
tion of the status quo, the habitus molded by and molding the environment
can be useful7 for the analysis of rupture and crisis.8 The Syrian refugees’
movement over the landscape and the crossing of juridical borders and
cultural borderlands spatializes the kind of transformative processes that
take people from states and subjectivities of one kind to another.9 Unlike
structuralist studies of life-cycle transitions that or cycle, which focused on
the malleability of the individual in the liminal interstices within specific
cultures,10 the refugees’ flight is not ritually institutionalized as part of a
closed and localized culture. Rather as a transcontinental odyssey, it ben-
efits from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a nomadology traversing and
challenging striated and smooth spaces.11
In typically opaque fashion, Deleuze and Guattari decline to define and
fix the opposition in types of space, but use striation and smoothing of
space to describe the work of the state and the attempts of “the nomad”
avatar to elude the State’s channels and rather to order and territorialize
independently.

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space

over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of
communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital con-
cern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to con-
trol migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights
over an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the ecu-
menon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from
a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commod-
ities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need
for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed,
regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail
the relative movements of subjects and objects.12

By the countervailing actions of states on the one hand and mobile peo-
ple on the other “smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed

41
 Women and Borders

into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned

to a smooth space.”13 Thus we return from the structuralist interlude in
which Victor Turner focused rites of passage on the deepest interstices of
symbolic and often gendered transition of the life-cycle stages,14 back to
Van Gennep’s point of departure which derived temporal and symbolic
transitions from actual territorial passage and the crossing over invisible
thresholds and passage through doors (from the virtual to the monumen-
tal). Van Gennep, writing in 1908, provides what could almost be a more
vivid and human-centered description of the smooth/striated border zone
than Deleuze and Guattari:
The neutral zones are ordinarily deserts, marshes, and most fre-
quently virgin forests where everyone has full rights to travel
and hunt. Because of the pivoting of sacredness, the territories
on either side of the neutral zone are sacred in relation to who-
ever is in the zone, but the zone in turn is sacred for the inhab-
itants of the adjacent territories. Whoever passes from one to
the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a
special situation for a certain length of time; he wavers between
two worlds.15

The negotiation that becomes symbolized and institutionalized as ritual

in the ethnographic literature after Van Gennep stands in for the iden-
tity-producing contest to inscribe order in a marginal space. Yiftachel,
describing marginal urban settlements, calls these margins ‘gray spaces’
which are “positioned between the ‘lightness’ of legality/approval/safety
and the ‘darkness’ of eviction/destruction/death.” In his words, this kind
of space which is the site of a “ceaseless process of ‘producing’ social rela-
tions, bypasses the false modernist dichotomy between ‘legal’ and ‘crim-
inal,’ ‘oppressed’ and ‘subordinated,’ ‘fixed’ and ‘temporary.’”16
Between the harshly striated spaces of the point of origin – the authori-
tarian (necropolitical) Syrian state – and the ultimate destination – the
very differently (biopolitically) striated spaces of the European Union –
narratives of flight highlight a variety of gray spaces, especially the smooth
spaces of open countryside, wilderness and sea and their life-threatening
challenges to travelers. And the narratives are also punctuated by a series of
transit state striation crossings that the travelers try to make as quickly and

42
 The Refugee’s Passage

perpendicularly as possible to avoid being trapped in yet another state’s

straightjacket. Some of the negotiations of gray space effect separation
from the habitus of home, as when Syrians brave the internal checkpoints
that become a feature of the home state at war,17 or when they cross into
neighboring Lebanon whose institutionalized striations are those of a weak
state in the throes of chronic high neoliberalism – a bewildering depart-
ure from strong state norms.18 Sometimes the borders constitute or initi-
ate a painful liminality reminiscent of the structuralist moment “betwixt
and between,” as when the Turkish economy is penetrated but without the
benefits of linguistic competency or legal rights,19 or when refugees face
violence and the possibility of death in the Aegean Sea crossing. Finally,
the border procedures leading to camps and asylum status effectively re-
incorporate subjects into the patronage of an idealized Europe as people
settle their new legal status or when charity is given and accepted, when
people are organized and allocated into temporary housing.20
Much has been written about gender at the borders.21 So it is tempt-
ing to look for a transformation in gender habitus as the culmination of
the rites de passage. This is how traditional rites appear to work, after all,
effecting the transitions from boy to man, from girl to woman. For women
refugees this structuralist paradigm would result (in the liberal imagin-
ation) in the felicitous shedding of oppressed Muslim woman status at the
separation stage, an uncomfortable wrestling with the individual self in the
liminal stage and the emergence of modern universal/European woman at
the point of incorporation/assimilation. But this spatial liminality of the
narratives is not, for most, one of gender reorientation, and the transform-
ation is not one of a sexual nature as it often is in the traditional rites de
passage. On the contrary, the narratives suggest that, for many, received
gender identity and its habits are an anchor of consistency (certified in
paper and in lived-in gendered practices adapted to the road) in an other-
wise disorienting transition. At every formal border crossing, one is forced
to show or prove who one is. One’s assigned sex is the first and most natu-
ralized category of identity, one of the few elements not in negotiation. It is
an element on which the state and the subject can agree, both recognized
in the state’s striations and a comforting (if not comfortable) embodiment
of self in the smooth spaces.

43
 Women and Borders

Separation: Internal Checkpoints and Neoliberal

Lebanon
The checkpoint in Syria, as in wartime Lebanon, occupied Palestine, and
post-invasion Iraq, is the new hallmark structure of the failing or failed
state.22 The checkpoints that separate regime-controlled territory from
rebel-controlled territory in the Syrian cities and the perimeters they
enforce are like scar striations, or a too-tightly striated exoskeleton that
inhabitants must escape to the beckoning freedom and safety of refuge.
The wartime geography of the cities overlays the striating structures of
the authoritarian state, itself laid down over decades of Ba’thist dictator-
ship. Crossing the internal borders of government and militia checkpoints
between urban neighborhoods echoes Van Gennep’s stage of separation in
which old habits are symbolically left behind. One mother recounted brav-
ing the checkpoints that the government used to control the population of
rebellious neighborhoods in Damascus’s East Ghouta suburbs. Learning to
fear ordinary looking people and familiar streets, to manage facial expres-
sions, conversational tone, and vehicular conduct to avoid summary pun-
ishment was key to the escape and expulsion from the comfort zones.

The man who assured us the road was safe seemed trustworthy
and stable, but how did he have water and electricity for this
clean, white abaya (robe). We should have asked ourselves this,
as he turned out to be an informant with the government. A dog
who spies on the people and who informs on the rebels. But it
was too late. We went towards the highway. As soon as we left
the street and got there we saw that we had been tricked. If we
went back it would be suicide since the checkpoint would know
we were scared. Ahead was a huge checkpoint with shabiha
(thugs) on the ground and in the buildings nearby. The had
rifles and machine guns. Our hearts stopped with fear. We got
closer and closer and stopped and they clicked their guns. The
sound of the guns was like a knife on our throats and I felt like
I could see death with my eyes. But we pretended that we were
fine and there was no problem. I don’t know if we were con-
vincing or not. And here began our unique performance. My
brother greeted them casually and the shabih punched him on

44
 The Refugee’s Passage

the shoulder and asked where he was coming from. My brother

smiled a little and said we were here at my sister’s house. And
this devil said, “What were you doing there?” Poison and sparks
were coming from his face and eyes.
“We were getting some clothes for the kids,” we said, laugh-
ing to lighten the mood.
“You know, brother, the kids need a lot of clothes.”
“And who allowed you to come and get things? “
My brother said, “Our situation is bad and we needed it. It
looks like you are a good guy and son of the country.”
The guy ordered us to open the trunk of the car.
“What is this computer and what’s on it?”
My brother said, “it’s my niece’s and there’s nothing on it;
she is an accountant and there are accounting files on it.”
“For sure nothing on it?”
“If you want, check it out, nothing but accounting.” The
computer was full of revolutionary pamphlets and MP3s of
anti-government songs.
The rest of us were praying as he asked who the accountant
was, and sweat was pouring down and our feet turned icy cold.
The guns were primed and pointed at us. We were good prey for
them since we had a girl and a young boy, and this was a great
opportunity for rape. The street was completely empty but for
us and another taxi whose driver they had forced out to the side
of the road. They walked him away at gunpoint. He took our
IDs and started to read them. He looked searchingly at us and
we kept our faces straight. And he looked most at my son’s ID
and then gave it back. He told my brother to go. We were sure
they would shoot us from behind. We went slowly, slowly. Then
faster, but still slow and our faces showed no emotion.
“Please” we begged, “go fast.”
“No, they’ll shoot us if we speed up.” And this was very wise.
Once we got past the lumber yards where the road goes down-
hill and out of their sight, our hearts returned to our bodies and
we raced to my brother’s house. And we felt as if we were born
anew.23

Fear of being raped by a stranger, as much as rape itself and the possibility of
imminent death, is one of the forces that pushes people out of their homes

45
 Women and Borders

into the status of nazih (internally displaced person) or laji’ (refugee). At

hard borders, male bodies are the more vulnerable ones, with the threat of
arrest, incarceration and torture. But the border and the borderland, where
quick movement and mobility is slowed and uncertainty entered is marked
by physical and symbolic violence, and especially by a fear of sexual vio-
lence and shame.24 At the borders inside and close to the Syrian war, the
residual normality of everyday life habits pose a fragile buffer between the
female body and violence. Once the normality is breached and a woman
or girl is marked for violence, the violence is more than likely to be sexual-
ized – rape or the threat or rumor of rape. Testimony collected by activists
reveals that women stopped at checkpoints suffered a range of abuses from
sanitary deprivation to rape and torture at the hands of regime officials.25 In
anecdotes, women were as likely to be coerced into confessing false sexual
encounters like volunteering sexual service to jihadis and thus exposed to
and condemned by the subsequent stigma of their own community, a par-
ticularly cruel emotional proxy for rape.
The first international border crossing for many refugees from the
Damascus region took them to a place that looked similar to Syria but was
just different enough to unsettle. The effects of the stage of separation can
also be seen in the dramatic movement from the conservative authoritar-
ian and war state of Syria (undergoing its own partial neoliberalization
to be sure since the 1990s) to high and mature neoliberal “freedom” of
the most enthralling and bonded type endemic in Lebanon. One woman
recounts her first entry into Lebanon, a mere hour’s drive from her home
in Damascus.

As we drove into Lebanon I realized I had nothing in common

with a tourist who delights in everything that is new and strange
to him. For a tourist everything is intriguing, but for a refugee it
is hardship and pain and constraints and bitterness. No, I must
be strong. Because if I’m weak that will only make things worse
for my family. I can’t show these feelings. I have to borrow the
tourists’ feelings. Because I love my family. I need to do this
for my family, to save their feelings, just like I saved their lives
when I decided on leaving. The driver told us he would take
us to a place in the town where we could change money. And

46
 The Refugee’s Passage

that was the first thing that surprised me. They spoke freely of
such things here that were illegal in Syria? There were shops for
money changing? All my life I’d known with my limited experi-
ence that you didn’t talk about such things openly. Ok then.26

Home was gone, the familiar lines of what was legal and what was illegal in
Assad’s Syria were no longer relevant, but her duty as a mother to be strong
for her family was never in question. Her strongly gendered identity was
bolstered, not diminished. As the new environment manifested itself, act-
ing like a mother, on behalf of her children, was a source of strength.

Borderlands of Chronic Liminality

The liminality phase which follows the separation phase in the structur-
alist paradigm of ritual involves the disorientation of the subject after the
stripping away of the familiar. In the absence of the authoritarian infra-
structure and red lines of Syria, life in privatized Lebanon often seemed
like an existential struggle. The acts of moving about, making a living, leav-
ing the country, and even dying seemed to Syrians not just to cost money
but to automatically produce crippling, compounding debt. One mother
described a purgatory of the neoliberal landscape she faced in Tripoli,
Lebanon, in which she could not take care of her children.

And during this time in which my body and soul broke and my
world became black and I became filled with bitterness, I and
my children were all looking for work. Also for much of this
time I was looking for a school or free courses for my son so
that he could complete his secondary education. And in pursuit
of this I walked for unbelievable distances on my feet. This was
the only way, because transport was incredibly expensive for us.
Anytime you wanted to go from point A to point B within the
city on the so-called public transportation you’d have to pay the
equivalent of a dollar. And if you needed to go outside the city
it would cost you two dollars. In Lebanon, without exception,
there is no such thing as government public transportation, or
even public transport companies. All there is private invest-
ments for profit.27

47
 Women and Borders

She felt that she could not even afford to die in Lebanon or return to Syria
to die. The bureaucracy of taking names and registering for aid which
began in Lebanon was a new and much resented striation.

We can’t even afford to die here. Ask yourself what that means –
we’d need death certificates and coffins and permission for bur-
ial and our corpses would decompose before we could get any
of those things. So for that reason I decided to go back to die in
my own country, but I was surprised to learn that I can’t even
leave Lebanon to go back to my own country. Why? Because
I’ve overstayed my visa and owe fines of $1600 and the longer
I stay the more I owe, and eventually I’ll be considered someone
not paying the state and my children and I will go to jail. So let
me be very clear. I haven’t received any assistance of any kind.
Everyone takes our names so that they can steal charity meant
for us.28

She was desperate to return to the familiar Syrian landscape of death

rather than submit to the mode of striation which produced compound-
ing debt and social stigma. The stress of the neoliberal environment of
Lebanon, free of a strong and genocidal state, but in which all was per-
ceived to be for sale, competitive and negotiable, intensified a longing for
compassion, empathy, neighborliness which was gendered. In the act of
separation from the home environment these deeply gendered elements
were nostalgically remembered.
The liminal period for many refugees was extended by the flight
from Lebanon to Turkey. Turkey attracted them with more economic
opportunity than in neighboring Arab states and the hope that a more
sympathetic and prosperous Sunni society with an apparently support-
ive government could provide relief. But in Turkey, the cost was a key
embodied habitus – Arabic language and communicative fluency was
drastically reduced. In the Turkish cities where many middle class Syrians
from the Lebanese migration had moved by 2013 and 2014, the new arriv-
als were challenged to learn a new and very different language on the fly
or ally themselves with others who had achieved language proficiency. At
the same time, most found that while work was more readily available in
the Turkish economy and empathy easier to come by than in virulently

48
 The Refugee’s Passage

anti-Syrian Lebanon, only very hard work would allow survival. For many
women, life in Turkey’s cities was less of an existential life or death strug-
gle than in the Lebanese context, but 12-hour shifts of wage labor without
rights or the ability to communicate effectively reduced one quickly to an
exhausted body.

My son and I went into a store with a sign in Turkish but we

made out a single word and through signs the manager asked
me if I could sew. Through pantomime I told her that I made
both my wedding dresses myself. They didn’t have anything
for my son, so I went the next day. The work was on wed-
ding dresses, especially the corsets, full of beads and glitter.
I had to take out the pins and sew on the beads and sequins.
Thousands and thousands of them. Since the corset is so stiff
with whale bone and wires, each time I would prick my finger.
All day from 8 to 8 with pricking my fingers. The first day I
got back my hands were numb and tingling. And then I feared
I would get blood on the white wedding dresses. The second
and third day, my eyes were all on the white, I would look
up and feel like I couldn’t see at all. After five days or a week,
I heard from my sister that she was coming. And I cooked
some stuff so when she arrived we’d have some food. The kids
brought her to the apartment, but I couldn’t get out of work. I
didn’t want to do anything to make them angry even though
I could barely work. To this day, when I see a wedding dress I
feel like I will vomit.29

Most Syrians who made it to Turkey felt their dreams of education and
prosperity fade along with their resources, and this impelled them to mobi-
lize their last financial resources to risk the illegal water journey to Europe.

Acute Liminality: Trial by Water Crossing

The climax of liminality in many of the refugee narratives involves the fear
and real threat of death. The families were stripped of cultural capital –
from their knowledge of and habits of Syria down to linguistic capacity –
and desperate to escape to asylum in Europe. The prospect of unend-
ing physical labor for paltry wages without recourse to rights challenged

49
 Women and Borders

all who could to contemplate the illegal water-crossing to Greece. This

involved the mobilization of significant amounts of money through work-
ing and saving, borrowing or liquidation of any remaining assets. For many
this was the first extralegal crossing, since they had entered the countries
bordering Syria with valid papers and visas, and the first encounter with
the ungoverned space of the sea. Not since leaving Syria had they faced
such a risk of death.
Research from many parts of the world has emphasized the danger
and violence of border zones for refugees and economic migrants alike.
Those foregoing their legal status in the country of origin and crossing
borders illegally for reasons of survival are subject to the violence of the
state, the violence of smugglers, to the violence of the smooth space wil-
derness itself. At the US–Mexican border, for example, uncounted hun-
dreds, even thousands, have died in the Sonoran Desert attempting to
bypass the militarized border.30 Like men, women suffer from the threat
of deportation, incarceration and death, and also in the passage into the
United States, gendered murder or femicide.31 Some borderlands like the
US–Canadian one are characterized by a chronic danger of rape and mur-
der to the indigenous and working women who frequent it and perhaps
are seen by predators as beyond the reach of rights.32 The smooth space
margins of the nation state, whether urban, rural, desert, plains or sea,
seem to be places where uncounted, the undocumented can disappear or
be made to disappear. With estimated migrant deaths in 2014–16 in the
thousands, the Aegean and Mediterranean routes from the Middle East
to Europe join the ranks of the border killing zones where women and
men can be driven away from increasingly militarized perimeters, preyed
upon by smugglers, and caught up (as if by their own “bad choices”) in
the harsh environments that states use to define their edges. For Deleuze
and Guattari, the sea is the ultimate smooth space, but subject to power-
ful striation attempts through navigation and naval domination.33 The
climactic moment of the Aegean water-crossing starts with submitting
oneself and one’s family to smugglers who materialize from disembodied,
unremarkable voices on cell phones to subject the travelers to startling
violence as they shout, herd them and force them to throw away their last
possessions.34

50
 The Refugee’s Passage

After we got to the dark place, they made us throw our suitcases
and bags on the beach. My son was crying because they even
threw away his toy bear, the one he had had with him since
Syria. “Shut off your phones,” they yelled, and everyone was too
scared to speak or protest. We stumbled into the inflated boat
meant for ten or twelve people and the other thirty people sat
on top of us. We figured they’d move and we’d wiggle around,
and we thought it was just temporary but this was the way it
would be, layers of people sitting on top of each other.35

The people in the boat tried to navigate the Aegean with technology and
prayer. The mass of people in which they found themselves trapped was
another smooth space that would require ordering, along with the sea.

Under the tarp, I was sending out our location and GPS and
keeping the line open on the mobile phone to my sons. They
could hear the people in the boat praying to god to save us.
When the rain stopped and I turned on the phone again, the
other passengers would scream like crazy people “turn off your
mobile! The Turkish coast guard will come!” I saw this situation
and I didn’t care, the water was coming down and I was soaked
and my son was sitting soaked in my lap holding his floatie
ring. And there was a big boy, as big as a donkey, holding onto
the ring as well and sitting on my leg for the whole four or five
hours, who also wouldn’t let go of my son’s ring. I should have
felt sorry for him, he was so scared, but all I could think about
was that he should have brought his own ring. The boat would
tilt, and we would see only blackness and just getting farther
and farther away from the shore.36

The very real threat of death and the complicity of the state made it a
moment of necropolitics where the exposure to death marked one’s status,
even on the fringes of Europe, belying any notion of a humane movement
to safety. On land the threat of death would quickly be replaced with a
biopolitical set of filters, but for many, the threat of drowning was com-
pounded by elements of state authority in the form of the coast guard.

The Greek coast guard came and they stopped in front of the
boat. They said “we’re here to help you,” and they told us to turn

51
 Women and Borders

off the engine. As soon as we turned off the engine, they took
out a large hook and tried to punch a hole in the rubber boat.
Then one guy took out his mobile and started to film them and
then they stopped. They tied a rope to our boat and told us to
remove the engine, that it was dangerous from the gasoline.
Of course we had women and children with us. They took the
motor and said they’d go back to shore and get a bigger boat. We
waited for an hour and then realized that they weren’t coming
back and that they had tricked us. We called the Greek Coast
guard main station and told them that we were stuck. They said
they were coming and didn’t come. After an hour or two, at four
in the morning, the waves started getting strong. They started
moving the boat off course. Then we called an activist named
Nawwal. She helps Syrians even on the Italian route from Libya.
We called her and gave her the GPS coordinates and she also
spoke to the Greek coast guard, and the Turkish. The Turkish
coast guard came and helped us within a half hour or three quar-
ters of an hour. They took us back to Turkey and to prison. But
they treated us well. We spent a night in prison and then started
all over again.37

For many refugees, once they were registered with the UN in Greece as the
beginning of the asylum process, the overland trek into Eastern Europe
was a further navigation of smooth space, or rather a specific subset, the
holey hiding space of the forest.38

We rested about four hours then headed for the border and no
bus or taxi would take us because it was illegal. At first we tried
to walk by ourselves to the border with sleeping bags, food, and
stuff and we walked for six or seven days… we would walk from
5 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. Then we’d rest and then
from 6 to 1 in the morning walk again and then sleep. We’d
send one or two people to get food for the whole group. We
had walked about 90 kilometers through Serbia. We were very
tired and people had infections. We decided to get on the train
and go about three stops and then walk. Then when we were
about 10km from the border, we were chased by the police and
they pulled guns, and put us all in a bus (80 of us from Syria,
Eritrea, Afghanistan) and said we were going to Serbia. Then

52
 The Refugee’s Passage

they closed it and we figured out from the GPS that they were
taking us back to Greece. And then we went back to the hotel in
Polykastro and agreed with a smuggler to take us in a car. Even
so we’d need to walk six hours to get to the car. We waited there
for a week, 10 days in the forest. Finally we knew we’d been had.
Turns out that cars were being stopped and drivers were being
put in prison for months if they were found driving refugees
through Macedonia. If you were found in a car you’d be put in
prison for months, but if they caught you walking you’d just be
dumped back in Greece. So we had sat for a while in the for-
est and sent a couple of people to a nearby gas station. Police
would come but not always. We’d go buy food and water when
no police were around. We would send those who could run
fast to get the food. One time, me and my friend went to get
food and the police came and caught us. So we ran. I was run-
ning and one came and put a gun to my back. He was talking
to me in Macedonian, but I just ran. I don’t know what he said,
but I just ran for it because I was not about to spend any more
time in Macedonia. I headed for the woods; once you get to the
woods they would stop and not follow you. Here we waited for
another smuggler and we had problems and sick people and
went back to Greece for two days. After two days we made our
third try. We went out again to the place where we were going
to meet the smuggler. We decided to try without a smuggler.
Couldn’t find a car. We walked five days on the same track but
we were more careful. Four police caught us, but twenty of us
together gave them 500 Euros and we went on our way. Finally
20 kilometers before the Serbian border we agreed with him
and reached Serbia. We walked to a third village, gave ourselves
up, and they gave us papers…We spent 25 days in Macedonia.39

Incorporation, Camps and Biopolitical Striations

In March 2016, nearly a year after the account above of crossing Macedonia,
the once permeable northern border of Greece became impenetrable to
new arrivals as Macedonia sealed and armed its border, following the
example of Hungary a few months earlier. A miserable refugee camp sprang
up near the gas station at Polykastro that had been a relay point for earlier

53
 Women and Borders

waves of travelers. The smooth space around the border from Polykastro
into Macedonia was dramatically striating as the border was hardened
and armed.40 The camp that formed on the Greek side at Idomeni with its
humanitarian NGOs, registrations, queues and services reflected the EU
efforts to order its Greek fringes. This was similar to other transit camps,
most notably Mora in Lesvos, the first point of entry to the European
Union for those who crossed the Aegean, and continuing through a suc-
cession of Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Austrian and German camps.
Macedonia, backed by an alliance of Eastern European, non-EU states, was
enacting the kind of state it wanted to be – a sovereign, Christian fortress
inhospitable to outsiders. Greece, crippled by its debt crisis was also per-
forming, with great difficulty, the kind of state it wanted to be, a European
guarantor of human rights. At its peak in April 2016, the Idomeni camp
warehoused 14,000. Even as it formed the last grueling test of endurance
for many refugees trapped there between February and May of 2016, the de
facto encampment at Idomeni began the biopolitical processing of refugees
into a series of convoys and encampments that led them towards life of ref-
uge in Germany. The refugees, trapped and angry, dirty and sick, and at the
end of a long series of punishing transitions were languishing there desper-
ate to move on. In registering for asylum hearings, accepting free food and
inadequate shelter, and standing in endless lines, they were introduced to
the striations of a new life in Europe.
Camps are treated in the theoretical literature after Agamben as the site
par excellence of exception.41 But subsequent scholarship has pointed out
that Agamben’s initial formulation, while provocative, does not exhaust the
practical and theoretical operation of the camp as a site.42 On the passage to
European asylum, the holding camp is where Van Gennep’s third phase of
transition, namely, incorporation, begins. It starts with charity, a material
necessity, but also a painful blow. As one man recounted of his journey to
a Greek camp on Lesvos,

As we were walking by the side of the road, a car pulled up. At

first we were nervous, but then we understood that they were
giving us coats and blankets. Instead of being relieved, I was
shocked. I had never taken charity from anyone, ever, and now
I had no choice. I couldn’t refuse.43

54
 The Refugee’s Passage

Along with the acceptance of new goods – clothing, coats, blankets, tents
and toys – rites of reincorporation into the striations of Europe consisted
of a new diet of sandwiches and chips, homogeneous junk food as taste-
less and spiritless biopolitical fodder that kept the body alive but distressed
the soul and emphasized the absence of domesticity, privacy and cooked
food (“if I ever see another cheese sandwich”).44 To get the same cold and
bland food served for breakfast, lunch and dinner, one waited in endless
long queues, a most literal form of striation. “You would start queueing up
for breakfast hours ahead of time, and then as soon as you had eaten, you’d
need to start standing in the lunch line.”45
But then the tent became a shelter and hiding place for the women and
children now exposed to a crowd of fellow refugees who were strangers to
them – not just Syrians from other places, but Iraqis, Afghans, Africans
and Pakistanis, Lebanese and Iranians and Eastern Europeans joining
in the great migration who had come to form at least half of the mass of
migrants. Old gender habits of fear of violation, modesty, and a longing for
domesticity reemerged. The refugees themselves were reterritorializing the
space of the camp.

The rain, cold, mud, the lines for the horrible cold sandwiches,
the misery of the filthy stinking latrines and the open air areas
we preferred to use, the fevers and coughing, the cheating and
forging. The girls and I spent our days shivering in a tent we
had been given. We tried not to eat or drink too much so we
wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom. We were in a sea of stran-
gers. We had no idea who the people around us were. We took a
tent that we had been given and pitched it at the outskirts of the
camp. Even though we were in a pool of mud, it was better than
being surrounded by god knows who. Every one of us was sick,
coughing, shivering, feverish. And the cold. Day after day. Is it
possible that we would be sent back to Turkey after all this?46

In the camps the biopolitical specializations of medical care was provided

by NGOs (which emphasized that that was all that they could offer – no
food, no legal advice), but several of my women informants reported being
pressed into duty as midwives (although they were not medical profession-
als) of a peculiar sort offering the comfort of Arabic and female support to

55
 Women and Borders

laboring new mothers and using their rudimentary English and French to
interpret for the camp medics. What Van Gennep or Turner would have
seen as the third and final phase of a rite of passage happens often when
a stranger is engaged in exchange and reciprocity with the host culture.
A common meal or a sympathetic mime of birth or sociability was com-
mon in the older literature.
In this case, the refugees stripped of so much in the phase of leaving
behind and reduced to survival mentality in the crisis of the smuggled
illegal crossing, are replenished with aid from Europe and its NGOs. The
empty space of separation and stripping away was filled with applications
for asylum and donated clothes and toys (especially stuffed animals for
the children). Having been reduced, stripped, bare and naked of rights,
the refugees were sometimes grudgingly, sometimes graciously granted an
infantilized access to the world of European equalities. As people approach
Europe they are increasingly subjected to Foucauldian liberal biopower47
but also with rituals of hospitality approach implying not only reciprocity
but also domination in the form of protection and paternalism, not to
mention xenophobia.48 At every border there is a kind of echoing rhythm
of different regimes of reception as the state, superstate and NGOs regis-
tered and volunteers provided hospitality.

Old Gendered Habits and New Habits of

Differentiation
Syrian refugees trapped in Idomeni for weeks and months between
February and June 2016 themselves began striating the campground of
Idomeni as well as they could, creating their own geographies and short-
cuts within it. In the end the European striations of refugee identification
were competing with the refugees own striating to create domestic and
safe spaces in the “sea of people.” Naturalized sex categories and gender
constructions were reinforced in the paperwork, the registrations, the
applications for family reunifications at Idomeni and other transit camps
along the migration route. And traditional gendered habitus and practice
were a source of strength and continuity as women cared for others, and
attempted to protect themselves from exposure to strangers.

56
 The Refugee’s Passage

In the narratives, a woman’s status as a female, a wife, or a mother is

confirmed and validated in the acts of accepting, registering, submitting
to camp protocols that embody Van Gennep’s final transitional phase of
incorporation into two new statuses. The first new status is, predictably,
as a subject of a graduated European program of rights, starting with the
right to apply for asylum. But the second new status and subjectivity is as
a member of a self-helping network of shared experience, shared language
and fictive kinship. By the time the convoy of travelers reached Austria
or Germany, they had organized themselves into linguistic and protective
networks – their own striations of the migrant wave – to pool informa-
tion, provisioning, and a gendered protection. After the intense ordeals of
the beach, the sea, and the forest, the road and its vehicles or the transit
camp, are places where gendered kinship relations are reconstructed as
people help each other out. Language, an equally deeply ingrained element
of identity was similarly pressed into service to bind together the new net-
works of kin. As one woman reported about the last days of her trip start-
ing in Lesvos,

The ferry had comparatively few Arabs, maybe twenty-five per-

cent and the other 75 percent were Afghans. They went bare-
foot into the bathrooms, and there were pickpockets among
them. Some Syrians trying to get a group together so we could
all travel together and have safety in numbers. There were some
young men and women and children and we joined them. And
dozens of Syrians started chanting:
“Suriyahurrahurra, basharyitla’ li barra” (Free free Syria,
Bashar should leave!)
When we got to Athens the Syrian group wanted to all get
into a bus together. So we gave up the 150 Euros that we had
already paid so that we could be with a group of Syrians that
we trusted. Later when we got closer to Austria, they put us
Syrians on one side and loaded us in the train, then the Afghans
who were sitting on the floor, and everyone hated the Syrians
because they started to be jealous of our treatment and the
assumption that we would get asylum and better service…Later
in one of the most crowded camps, our Syrian guys made like
a boat by joining their hands together around the women and

57
 Women and Borders

children of our group and we were able to plough through the

crowds like that to the place where the buses were.49

For many refugees, more exposure to strangers of other nationalities, reli-

gions and ethnicities produced fear of a sexualized nature and traveling in
the company of the fictive kin of one’s home country, or better yet hometown
as indicated by dialect and accent, became highly desirable. One young man
learned the new affectionate term balood or countryman, while on the road.
The word combines a diminutive suffix of endearment with the word for
country, balad. When he asked what it meant, he learned that it was a form
of address for someone from one’s home town that may have originated in
earlier generations among men drafted into the Syrian military.
The border and borderland crossings are all about the production of
difference. But it is not simply the inscription of modern European citizen-
ship on the minds and bodies of the refugees. As the travelers compete with
each other to gain the status that will entitle them to stay and live, they pro-
duce striations of the migrant mass landscape that are perhaps more effec-
tive than those that the states they are traversing can manage at their edges.
Two types of striation occur in the gray zones; one of imposed regimes of
preexisting hierarchies, gradations and orthogonal formations (rights) is
up against rhizhomic formations organized on the move by the travelers
themselves in which new networks of communication and structures of
insider and outsider are laid down galvanized by the threats and struggles
experienced in a lifetime’s worth of frontier crossings.
Gender and its provocation and stimulation with fear of violation is
a fairly uncontroversial point of agreement between the newcomers and
the states they incorporate into. But in addition to being a marker of reg-
istered refugee status it also organizes the formation of the communica-
tive, protective and fairly traditional networks that mark Syrians as not
just different from German or European, but even more importantly as
different from Afghans and Africans. Thus the crossing of the refugees also
leaves marks on the border and the states they enclose. And gender is, in
the struggle to inscribe meaning and territorialize space, less of a tool of
the state than a tool of the people. Gendering space through practice is as
much available, if not more so, to women and men “nomads” as it is to the

58
 The Refugee’s Passage

state through necro- or biopolitics. And most of the refugees, even those
who are juveniles, are not children being initiated to a preexisting order of
adulthood. They are laying down their own trajectories, and for many, tra-
ditional gender is one of their most useful categories. Gender, by and large,
is not that which is being changed. Gender habits, provoked and resilient,
are contributing to the levering of change and the production of new dif-
ferences i.e. meanings – refugee status and group belonging.
As they move into the unknown, the travelers face repeated moments
of transgression of boundaries from one state to another and from one sta-
tus to another. In place of the elders running the ritual, the states manage
the refugee’s progress with a simultaneously mystifying and rationalizing
cascade of papers, stamps, inspections, confinements, and certifications.
The odds in these negotiations are heavily in favor of the state dominating
the newcomers handily, but people can also make use of the ambiguity.
The state is much more likely to striate and inscribe the body of the refugee
(through registration, categorization, deportation and incarceration) but
the refugees are themselves territorializing their new transitory environ-
ment through organization, place-making and through cultural assertion
as they fight back by low and high tech information-sharing, navigating,
gaming the system, and even fading back into smooth space (like the hus-
band who moved in and out of the queue in at the Lebanese border cross-
ing after observing the behavior of the guard.) But focusing on the rites
and liminality of the border experience and its inherently violent sorting,
filtering, stripping and categorization suggests that the journey to refuge
is merely not a net gain of freedom in a natural order of universal rights,
but an opening to transformations mediated by states but open to creative
human action. The state’s task is to organize space and regulate mobility50
but the people moving through the space leave their marks and meanings
on it as well.

Notes
1. Personal interview, June 19, 2016.
2. Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2013.

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 Women and Borders

3. Aihwa Ong, “Mutations in Citizenship,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23,
No.2–3, 2006, pp. 499–505.
4. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960.
5. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, New York; Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1977.
6. Loic Wacquant, “A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus,” The Sociological
Review, Vol. 64, No. 1, 2016, pp. 64–72.
7. John Friedmann, “Place-making as Project? Habitus and Migration in
Transnational Cities,” in J. Hillier and E. Rooksby (eds), Habitus: A Sense of
Place, Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 148–9. See also Leila Hudson, Transforming
Damascus: Space and Modernity in an Islamic City. London: Tauris Academic
Studies, 2005.
8. Wacquant, “A concise genealogy and anatomy of habitus” 2016.
9. Julia Schulze Wessel, “‘On border subjects: Rethinking the figure of the refugee
and the Undocumented migrant,” Constellations, Vol. 23 No.1, 2015, pp. 46–57.
10. Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de
Passage,” The Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Symposium on
New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1964, pp. 4–20.
11. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Translated by B. Massumi) London: Continuum, 1987.
12. Ibid., p. 386.
13. Ibid., p. 474
14. Turner, “Betwixt and Between” 1964.
15. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage 1960.
16. Oren Yiftachel, “Critical theory and ‘gray space’: Mobilization of the colo-
nized,” City, Vol. 13, No. 2–3, 2009, pp. 246–63.
17. Shannon Doocy, Emily Lyles, Tefera D. Delbiso, and Courtland W. Robinson,
“Internal displacement and the Syrian crisis: An analysis of trends from 2011–
2014,” Conflict and Health, Vol. 9, No.1, 2015.
18. Lorraine Charles and Kate Denman, “Syrian and Palestinian Syrian Refugees
in Lebanon: the Plight of Women and Children,” Journal of International
Women’s Studies, Vol. 14, No. 5, 2013, pp. 96–111; Lewis Turner, “Explaining
the (non-)encampment of Syrian refugees: Security, class and the labour
market in Lebanon and Jordan,” Mediterranean Politics, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2015,
pp. 386–404.
19. Timur Kaymaz and Omar Kadkoy, “Syrians in Turkey – the Economics of
Integration,” 2016. http://www.tepav.org.tr/upload/files/1473326257-7.Syrians_
in_Turkey_The_Economics_of_Integration.pdf.AndZeynepKivilcim (accessed
on October 27, 2016); “Legal Violence Against Syrian Female Refugees in
Turkey,” Feminist Legal Studies, Vol. 24, No.2, 2016, pp. 193–214.

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 The Refugee’s Passage

20. Henrik Lebuhn, “Local Border Practices and Urban Citizenship in Europe,”
City, Vol.17, No.1, 2013, pp. 37–51.
21. For example, Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, Women and Migration in
the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007;
Kathleen A. Staudt, Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear, and
Everyday Life in Ciudad Juárez, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008; Maria
Christina Morales and Cynthia Bejarano, “Transnational sexual and gendered
violence: An application of border sexual conquest at a Mexico-US border,”
Global Networks, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2008, pp. 420–39; Paula Banerjee, Borders,
Histories, Existences: Gender and Beyond, Los Angeles: Sage Publications,
2010; Sharon Pickering, Women, Borders, and Violence: Current Issues in
Asylum, Forced Migration and Trafficking, New York: Springer, 2011; Lynn
Stephen, “Gendered transborder violence in the expanded United States-
Mexico borderlands,” Human Organization, Vol. 75, No. 2, 2016, pp. 159–67.
22. Nasser Abourahme, “Spatial Collisions and Discordant Temporalities: Everyday
life between camp and Checkpoint,” International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, 2011.
23. Personal interview, February 8, 2016.
24. Stephanie Parker, “Hidden Crisis: Violence Against Syrian Female Refugees,”
The Lancet, Vol. 385, No. 9958, 2015, pp. 49–50.
25. Sema Nassar, Sarah Gjerding, Mathieu Routier, Muna Samawi, and Marc
Schade-Poulsen, Detention of Women in Syria: A Weapon of War and Terror,
2015. http://euromedrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/EMHRN_Women
indetention_EN.pdf. (accessed on August 12, 2016).
26. Personal interview, February 10, 2016.
27. Personal interview, February 9, 2016.
28. Ibid.
29. Personal interview, June 22, 2016.
30. J. G. Correa, “‘After 9/11 everything changed’: Re-Formations of State Violence
in Everyday Life on the US-Mexico Border,” Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 25, No. 1,
2013, pp. 99–119.
31. Heather Robin Agnew, “Reframing ‘Femicide’: Making room for the balloon
effect of drug war violence in studying female homicides in Mexico and central
America,” Territory, Politics, Governance, 2015, pp. 1–18; Mariana Berlanga
Gayón, “The Spectacle of Violence in Contemporary Mexico: From Femicide
to Juvenicidio (young killing),” Athenea Digital. Revista de pensamiento e inves-
tigación social, Vol.15, No.4, 2015, p. 105.
32. E. D. Cauchi, “Canada’s missing: Thousands of lost or murdered indigenous
women”. http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2016/1/canada-missing-
indigenous-women.html (accessed on September 20, 2016).
33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987 p. 387.

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 Women and Borders

34. Dušan Drbohlav, Přemek Štych, and Dagmar Dzúrová, “Smuggled Versus Not
Smuggled Across the Czech Border,” International Migration Review, Vol. 47,
no. 1, 2013, pp. 207–38.
35. Personal interview, August 29, 2016.
36. Ibid.
37. Personal interview, October 5, 2015.
38. Hélène Frichot, “Holey Space and the Smooth” 1970. http://swepub.kb.se/bib/
swepub:oai:DiVA.org:kth-63484?tab2=abs&language=en.63484?tab2=abs&la
nguage=en (accessed on September 21, 2016).
39. Personal interview, October 5, 2015.
40. O. Bures, “Private Security Companies in the Czech Republic: Rearticulating
the Security Field and Transforming Politics,” Security Dialogue, Vol. 45, No. 1,
2014, pp. 81–98.
41. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Translated by
D. Heller Roazen) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; 1998.
42. See to start with, Richard Ek, “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the
Camp: An Introduction,” Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human Geography
Vol. 88, No. 4 2006, pp. 363–86; S. Hanafi and T. Long, “Governance,
Governmentalities, and the state of exception in the Palestinian refugee camps
of Lebanon,” Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 2010, pp. 134–59; Diana
Martin, “From Spaces of Exception to ‘campscapes’: Palestinian Refugee
Camps and Informal Settlements in Beirut,” Political Geography, Vol. 44, 2015,
pp. 9–18.
43. Personal interview, February 9, 2016.
44. Personal interview, August 5, 2016.
45. Ibid.
46. Personal interview, June 25, 2016.
47. Sophia Hoffmann, “International Humanitarian Agencies and Iraqi Migration
in Preconflict Syria,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 48,
No. 02, 2016, pp. 339–55.
48. Jacques Derrida, “HOSTIPITALITY,” Angelaki Vol. 5, No. 3, 2000, pp. 3–18.
49. Personal interview, June 19, 2016.
50. Deleuze and Guattari, p. 385.

62
 3
Pregnant Crossings: A Political Economy
of Care on Europe’s External Borders

Vanessa Grotti, Cynthia Malakasis, Chiara Quagliariello,

Nina Sahraoui and Daniela Arias Vargas

Introduction: Gendered (In)Visibilities1

A recurring feature of the dominant representation of the migration crisis
along Europe’s southern border in the Mediterranean and in the Balkans
is that of the harrowing portrayal of women and small children captured
on their migration journey. These images are meant to epitomize human
suffering and victimhood, and to invoke in their viewers strong feelings of
empathy, which, however, somehow have a distancing and silencing effect.
These images do not matter as such for the persons and their individual
stories that they document, but rather for the abstract emotional narratives
they capture. Over-represented, yet silenced, women entering the European
Union (EU) today through its external borders represent, we argue, the
powerful gendering of migration which operates in densely crossed bor-
derlands. Women remain invisible, to researchers and journalists in the
field, as much as to studies on migration and border crossings. This is par-
ticularly true of Europe, where the “Migrant Other”2 is often assumed to
be young and male. Yet what may have been a statistical reality in previous

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 Women and Borders

years is no longer true. The steady increase in the numbers of migrant

women entering the EU in the past two decades is well documented in the
social and political sciences, particularly in the case of domestic work and
health care, family reunification, and human trafficking.3
A rapidly emerging phenomenon, however, is the growing presence
of pregnant women among newcomers to some of the EU’s most densely
crossed borderlands; in particular, along the southern (Spain and Italy)
and southeastern (Greece) European borders. Migrant women’s reproduc-
tive health has been widely studied in recent years especially in the context
of human trafficking and sexual and domestic exploitation, and through a
particularly interesting medical lens in the case of victims of female genital
mutilation and domestic violence in France.4 However, migrant maternity
has only recently become the object of social science investigation, with
particular reference to the sociological analysis of the politics of migra-
tion border control, citizenship, and national identity in North America
and northern Europe.5 In gender studies, migrant motherhood has been
discussed as an embodied tool for political protest and activism.6 These
sociological studies address migrant maternity, bodyliness, and belonging
through a critical discussion of current American and northern European
identity politics, immigration policy, and the welfare state, often based on
autobiographical narratives, which raise questions on the representation of
the female body.7
Maternity care is an interpersonal process which brings very different
people into close physical contact, and is subject to practical, adminis-
trative, legal, and ethical difficulties.8 It encapsulates social and political
tensions of European migration governance as a whole: victimhood and
deservingness, sexuality and reproduction, identity and belonging, ethics
and morality, and politics and anti-politics of institutional care towards a
vulnerable population in a context of austerity and welfare cuts. Pregnant
crossings reveal additional layers of the gendered dimensions of social
rights – rather than refugee – crisis in the European Union. The grow-
ing numbers of undocumented women giving birth in these border-
lands raise the following questions: Under what conditions are pregnant
women crossing European borders? Why are pregnant crossings on the
rise, and does gender-based violence factor into this increase? To what

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 Pregnant Crossings

maternity care are these women entitled, and what care do they access
in practice? What is the role and diverse subjectivities, narratives, and
strategies of the state, of healthcare providers, and of different civil
society actors and organizations? We provide here initial insights into
these women’s encounters with diverse actors involved in the provision
of maternity care – encounters mediated across social, cultural, gender,
and other hierarchies. Due to their pregnancy, expecting migrants are
classified as vulnerable, and qualify for various degrees of “free” care,
emergency or more extensive, in the four European member states in
question. Undocumented pregnant migrants thus embody the paradox of
being at once subject to legal prosecution and beneficiaries of humanitar-
ian protection under exceptional legal clauses. Yet pregnant women who
cross EU borders often do so at the end of a long journey ridden with
violence and abuse, and their stories remain largely undocumented and
misinterpreted.

Fragments and Networks of Care at the Border

The primary object of our study, our lens for entering EU borderlands, is a
specific system: maternity care. Maternity care does not only refer to hos-
pital structures, but rather to a network, which includes non-clinical, state,
and non-governmental agencies, such as rescue teams, NGOs, and deten-
tion centers. Using ethnographic data collected so far, we demonstrate how
welfare and public health policy exacerbate inequalities and tensions, or
stand to reduce them; e.g., between locals and migrants, or between civil
servants and local staff. We aim, therefore, to identify the specific structural
and cultural frameworks which pervade the way maternity care is deliv-
ered, and which strikingly reflect how relations of care are tightly inter-
twined with issues of power and control.9 Hospitals are usually hierarchical
institutions, where top-down decision making is the norm, and where doc-
tors are assumed to know best. Maternal health, more than any other medi-
cal field, is also laden with morality: a good part of antenatal care is based
on risk prevention in what is otherwise a healthy physiological process – it
rests on ensuring “good” behavior on the part of the expecting mother,
and how one defines “good” behavior fluctuates across time and space, and

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 Women and Borders

can be distorted by prejudice on the part of health workers.10 In today’s

European migration hubs, located in geographical peripheries which often
concentrate the sharpest social and economic inequalities of the European
Union, moral expectations of care relationships and the structural features
of doctor-patient relations are deeply ingrained. EU borderlands, because
of their unique social and historical national legacies, also represent geog-
raphies of legal and cultural exceptionality. From Lampedusa to Melilla,
pregnant crossings unfold in settings which function according to their
own exceptional jurisdiction, where intense media scrutiny co-habits with
structural long-term neglect and strong local identities, activism, and
sense of belonging.
We now turn to ethnographic data we have collected so far, and which
represent the point of view of pregnant patients, and their experiences,
motivations, and aspirations – as well as the different types of legal ambi-
guities that affect their access to care. We also turn to the perspectives of
healthcare personnel in close contact with these women – people who have
a strong hand in determining their conditions of care on various levels,
ranging from practical access to care to socio-culturally mediated gender
hierarchies.

Spain
The southern European borderland of Melilla, a Spanish enclave situated in
North Africa, has become simultaneously a passage and a barrier to inter-
national migration routes to Europe. A medium sized city of approximately
84,000 inhabitants, Melilla is surrounded by militarized fences on one side
and the Mediterranean Sea on the other. There are four official border pas-
sages between Morocco and this periphery of the European Union. Melilla
and Ceuta, the other Spanish enclave in North Africa, used to belong to
the Spanish southern region of Andalusia, and became autonomous cit-
ies in 1995 following a process initiated by the post-Franco 1978 Spanish
Constitution.11 Ceuta and Melilla are today Spain’s only two autonomous
cities, and differ in several aspects from the autonomous communities that
constitute the administrative regions of mainland Spain. The two cities
are also embedded into a regional migration regime: Moroccan residents

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 Pregnant Crossings

of Tetuan and Nador are entitled to enter Ceuta and Melilla respectively on
the basis of their Moroccan documentation.
Melilla presents a complex mix of increased autonomy due to a state of
“exceptionality,” which translates for instance into an adverse tax regime,
and of stronger ties with Madrid than those of the autonomous commu-
nities, because the central government manages areas such as education
and health in Melilla, which in autonomous communities have been trans-
ferred to regional authorities. The healthcare system, including mater-
nity care, is consequently managed by the National Institute of Sanitary
Administration, INGESA (Instituto Nacional de Gestión Sanitaria), which
falls under the Ministry of Health. In addition, the strategic importance of
Melilla as Spain’s land border with the African continent places this limited
territory at the heart of national border control policies. In terms of the
articulation of migration and care policies, the autonomous city thus finds
itself in the position of a “central periphery.”
The universal access to healthcare that existed in Spain was officially
terminated in 2012 with the Real Decreto-Ley 16/2012, which limits the
issuing of Spanish health cards (tarjetas sanitarias) to individuals with
legal residency. Following this decree, undocumented migrants have access
only to emergency care. The 2012 Royal Decree Law addresses, however,
the situation of pregnant women as exceptional, and their right to access
pre-natal, birthing, and post-partum care is maintained. Maternity care
for undocumented women is composed of a network of actors in Melilla,
which enter into play at different moments according to the trajectories
and profiles of the pregnant women; i.e., the different circumstances under
which they are undocumented. Pregnant women without documentation
accessing the maternity care system can be schematically grouped into
three categories, which the maternity care system manages differently:
women living in the city of Melilla without residency permits, women
living in the Moroccan region of Nador and entitled to cross the border
on the basis of their residence in the borderland but without possess-
ing the tarjeta sanitaria, and finally migrants and asylum seekers resid-
ing in the Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI),4 run by
the Spanish Ministry of Employment. Amongst the first group, those who
were able to have their residency certified by a social worker’s visit to their

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 Women and Borders

home will have access to maternity care free of charge. This administra-
tive procedure limits however access in practice and many resort to private
care provision. Women who cross the border from Morocco are entitled to
emergency care, and are thus admitted to the hospital in case of obstetric
emergencies or when they have started labor. In 2015, births by women
without social security represented 60 percent of all births in the hospital
according to the hospital internal statistics, most often related to pregnant
border crossings. In the latter cases, the pregnancy has not been medically
controlled as planned by the maternity care scheme outlined in the Spanish
Pregnancy Health Notebook (Embarazada Cartilla de Salud), which con-
stitutes a major challenge for healthcare workers in the maternity ward.
As for migrants and asylum seekers residing in the CETI, their access to
maternity care is managed by the Red Cross, the only NGO commissioned
to provide care inside the center. Red Cross healthcare professionals pro-
vide basic maternity care, and work in collaboration with the local health
center and the hospital for visits to the midwife and to the gynecologist
according to the pre-determined maternity care scheme mentioned above.
Migrant women are assigned a number, which does not equal the issuing
of a tarjeta sanitaria, but which nevertheless guarantees access to maternity
care throughout the pregnancy.
Only 207 kilometers north-west of Melilla, in peninsular soil at the
Malagan port, border (re)configurations shape the conditions in which
differentiated care relations unfold, beyond what local legal frameworks,
and national and supra-national migration management regimes have
defined. Migrants living in Spain and registered within its municipalities
were granted by Law 4/2000 the same healthcare and education entitle-
ments as Spaniards, regardless of their legal status of residence.12 After
the central government, held then by the conservatives from the Partido
Popular,13 passed the non-voted decree RDL 16/2012 mentioned above,
legally, migrant collectives were to be officially uncovered through this
national policy decision. Nonetheless, today, the implementation of this
law by regional health authorities still remains a highly contested domain.
Whereas in some places and regions within Spain, undocumented
migrants in general, not only pregnant ones, continue to enjoy healthcare
coverage, in other parts of Spain migrants struggle to receive care, even

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 Pregnant Crossings

in the face of an emergency, a chronic disease, and other life threatening

situations.14
However, ten regions representing 70 percent of the Spanish popula-
tion, including Andalusia,15 have designed alternative pathways for undoc-
umented migrants to access healthcare. While care provision often falls
outside the official healthcare system and into the NGO ambit, some local
health centers use a special category that does not require the person seek-
ing healthcare to have a tarjeta sanitaria. Rather, patients are received as
“occasional care” patients. This ad-hoc solution has long-term detrimental
effects, specifically affecting if not preventing appropriate continuum of
care. Far from counteracting the Royal Decree Law 16/2012, local health
systems in fact endure extra pressure from such improvised practices:
consultations may take place without the possibility for a follow-up visit,
and, as we have been told, migrants without a tarjeta sanitaria or even
asylum seekers are not eligible for specialized care. Providing healthcare
under these circumstances and particularly in social spaces with an added
mixed influx of temporary migrants such as retired individuals, students
and tourists represents a concrete logistical and ethical burden to bio-
medical practitioners. Local healthcare systems and especially employees
themselves16 endure and cope with these challenges as best as they can. In
one interview we held at a local hospital, a matrona (midwife) expressed:
“Working like this is anarchism! There should be more personnel; we
have to be focusing not on solving emergencies, but on preventing them. I
would very much like to be doing maternal education; you know, there is
a cultural and a time lag, so we need to work there too, not just here, when
they come (referring to Moroccan mothers and Syrian asylum seekers in
her service).” Local structural underinvestment and precarious working
conditions among public health officials contribute to the reproduction of
systemic health inequities on the ground, for which migrant patients pay a
disproportionately high price.

Greece
In Athens, the capital city of the European Union’s south-eastern buffer,
networks of maternity care wind through the public sector, the world of

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 Women and Borders

NGOs, the activities of independent volunteers, and the terrain of leftist

activism. As we set out to map these networks, one of our earliest con-
versations was with a seasoned, middle-aged leftist; a leading figure in a
group of people who had come together to form one of the city’s refu-
gee squats. Squats, they argue, represent an alternative to the state’s policy
of housing refugees in camps far from urban, populated areas, and thus
depriving them of the chance for social integration. Yet, while these activ-
ists clash with the state in terms of broad reception paradigms, they are
loath to absolve it from what they consider its responsibility to provide
social rights to people within its jurisdiction. In terms of maternity care
for the pregnant women who inhabit the squat, this translates into pro-
pelling them toward the maternity departments of public hospitals, where
the squat’s operators had taken care to establish rapport. Almost nobody
among the personnel there was averse to providing care to refugee women,
our interlocutor said; with very few exceptions, they were very friendly and
accommodating.
According to figures provided by the Greek government, some 60,000
refugees are currently in Greece;17 meanwhile, almost 60 percent of those
entering Europe as of January 2016 were women and children.18 Where do
pregnant migrants live, and where do they seek care? What is the division
of labor between state and the various non-state health providers?
The picture that emerges via early interviews and archival material
shows networks of maternity care that feature multiple nodes of con-
flict between actors and structures of diverse ideologies, affiliations, and
agendas. Pregnant women’s journey to relative safety – and, most likely,
to their first prenatal examination – on Greek soil has been blocked since
March 20, 2016 by the infamous EU-Turkey agreement, which mandates
that Turkey prevent refugees from reaching its neighboring, Greek-
European shores.19 As a result, those who did manage to reach Greece
despite Turkey’s efforts to hold them back have been detained in five hot-
spots, in the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Leros, Samos, and Kos,20 awaiting
their mandatory return to Turkey, unless Greek asylum officers deem that
Turkey is not a safe country for them. The so-called “hotspot approach”
to managing migration21 has entailed the creation of closed facilities for
people who enter Europe irregularly, to ensure a rigorous identification

70
 Pregnant Crossings

and registration process. Because of their proximity to Turkey’s shores,

these Greek islands receive the bulk of newcomers from the neighbor-
ing country. In the case of Greece, newcomers subject to the EU-Turkey
agreement must stay in island hotspots until their asylum claims are pro-
cessed. These spaces have become zones of often violent conflict between
local vigilantes – people, often overtly or covertly affiliated with the neo-
Nazi Golden Dawn party, who protest the presence of large numbers of
refugees in the islands by staging demonstrations and often physically
attacking refugees22 – and pro-refugee activists or refugees themselves,
and among refugees themselves exasperated by their indefinite – de facto,
if not de jure, given the slow pace in which asylum claims are processed –
detention, the dire living conditions, and, reportedly, inter-ethnic ten-
sions. In the intra-European arena, the hot-potato approach evinced by
the re-institution of internal border controls23 and by Germany’s recent
announcement that it will be resuming Dublin transfers24 to Greece halted
since 201125 far from create conditions for continuous maternity care and
overall stable living conditions. Further, the Greek state has seen its sov-
ereignty curtailed, since the European Union started releasing funds for
the care of refugees directly to NGOs,26 which staked their spots provid-
ing different types of services in refugee camps – in the Schisto camp, for
example, located in the city’s industrial outskirts, three different NGOs
are in charge of providing maternity care, psychological support to recent
mothers, and breastfeeding consultations.27 The living conditions – par-
ticularly nutrition, sanitation, and the lack of gender-safe spaces – in these
camps, as well as in island hotspots, have come under fire by such NGOs
and by human rights organizations.28
Yet conflict does not dominate these interactions; collaboration also
occurs. Mid-level personnel in government ministries, in NGOs, and even
in the Greek branch of the UNHCR often comes from the same pool of
highly educated, young Greeks with at least a leftist, if not an explicitly
activist, background. These are people who navigate the same social net-
works, and hold similar socially emancipatory views. Humanitarianism,
as top-down ideology and practice, and solidarity, which fosters horizon-
tal relations of care often mesh in ground-level processes of maternity
care. Leftist activists denouncing the state yet also intent on holding it

71
 Women and Borders

accountable to what they consider its responsibility to provide social rights

to people within its jurisdiction constitutes an example of this complexity.

Italy
Lampedusa is the southernmost part of Italy and Italy’s southernmost
island in the Mediterranean Sea. This island is located 205 kilometers
away from Sicily and 150 kilometers away from northern African coasts.
Tunisia, which is about 113 kilometers away, is the closest landfall to the
island. Lampedusa is also the Italian land closest to the Libyan coast. Due
to its geographical position, this island is the first Italian (and European)
territory that migrants encounter along their journey from Africa. From
the late 1990s to the present, more than 250,000 migrants have arrived
in the island, to then be transferred elsewhere in Sicily and Italy. Hence,
its official recognition as Europe’s gate to the Mediterranean Sea, as sym-
bolically witnessed by “Europe’s Gate monument,” created in 2008 on the
southern side of the island. Over the last few years, migrant women have
become increasingly ubiquitous, and today they represent 25 percent of
the migrants arriving in the island weekly. Eight percent of these women
are mothers traveling with small children (up to three years old) or are
pregnant women. If international data indicate that migration through the
Mediterranean Sea is rising, the constant arrival of migrants in Lampedusa
stands to change the local setting of this tiny island with an area of 20.2
square kilometers and a population of about 6,000 inhabitants.
This demographic tension manifests itself in the organization of mater-
nity healthcare in the island. The growing presence of pregnant migrants
has led to the number of gynaecologists in the island to recently double
from two to four. Concomitantly in 2015, a special maternity service for
migrant women was created within the local healthcare center. Thus, today
two separate maternity services co-exist in this small medical structure:
one dedicated to pregnant migrant women suffering from urgent health
complications and another one for local patients. The former is staffed by
two gynecologists, three nurses and a cultural mediator available on-call
24-hours a day. The latter instead comprises of two gynecologists and two
nurses who only work during day-time opening hours. The presence of

72
 Pregnant Crossings

more numerous health providers for foreign women than for local patients
exacerbates local tensions. In particular, the characterization of pregnant
migrants as vulnerable subjects who need immediate health assistance has
led to choices that have not affected other categories of migrants, such as
men, thus reiterating the importance of gender in the “assistance policies”
carried out in the island. The current division of the medical assistance
into two parallel systems of care, one for the migrants and one for local
inhabitants, is strengthened by another paradoxical fact: nowadays, the
only women who give birth on the island are migrants. Locals themselves
describe Lampedusa as the island where one cannot be born, and this topic
is one of the political cleavages that define the island with regards to its past
traditions and local identity. During the postwar era (1950s-1960s) women
were allowed to give birth on the island. At the time, traditional midwives
would attend to the birth with little to no biomedical interventions. With
the opening of the local health center in the 1970s, and the gradual policy
move towards the concentration of perinatal health in hospitals, expecting
mothers were exclusively directed to the maternity wards of Sicilian hospi-
tals to give birth. The impossibility of giving birth in Lampedusa, according
to the local population and medical staff, has one main cause and one main
consequence. The cause is that on the island there are no adequate health-
care facilities (no surgery service for C-section, no reanimation, no amnio-
centesis) to allow women to give birth. The consequence is that the costs
connected to pregnancy and delivery amount on average 3,000–5,000 Euros
per birth. These costs include: the number of medical consultations carried
out in Sicily before childbirth – ordinary antenatal screening until the eight
month of pregnancy (in case there are no complications) are available on
the island and the trip to Sicily at their own expense before giving birth –as
women used to move to Sicily with their partners about a month before
the due date; the hospital stay in Sicily after childbirth, whether C-section
is needed or not. This complex situation has exacerbated a feeling of div-
isiveness between native inhabitants and migrants, because of a perceived
privilege of the migrant women to have access to free and universal assis-
tance during pregnancy as stated by the Italian law on universal access to
primary care for migrants.29 Lampedusans, on the other hand, lament their
meager partial entitlement to healthcare assistance. This is also connected

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 Women and Borders

to a perception of unequal rights and social inequalities compared to the

rest of the (continental, including Sicilian) Italian population, which ben-
efits from better and more affordable health care. Furthermore, the fact
that the only babies born today in Lampedusa are the children of ‘outsiders’
has exacerbated tensions between the sense of “belonging” to the local ter-
ritory and medical discourses of “risks” forcing women to give birth away
from their island.30

Undocumented Motherhood at the Border

Pregnant women, either partially documented or undocumented, need to
navigate complex networks of maternity care, as described in the previous
section. Whether labeled refugees, migrants, or “border crossers,” pregnant
women on the move find themselves in the midst of political debates rang-
ing from rights, humanitarianism, and deservingness to questions of medi-
calization and quality of care.
In Melilla, migration is a highly politicized issue and a ubiquitous mat-
ter that concerns all aspects of life on this borderland. Migration has huge
economic significance, not only in relation to the importance of border
trade, but also due to the “migration industry”31 that represents a source of
labor for local workers. Migration-related issues are featured every day in
local newspapers with different categories of migrants spanning the con-
tinua of visibility/invisibility and empathy/rejection. While the access to
care of pregnant women residing in the CETI remains invisible as a pol-
itical issue, border crossings by pregnant Moroccan women are a burn-
ing topic in political discourses. The local hospital is named Hospital
Comarcal, in reference to the limited territory it provides for (comarca
meaning a local administrative division). The additional costs and work-
load attached to pregnant border crossings are a source of tension both
within the hospital and at the level of media and political discourses (as
mentioned above, approximately 60 percent of women giving birth at the
hospital in Melilla were Moroccan women crossing from the neighbor-
ing country in 2015). While these women do not possess a social security
number, they are neither strictly speaking undocumented, nor migrants.
They possess Moroccan documentation that identifies them and gives

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 Pregnant Crossings

them the right to cross the border to Melilla; they thus find themselves
legally in the Spanish borderland when they are admitted to the hospital
to give birth. Furthermore, this documentation serves to process adminis-
tratively all emergency visits at the hospital, so the medical history of the
Moroccan women attended is retrieved each time, provided that names
were spelled correctly. Precisely because these women are documented, a
Partido Popular politician elected in Ceuta32 drafted a proposal in 2012 for
the passports of Moroccan women to be kept by the hospital as security for
payment; while the proposal was rejected, it is symptomatic of the tensions
that arise around this issue.33
Moroccan women are by far the most populous female migrant group
in Andalusia,34 however, when it comes to non-European undocumented
migrant women, sub-Saharan Africans top the list. In the month of August
2016 alone, 615 people crossed into the Spanish mainland using small fish-
ing boats called pateras or cayucos. Many of their passengers were pregnant
women and, in some cases, minors too. The Spanish Red Cross usually
leads the rescue operations along with the Salvamar Alnitak team, a sal-
vation group based in Malaga. The small watercrafts often arrive at the
port of Almeria or in the south, in Tarifa, Cádiz, and less often in Malaga
and its surrounding seaside. In our fieldwork, we had the opportun-
ity to engage in the daily activities that different NGOs carried out with
this particular group of migrants, within the limits of the only program
available to them in Andalusia, a program nominated as “Humanitarian
Relief,” wherein asylum seekers can be granted access to more services and
assistance through the “Reception Program.” Unless there is an asylum
seeking claim in place then, this is the only pool of resources (humani-
tarian relief) that people might tap upon, explained a worker from the
Spanish Commission for the Assistance of Refugees CEA(R).35 This
program in particular is a putre program she referred and continued “I
am totally against this program! It is very frustrating to keep on with it,
because deep down we know that what we do is fattening the pig here.”
To refer to something as being putre, in this case the so-called humanitar-
ian relief program, means that some parts of it smell bad; as if there were
processes of putrefaction happening within it, because, as she pointed out
after, they are only “fattening the pig.” She used the colloquial expression

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 Women and Borders

“fattening the pig” to refer to her work, but also the impact of that work. She
acknowledged, using these symbolic expressions, that their aims stayed at a
surface level in terms of offering relief, in terms of really being humanitarian;
she recognized they do provide basic assistance (food, shelter, medicines) for
a short amount of time (three months), after which migrants are left to their
own “luck” again. These programs might help somewhat to restore the over-
all well-being of people on the move, but efforts are not directed towards for-
ging a long-term engagement with them or with their well-being as human
beings, despite, or even more so because of the vulnerable situation in which
being undocumented puts these collective. After the three months men-
tioned, regardless of what their personal situation might be, each of them
would have to head out of the accommodation provided, to continue their
“European adventure,” as another CEA(R) employee referred to the fact that
people come to Europe from Africa to “try their luck.” As we can grasp, those
who work and care for migrants and asylum seekers might be deeply con-
cerned and even disgusted by the current situation within the humanitar-
ian sphere; they are mindful of it being wrong or unfair, however, as she
expressed in dismay, “there is nothing we can do about it, but continue.”
In Athens, pregnant migrants are not undocumented. Refugees in
Greece fall into two broad categories: those who came in before the infam-
ous EU-Turkey agreement, explained above, went into effect March 20
2016, and those who came after. The latter are detained in the islands where
they arrive, until their asylum claims are processed. People who entered
before the agreement have, in their vast majority, gone through the so-
called “pre-registration” process, which equipped them with asylum seeker
cards that allow them legal residence in Greece and access to health and
education services.36 But even migrants with no legal papers in Greece have
full access – at least on paper – to maternity care, since an April 2016 law
that made care in state hospitals available for free to pregnant women with
low means, irrespective of their legal status.37
Meanwhile, their presence in Greek hospitals fall into pre-existing,
often conflictual conversations on citizenship rights, vulnerability, and
socio-culturally constituted gendered agency. Our first point of contact at
an Athens public hospital with a major maternity department was a high-
ranking administrator whom we approached to request permission for

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 Pregnant Crossings

research; a physician, albeit not a gynecologist. The population we wish to

study, he said, abounds in his hospital – at that moment, they were treating
about 400 migrant women, who had come to the hospital from the islands
and the mainland camps, and about half of whom were there to receive
maternity care. Since February, he continued, their numbers had been hik-
ing; conversely, his hospital’s resources had been plummeting. We tried to
interject that public health resources were already close to depletion after
six years of austerity, but he was adamant that the number of refugees was
to blame. After they got settled, he said – stepped on solid ground, and
found food and shelter – they started looking for healthcare as well. “I am
not a racist, for God’s sake,” he stressed. But what about the poor Greek
who lost his small business, or the long-term immigrant who was fired
from his job? Neither of these cohorts can pay into their social insurance
fund anymore; meanwhile, for this administrator, refugees command the
attention and resources of a number of national, non-governmental, and
supranational agencies.
For a senior Greek midwife, we interviewed, the presence of migrant
women in the Greek maternity care system highlights and often exacer-
bates existing gender hierarchies. In the field of maternity care, she said,
such hierarchies manifest in the insistence of many Greek doctors on per-
forming C-sections38 and imposing a highly medicalized model of care.
“This is what feminism should be about today,” she argued, her eyes
flaring. In the case of migrant women, who may have already had several
natural births and who are used to a less medicalized, more traditional
model of care, this imposition is experienced more strongly, she argued.
The senior midwife and the high-ranking administrator cited here
are two among thousands of people involved in maternity care in Greece.
Their discourses hint at the diversity of perspectives, sociocultural norms,
and ideological compasses of actors in this social terrain. Their challenges,
practices, and interactions with migrants and with each other evince, but
also renegotiate, norms of social rights mediated through notions of vul-
nerability on one end and of political subjectivity on the other, as well as
ideas related to the sociocultural dimension of gender hierarchies.
Further west, in Lampedusa, the gendered character of the migratory
journey’s inequality and often stark violence has become evident through

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 Women and Borders

the experiences of our Nigerian interlocutors, who make up almost half

(43 percent; 85 out of 200 in 2015–16) of pregnant migrants assisted in the
island health center. Our findings so far show that most pregnant migrants
assisted in Lampedusa are between 17 and 27 years old, and come from dif-
ferent African countries; e.g., Mali, Ivory Coast, Guinea Conakry, Guinea
Bissau, and Gambia, in West Africa; Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somaliland, in
East Africa.
Focusing on Nigerian women, the first striking characteristic is the
absence of partners during the medical consultations. Usually, women
explain to doctors that they are traveling alone. Alternately, they mention
“boyfriends,” who paid for their trip from Nigeria and are still waiting to
set-up their own trip to Europe. Furthermore, some of them seek protec-
tion from other “boyfriends,” such as migrant men that they have met dur-
ing their trip across the desert and during their stay in Libyan prisons.
Most of them describe the pregnancies that result from these relationships
as a choice to feel safer.
The second element to underline is that, on the contrary, many women
get pregnant, because they were victims of sexual violence during the
migratory trip. As told by Mary and Jesse,39 20 and 22 years old, the sexual
abuse generally occurs during the weeks spent in Libya.
“The only way to have access to food was to have sex with the guards”
explained Mary, who spent seven weeks in the Libyan prisons.
“When you are there you have no choice; unless you want to die, you
have to do what they ask,” she explained to the doctors of the service.
Like Mary, some of these women talk openly with the doctors about
the sexual violence they have endured, especially if they ask for an abor-
tion. Other women, like Jesse, describe their pregnancy as a shame to them
and to the baby they are carrying, and as a problem for their future life in
Europe. These women also request terminations. To justify their demand,
they explain that they took contraception (hormone injections) before
leaving their country in order to avoid pregnancy on their journey. But, the
duration of trip was longer than the period covered by the contraception
(three months), so they get pregnant because of sexual abuse. Abortion,
however, is not always available to them. Italian law (law n.194/78) prohib-
its, abortion after the third month of pregnancy. Faced with this prospect,

78
 Pregnant Crossings

most women whose medical consultations we observed refuse to see the

image of their baby during the scan. The womb’s ultrasound screening
appears as an additional source of suffering for them, as they are forced to
“see with their eyes” the product of the violence experienced during their
journey to Europe.
Then, either when women seek the protection of a “boyfriend,” or when
they suffer sexual abuse, women’s body appears as a “tool” for the success
of the migratory project. Hence, beyond the negative effects of the travel
conditions on their well-being and that of their child – in many cases, the
overall health of the Nigerians is relatively worse compared to the health of
other migrant women assisted in the maternity service of Lampedusa40 –
the most distinctive element of their mothering experience is a “continuum
of violence,” at a physical, mental, and social level. This long spiral of vio-
lence, in fact, begins in their country of origin, continues during their jour-
ney, and is reinforced by the fact that they cannot always end a pregnancy
that is felt as a “necessary mistake.” Therefore, the case of Nigerian women
exemplifies gender inequality crossing the migration process: an experi-
ence where womanhood increases the level of vulnerability as shown by
the multiple factors of violence faced by women and rarely experienced
by men, and which appear to be intimately connected to the instability
and degree of internal warfare which unfold along each specific migration
route into Europe.

Conclusion: Childbirth and Political Economies

of Care at the Border
The field studies presented in this chapter are all based in southern Europe,
or rather, in Mediterranean migration hubs which have in recent years
become conspicuous testimonies of tragedies of international migration
triggered by conflicts and social and economic instability. The routes that
migrants take into the European Union are increasingly more dangerous
and deadly, because of the conditions under which these journeys unfold
and the unimaginable degrees of violence which have been unleashed in
some conflict zones. However, the routes themselves are not new, quite
the contrary. Contemporary migration routes into the Mediterranean cut

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 Women and Borders

across a deeply interconnected region whose rich and complex history of

human mobility and exchange predates Ancient Greece. Today’s inhab-
itants of Lampedusa, Lesvos or Melilla are not mere representatives of
hardened European border regimes, but members of peripheries whose
regional cultural heritage has been sharply divided by the emergence
of an international border governed by national and European central
authorities they have little familiarity with. Pregnant crossings illustrate
how in international border areas like the EU’s peripheries, there is no
such thing as a single homogeneous category of migrant, but rather, vari-
ous scales of mobility scenarios that require different forms of cross-bor-
der healthcare interventions, from Moroccan residents who decide to
give birth in the nearest hospital in Melilla for convenience and safety,
to the international migrants seeking refuge and protection after a long,
transnational journey.
As “people of the frontlines” of the current migration crisis, to quote
how some of our interlocutors like to describe themselves, local populations
have become caught in between the deep social ramifications and intimate
webs of belonging which tie them to the region on the one hand, and the
intense fragmentation of solidarity and hospitality regimes on the other. In
this context, childbirth bears a peculiar symbolic and scaling value. As a
practice of place-making and processual kinship, it brings local populations
and migrants mothers in close physical proximity yet separates them further
through vexatious hierarchies of deservingness and stately duties. It comes
to no surprise that these borderlands have a character of their own which is
in sharp contrast to national and European centers of decision making, yet
are often drowned by the multiplication of international aid and rescue ini-
tiatives. For pregnant migrants, beyond systemic violence and sexual abuse
experienced in transit, violence can manifest itself under the guise of good
intentions, good policies, and best practices; in the management of recep-
tion and hospitality often reiterated under the global banner of humanitar-
ianism which often confines patients in specific wards and strips them of
personal space and intimacy. The perpetuation of migrants’ plight at every
border unveils hidden instances of oppression, as well as the participation
– explicit or implicit, deliberate or inadvertent – of diverse actors in systems,
spaces, and processes where violence and oppression occur.

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 Pregnant Crossings

These borderlands are, therefore, particularly revealing of the simultan-

eous implementation of caring and deterring policies. While journeys into
the European Union have become increasingly dangerous due to restrictive
EU and national policies, from the militarization of fences that surround
the Spanish enclaves in North Africa to the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, the
right to free maternity care remains fundamental, and networks of actors
have emerged to facilitate its implementation. Further, the examination of
pregnant crossings yields a crucial analytical challenge. To wit, we aim to
understand the agency involved in crossing restricted borders, as well as to
conceptualize such crossings as political statements – among other things –
without being hindered by conceptions of these women as victims in the
“gendered geographies of power”41 where they are embedded. We aim to
examine, understand, and highlight the embodied violence and oppression
endured, while challenging views of gendered violence as normal, natural,
or expected. In closing, the perpetuation of what Popescu42 underlines is
at stake; the border as such is never entirely, definitively, for once crossed;
rather, bodies become carriers of a constant demand for status, which is
not limited to legal status, but is about moral legitimacy as well.

Notes
1. This chapter is based on a collaborative research project funded by the European
Research Council (ERC) based at the European University Institute and led by
Vanessa Grotti. The data we present here have been collected in various field
sites across southern Europe since July 2016, using qualitative research methods
such as participant observation and open-ended interviews. We are immensely
grateful to local populations for their hospitality, kindness and patience. Special
thanks to the Hospital Comarcal (Melilla), the CEA(R) (Malaga & Canaries),
the Maternity Service ASP6 of Lampedusa, and refugee law expert Georgia
Spyropoulou for her comments on this text.
2. Ruben Andersson, “Time and the Migrant Other,” American Anthropologist,
Vol. 116, No. 4, 2014, pp. 795–809.
3. Jacqueline Andall, Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service: The Politics of
Black Women in Italy, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000; Floya Anthias and Gabriella
Lazaridis, Gender and Migration in Southern Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2000;
Ruba Salih, Gender in Transnationalism. Home, Longing, and Belonging among
Moroccan Migrant Women, London: Routledge, 2003.

81
 Women and Borders

4. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, “Government and Humanity,” in Ilana

Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds, In the Name of Humanity: The Government
of Threat and Care, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010,
pp. 1–26; Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of
Humanitarianism in France, 2011, Berkeley: University of California Press.
5. Ronit Lentin and Eithne Luibhéid, eds, Representing Migrant Women in
Ireland and the EU, special edition, Women Studies International Forum, Vol.
27, No. 4, 2004; Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the
Border, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002; Eithne Luibhéid,
Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2013. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Immigrants Raising Citizens:
Undocumented Parents and their Young Children, New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 2011.
6. Imogen Tyler, “Naked Protest: The Maternal Politics of Citizenship and
Revolt,” Citizenship Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2013, pp. 211–26.
7. Maxine Baca Zinn, Michael Messner, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, eds,
Gender through the Prism of Difference, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005.
8. Byron Good, Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological
Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
9. Priscille Sauvegrain, “La santé maternelle des ‘Africaines’ en Île-de-France:
Racisation des patientes et trajectoires de soins,” Revue Européenne des
Migrations Internationales, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2012, pp. 81–100; Khiara Bridges,
Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
10. Sandrine Garcia, Mères sous influence. De la cause des Femmes à la Cause des
Enfants, Paris: La Découverte, 2011.
11. Peter Gold, A Contemporary Study of the Spanish North African Enclaves of
Ceuta and Melilla, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
12. Marta Cimas, Pedro Gullon, Eva Aguilera, Stefan Meyer, José Freire, and
Beatriz Perez-Gomez, “Healthcare coverage for undocumented migrants in
Spain: Regional differences after Royal Decree Law 16/2012,” Health Policy,
Vol. 120, No. 4, 2016, pp. 384–95.
13. In the midst of an economic crisis that heavily struck Spain in 2009, the
People’s Party embedded austerity measures within the national health care
system, revoking equal access to public healthcare.
14. Ibid.
15. Brambilla et al., Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making.
16. Ibid.
17. The exact number in October 3, 2016 was 60,788. General Secretariat of
Information and Communication, Greek Government, “Summary Statement

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 Pregnant Crossings

of Refugee Flows (03.10.2016),” http://media.gov.gr/index.php/component/

content/ article/ 258- %CF%80%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%83%CF%86%CF%8
5%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C- %CE%B6%CE%AE%CF%84%CE
%B7%CE%BC%CE%B1/4125-summary-statement-of-refugee-flows-03-10-
2016?Itemid=595 (accessed on October 3, 2016).
18. UNFPA, “Report Warns Refugee Women on the Move in Europe Are at Risk
of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence,” http://www.unfpa.org/press/report-
warns- refugee- women- move- europe- are- risk- sexual- and- gender- based-
violence (accessed on January 20, 2016).
19. EUROPA, “EU-Turkey Agreement: Questions and Answers,” http://europa.
eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-963_en.htm (accessed on March 19, 2016).
20. EUROPA, “Hotspot State of Play,” http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-
we- do/ policies/ european- agenda- migration/ press- material/ docs/ state_ of_
play_-_hotspots_en.pdf (accessed on September 30, 2016).
21. EUROPA, “The Hotspot Approach to Managing Exceptional Migratory Flows,”
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-
migration/background-information/docs/2_hotspots_en.pdf (accessed on
October 20, 2016).
22. News247, “Λέσβος: Η Στιγμήτης ΕπίθεσηςτωνΧρυσαυγιτών σεΓυναίκες [The
Moment when Members of Golden Dawn Attacked Women],” http://news247.
gr/ eidiseis/ koinonia/ lesvos- h- stigmh- ths- epitheshs- twn- xrysaygitwn- se-
gynaikes.4273339.html (accessed on September 20, 2016); GiorgosPagoudis,
“ΓνωστοίΑκροδεξιοίμε Μανδύα… Κατοίκου [Well-Known Leftists Masquer-
ading… as Residents]” Efimerida ton Syntakton, http://www.efsyn.gr/arthro/
gnostoi-akrodexioi-me-mandya-katoikoy (accessed on September 13, 2016);
GiorgosPagoudis, “Το ΦαιόΑυγότουΦιδιούστο ‘ΚόκκινοΝησί [The Grizzly
Snake’s Egg in the ‘Red’ Island],” Efimerida ton Syntakton, https://www.efsyn.
gr/arthro/faio-aygo-toy-fidioy-sto-kokkino-nisi (accessed on September
20, 2016).
23. BBC News, “Schengen: Controversial EU Free Movement Deal Explained,”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13194723 (accessed on April 24,
2016).
24. The Dublin Regulation dictates that third-country nationals must request asy-
lum in the first EU member state where they arrive, remain there while their
claim is processed, and be returned there if they cross into another member-
state. Dublin returns to Greece were largely halted, however, after a European
Court of Human Rights 2011 ruling that Greece violated asylum seekers’ rights.
25. Keep Talking Greece, “Germany Insists on Sending Asylum Seekers back to
Greece,” October 2, 2016, http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2016/10/02/
germany-insists-on-sending-asylum-seekers-back-to-greece/ (accessed on
October 10, 2016).

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 Women and Borders

26. Tania Bozaninou, “Υπογράφηκαν τα Συμβόλαια για τηΧρηματοδότηση

τουΠροσφυγικού [The Funding Contracts for the Refugee Issue Have Been
Signed],” To Vima, April 19, 2016, http://www.tovima.gr/society/article/
?aid=793913 (accessed on May 23, 2016).
27. This is information that the researcher stationed in Greece acquired herself
during a visit to the Schisto Camp on July 25.
28. Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/europe/central-asia/greece)
and Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-
and-central-asia/greece/) have been particularly vocal, publishing numerous
reports.
29. The first legislative text concerning migration was introduced in Italy in 1986.
It is only since 1998 (286/98), however, that we have been witnessing a real reg-
ulation of foreign presence through the establishment of criteria for the access
and permanent stay in the country. In this regard, the current law regarding
foreigners is the Law 189, approved in 2002, which includes many of the pre-
scriptions contained in the preceding ones: Laws 40/98 and 286/98.
30. Danièle Carricaburu, De l’incertitude de la naissance au risqueobstétrical:
les enjeuxd’unedéfinition, Sociologie et Sociétés, Revue de l’Université de
Montréal, XXXIX, I, 2007, pp. 123–44.
31. Ruben Andersson, Illegality Inc. Clandestine Migration and the Business of
Bordering Europe, California: University of California Press, 2014.
32. The Partido Popular is the main right-wing nationwide political party, Ceuta
and Melilla being two traditional strongholds of the PP.
33. http:// www.elmundo.es/ elmundo/ 2012/ 06/ 12/ espana/ 1339497036.html
(accessed on September 12, 2016).
34. See Sistema de Información Multiterritorial de Andalucía (SIMA). http://
www.juntadeandalucia.es.
35. Comisión Española de Ayuda al Refugiado defend the right to asylum as a
universal right.
36. European Asylum Support Service, “Joint Press Release: End of large scale
pre-registration on mainland Greece,” https://www.easo.europa.eu/news-
events/joint-press-release-end-large-scale-pre-registration-mainland-greece
(accessed on August 1, 2016).
37. Ministry of Health, Government of Greece, “Υπογράφηκε η Κοινή Υπουργική
Απόφαση για τηνΠρόσβαση τωνΑνασφάλιστων στο ΕΣΥ [The Common
Ministerial Decision on the Access of the Uninsured to the National Health
Service Has Been Signed],” http://www.moh.gov.gr/articles/ministry/grafeio-
typoy/press-releases/3844-ypografhke-h-koinh-ypoyrgikh-apofash-gia-thn-
prosbashs-twn-anasfalistwn-sto-esy (accessed on April 4, 2016).
38. Elias Mossialos, Sara Allin, K. Karras, and Konstantina Davaki, “An
Investigation of Caesarean Sections in Three Greek Hospitals: The Impact of

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 Pregnant Crossings

Financial Incentives and Convenience,” European Journal of Public Health, Vol.

15, No. 3, 2005, pp. 288–95; Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, Epistemologies of the
South: Justice against Epistemicide, Oxford & New York: Routledge, 2016.
39. Pseudonyms.
40. Many patients present complications such as high blood pressure, pre-eclamp-
sia and placental irregularities, unreported and under-treated from lack, if not
absence of, continuum of antenatal care prior to their arrival in Lampedusa.
41. Sarah Mahler and Patricia Pessar, “Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing
Gender across Transnational Spaces,” Identities, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2001, pp. 441–59.
42. Gabriel Popescu, Bordering and Ordering the Twenty-First Century:
Understanding Borders, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers,
Inc., 2012.

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 4
Acknowledging and Addressing the Risks of
Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees
Across Borders: Escalation of Domestic
Violence in Refugee Populations

Melinda Wells, Suhail Abualsameed and Suse Prosser

It is unfortunately symptomatic of populations who have fled across bor-

ders that as time in exile grows, the risk of domestic violence and other
negative coping strategies such as transactional sex and early and forced
marriage also increase.1 This phenomenon has been noted in crisis after
crisis, and has been seen in a range of displacement contexts.2 While gen-
der inequality is at the root of gender based violence (GBV), conflict, disas-
ter and displacement create stressors and risk factors that can exacerbate or
increase the incidence of existing forms of GBV and trigger the appearance
of new forms of GBV in a given population. To prevent the rise in violence
in the aftermath of a crisis, human-made or nature-made, root causes (gen-
der norms) must be identified and addressed.
Internally displaced people and refugees can face many similar risk fac-
tors including trauma, loss of livelihoods, separation from families, and loss
of community and the traditional forms of protection families and commu-
nities can provide. However, upon crossing an international border, these

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risks are compounded by new risk factors, including loss of legal status, and
multiple forms of discrimination, oppression or exclusion based on, among
others, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability and/or linguistic, ethnic,
cultural or religious background. Further, refugees are often confronted
by prevailing negative stereotypes branding them as dangerous or in some
way infectious or socially undesirable, and/or the perception that their very
presence in the country poses a threat to scant resources that should be
reserved for the host population.3 Many refugees face a prohibition against
working in their host country, forcing them to navigate the risks and threats
associated with engaging in the informal economy where exploitation is
much more likely and the consequence of being caught and deported or
refouled may be a question of life and death.
Another important distinction between internal displacement and dis-
placement across international borders is the encampment approach to
refugee protection that was once the cornerstone of refugee protection, and
persists today. UNHCR’s 2014 “Policy on Alternatives to Camps” acknow-
ledges that the reasons for the existence of camps have passed and that, par-
ticularly over the long term, encampment can have a significantly negative
impact on refugees, engendering dependency, weakening refugees’ ability
to manage their own lives and perpetuating the trauma of displacement.4
In its 2016 report looking specifically at GBV prevention and response in
urban centers, the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) laments the lack
of movement on the implementation of such urban/non-camp policies and
approaches.5 In a study conducted across four cities, WRC observed a range
of GBV risks facing urban refugees, and the challenges in mitigating them.
Globally, 60 percent of refugees live in urban settings and this fact, along
with the complexity of assessing and mitigating risks related to the increased
incidence of GBV for urban refugees in homes, in public, in workplaces and
in schools, demand a community-based approach that addresses the par-
ticular GBV risks that urban refugee populations face. Key elements include:

• outreach to at risk populations aimed at allowing them to articulate

the risks they face, identify promising means of mitigation, and shape
policies and programing that will directly affect their security and
well-being;

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

• mapping of current and potential linkages between humanitarian actors

and a much broader range of host community nongovernmental organ-
izations (NGOs), governmental actors, and civil society;
• targeted actions to ensure refugees are provided with information tai-
lored to their risks and needs, including facilitating access to peer net-
works and supporting refugee-led support groups and CBOs.6

This context-responsive, community-based approach builds on that con-

tained in UNHCR’s Alternatives to Camps policy and would make a sig-
nificant contribution to mitigating the risks of GBV for refugees. Further,
as a community-based approach, it offers a more effective platform to dis-
seminate information, launch other GBV prevention activities, and grow
the knowledge base on risk factors and effective GBV prevention.
Evidence-based GBV prevention has a growing, if variable, track record
in countries in the global north7 and the global south,8 however both the
causes and means of preventing the rise in domestic violence specifically
in disaster and conflict-related crises have received little evidence-based
analysis. While good GBV prevention practice exists, “much of the evi-
dence for and learning from it has not been adequately documented or dis-
seminated…[which] has resulted in a lack of agreement on how to define,
prioritise, prevent and respond to gender-based violence in humanitar-
ian contexts.”9 From a positive standpoint, there has been a recent period
of growth that has “seen the development of a number of good practice
standards, guidelines, training resources and other technical tools and
materials.”10 Further, on a global level, there is growing evidence both for
the positive impact of existing gender equality programing11 and, based on
surveys of men’s gender-related attitudes and practices, for the proposition
that normative change is under way in many populations.12
In light of these developments, and knowing that the phenomenon of
escalating domestic violence is predictable, prevention should be possible.
If we look to a public health approach, when we know there is an increased
risk of communicable diseases where displaced people congregate, we work
to address the risk factors for disease before it occurs. The same should be
the case with increased risk of violence. If we limit our services to respond-
ing to families where domestic violence has started or been exacerbated by

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displacement, we can no longer speak of primary prevention, but rather

a secondary or tertiary model which seeks to limit further harm.13 Much
more can be done to bring what we know about the root causes of GBV and
the factors that exacerbate, and reduce, the risk of violence into the realm
of humanitarian response and to anticipate and mobilize to prevent a rise
in domestic violence from the moment conflict causes displacement within
or across borders.
In this chapter, we turn first to the root causes of GBV and will situate gen-
der transformation and the discourse on the engagement of men and boys in
gender equality’s evolving international legal and policy framework and in the
normative framework governing humanitarian intervention. In the second
half of this chapter, we present one component of the work of Collateral Repair
Project (CRP), a small community-based NGO working with urban refugees
in Amman, Jordan, as a case study on gender transformation and initial work
that may serve to identify and mitigate risk factors associated with the escal-
ation of domestic violence in the community CRP serves. The impetus for this
project came from CRP refugee volunteers and staff who were concerned by
reports from community members about rising violence in their families. In
response, CRP piloted a project on gender justice and raising awareness on
domestic violence to help engage community members in identifying gender-
related problems, with the belief that community-generated approaches to
address those problems will follow. The CRP model offers some possible early
steps for engaging refugee groups in community owned dialogue on GBV and
women’s justice that can be employed from the outset of a crisis by creating safe
spaces for purposeful engagement, dialogue and learning.

Gender Equality and Non-discrimination

Gender equality is a global goal, articulated in numerous United Nations
conventions and both the Millennium and Sustainable Development
Goals, however gender inequality continues to compromise the lives of
women and children in devastating ways.

Across much of the world, rigid gender norms, and harmful

perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman, encour-
age men to engage in high risk behaviors, condone violence

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

against women, grant men the power to initiate and dictate the
terms of sex, and make it difficult for women to protect them-
selves from either HIV or violence and to seek health services.
Indeed, a growing body of research shows that these gender
roles contribute to gender-based violence, alcohol, and drug
abuse and exacerbate the spread and impact of HIV and AIDS.14

Equality is one of the cornerstones of the United Nations human rights

system. The Charter of the United Nations, adopted in 1945, was the first
international instrument to refer specifically to both “human rights” and
to “the equal rights of men and women.” The doctrines of gender equal-
ity and non-discrimination, important when we consider the intersection
of gender with race, nationality, ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexual
and gender identity, disability, age, etc., were bolstered by the adoption of
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Various specific women’s
rights were further strengthened in subsequent international conventions
and declarations. However, a piecemeal approach proved insufficient to
instil the rights of women.
As a result, women’s rights activists advocated, and the Commission on
the Status of Women (CSW) led the push for a comprehensive, legally bind-
ing international instrument aimed at ending all forms of discrimination
against women. In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
Still, where violence against women is concerned, the international frame-
work and its implementation were found wanting.
Noting in the preamble of the 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of
Violence Against Women (DEVAW) that: violence against women is one
of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subor-
dinate position compared with men; violence against women is an obstacle
to the achievement of equality, development and peace and not only con-
stitutes a violation of the rights and fundamental freedoms of women but
nullifies their enjoyment of those rights and freedoms; that there has been
a longstanding failure to protect and promote those rights and freedoms
in the case of violence against women; and that some groups of women,
such as women belonging to minority groups, indigenous women, refu-
gee women and migrant women, female children, women with disabilities,

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elderly women and women in situations of armed conflict are especially

vulnerable to violence, the General Assembly concluded:

there is a need for a clear and comprehensive definition of

violence against women, a clear statement of the rights to be
applied to ensure the elimination of violence against women in
all its forms, a commitment by States in respect of their respon-
sibilities, and a commitment by the international community at
large to the elimination of violence against women[.]15

The UN gender equality framework has provided the “formal basis for
the international discussion of the position of women since the 1975–85
UN Decade for Women, which has been a key element in the story of glo-
bal feminism.”16 The role men and boys might play in achieving gender
equality generally, and more specifically in preventing violence against
women, emerged in international discussions in the 1990s.
The 1994 International Conference on Population and Development
(ICPD) in Cairo, the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing
and the landmark documents that came out of those conferences were,
according to Raewyn Connell,

driven by strong feminist movements and expressly recognized

that women’s empowerment and gender equality are central to
achieving greater social justice, peace and security, and sus-
tainable development. They were also significant for drawing
specific attention to the need to work with men and boys in
promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality.17

The ICPD called for greater male involvement in bringing about gender
equality in all spheres of life, including family and community life.18 The
Programme of Action of the ICPD stated that men share responsibility with
women for, among others, responsible sexual and reproductive behavior
and responsible parenthood and that “[s]pecial emphasis should be placed
on the prevention of violence against women and children.”19 Heralding
the discourse on gender transformation, the ICPD Plan of Action empha-
sized that “changes in both men’s and women’s knowledge, attitudes and
behavior are necessary conditions for achieving the harmonious partner-
ship of men and women.”20

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

The Beijing Declaration expressed governments’ commitment to

“encourage men to participate fully in all actions towards equality.”21
The language used and commitments made by governments marked a
“concerted shift in international [gender equality] discourse…. Beyond
just the nominal or symbolic involvement of men, the Beijing frame-
work envisioned male engagement as a necessary means to addressing
inequalities between women and men .”22 Gender-based violence was
among the areas identified by the Beijing Platform as critical for male
engagement.

Prior to Beijing and Cairo, major policy discussions and docu-

ments regarding gender equality had dedicated limited, if any,
attention to the role of men and boys…If and when men and
boys were featured in policy documents and discussions, it was
often as the implied or named obstacles to women’s struggle for
equality—rarely were they identified as a potential or necessary
part of the solution.23

In 2004, the 48th session of the CSW examined “The Role of Men and Boys
in Achieving Gender Equality.” The report of the Secretary General to that
session provides an overview of the role of men and boys in achieving gen-
der equality. Of particular importance is its focus on the socialization and
education of men and boys.24 In its Agreed Conclusions, the CSW echoed
Beijing in reaffirming the need for both men and women to work towards
gender equality and recommended continuing to expand the inclusion
of men and boys in key areas, including the elimination of violence. The
Agreed Conclusions are the first global-level policy statement focused on
the role of men and boys in furthering gender equality. The CSW stressed
the need to:
Encourage and support men and boys to take an active part
in the prevention and elimination of all forms of violence, and
especially gender-based violence, including in the context of
HIV/AIDS, and increase awareness of men’s and boys’ respon-
sibility in ending the cycle of violence, inter alia, through the
promotion of attitudinal and behavioural change, integrated
education and training which prioritize the safety of women
and children25

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 Women and Borders

Engaging Men and Boys in Preventing

Gender-based Violence
Gender equality is not an end in itself, but a necessary means to achieving
social, economic and political empowerment for women and ending vio-
lence against women and children. Why involve men in gender equality and
women’s empowerment? Put succinctly and pragmatically, one reason is the
growing recognition that “without men, gender interventions can only go
so far.”26 However, for feminist and pro-feminist thinkers and practitioners,
engaging men and boys is not without its risks. There is a concern that men’s
organizations, organized solely around the project of engaging men and boys
in gender-equality, shift the focus from women as “disproportionately affected
by inequality, discrimination and violence” onto themselves and conflate vio-
lence against women with the interests of men and boys.27 Although it is
beyond the scope of this chapter to present the many feminist and pro-fem-
inist perspectives engaged in this debate, one could summarize by saying the
question surrounding engaging men and boys in preventing violence against
women is not whether they should be engaged, but how? On whose terms?
As a partial answer to that question, the following are a set of feminist
principles and best practices the authors recommend to frame work with
men and boys:
(1) Conduct a gender analysis and culturally relevant context analysis,
which is essential to understanding the ways in which women and
girls’, men and boys’ experience pre- and post-flight are shaped by gen-
der in a given context.
(2) Create safe spaces in communities to enable men and boys, women
and girls to challenge inequitable norms and the power structures that
support them. As Promundo and others have observed, although men
continue to hold the power in most contexts, “men struggle to con-
form to the idealized and exaggerated gender norms for manhood.
One result of this is they don’t necessarily feel safe taking part in a
dialogue about gender equality or changing ideas of manhood.”28
(3) Promote gender consciousness when conducting trainings with staff
and with community members: Paulo Freire (1970) called it conscien-
tization, which “refers to individuals’ capacity to reflect on the world

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

and choose a particular course of action informed and empowered by

that critical reflection. This process … can promote personal growth,
political and social awareness, and activism. In turn, engaging in
activism and living in more egalitarian ways can create the conditions
for achieving greater gender justice and social justice.”29
(4) Be aware of multiple, often intersecting oppressions. Where train-
ing and behavior change are concerned, this leads us to ensure that
intersectional analysis informs the critical reflection mentioned in
the previous paragraph, including but not limited to consciousness
of socioeconomic status, race, disability, ethnicity, and sexual orienta-
tion. Where all aspects of program development and implementation
are concerned, respect for diversity must be mainstreamed.
(5) To the extent that it is culturally acceptable, adopt a “gender synchro-
nized” approach, which means to create an environment in which men
and boys, women and girls “actively strive to examine, question, and
change rigid gender norms and imbalance of power as a means of reach-
ing gender equity objectives.”30 This does not mean that all programing
is delivered across age and sex, rather, that we recognize that women and
girls also play a role in perpetuating harmful gender norms. Practitioners
can make decisions about what ages and sexes work together or separ-
ately based on the context and, importantly, in consultation with com-
munities themselves. The intention “is to engage young women and men
in confronting and changing gender inequalities in ways that are safe.”31
(6) Men and boys must be accountable to women and girls, and to their
broader community. As gender is about relations of social power, and
social structures and institutions are still largely dominated by men,
including in refugee/asylum contexts, “it is clear that men have a crit-
ical role to play alongside women and women’s rights organizations in
advancing equality and women’s rights, and in dismantling the gender
status quo. Efforts to engage men should explore channels of account-
ability to women and must be complementary to work with women
and girls to promote gender equality.”32
(7) Foster the belief that men’s conceptions of manhood can change. Many
men are already taking part in this change, but the challenge remains
in determining how to best encourage and support the process. “Those

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who wish to spark and support men’s evolution toward gender justice
must determine what stands in the way of men’s change, and what
types of advocacy and activism, social and economic policies, edu-
cational campaigns, legal reforms, and programs best facilitate this
process.”33
(8) Engender cultural competency of development and aid workers to
enable them to engage sensitively with the community in which they
work and mitigate any cultural safety risks. Ensure their understand-
ing of the multiple layers of cultures (for example local, international,
organizational, institutional) that are at play within each program or
action addressing gender.
(9) Understand the socio-economic contexts that create fertile breeding
grounds for unhealthy masculinities and the enforcement of regressive
gender norms. Poverty and economic class gaps lead to inadequate
access to quality education, personal development and eventually an
inability to achieve self-actualization. In societies where social sta-
tus, employment and wealth are markers of masculine roles, their
lack often results in men using violence against women and girls as a
means to reassert their power.

Normative Framework for Humanitarian

Intervention in GBV Prevention
and Response
“For the humanitarian community, the overarching challenge is to pre-
vent GBV, while standing ready to respond effectively when it occurs.”34
The Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) is the primary mechanism
for inter-agency coordination of humanitarian assistance provided by UN
and non-UN humanitarian partners. The IASC was established in June
1992 in response to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/
182 on the strengthening of humanitarian assistance. Its 2015 “Guidelines
for Integrating Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian
Action” (“IASC GBV Guidelines”) serve a standards/regulatory and pol-
icy role for GBV prevention and response within and between sectors.
One of its tenets is “Assume GBV is taking place” and indeed the 2015

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Guidelines address the predictability of GBV, including domestic violence,

clearly and concisely:

GBV is happening everywhere. It is under-reported world-

wide, due to fears of stigma or retaliation, limited availabil-
ity or accessibility of trusted service providers, impunity for
perpetrators, and lack of awareness of the benefits of seeking
care. Waiting for or seeking population-based data on the
true magnitude of GBV should not be a priority in an emer-
gency due to safety and ethical challenges in collecting such
data. With this in mind, all humanitarian personnel ought
to assume GBV is occurring and threatening affected popu-
lations; treat it as a serious and life-threatening problem;
and take actions based on sector recommendations in these
Guidelines, regardless of the presence or absence of concrete
‘evidence.’35

Where the exacerbation of GBV in a given humanitarian context is concerned:

Risks of various forms of gender-based violence (GBV) are

magnified. Factors that increase people’s level of risk can
include, among other things: the loss of shelter; armed attacks
and abuse; family separation; the collapse of family and com-
munity protection mechanisms; arbitrary deprivation of land,
homes and other property; marginalization, discrimination and
hostility in new settings; exposure to landmines or explosive
remnants of war; long-standing gender inequalities; and the
failure to address GBV prior to the emergency.36

According to the IASC, to integrate GBV prevention and mitigation into

humanitarian interventions, humanitarian actors must anticipate, context-
ualize and address factors at societal, community, family and individual lev-
els that may contribute to GBV. IASC stresses that although these factors
may contribute to GBV, the root cause remains gender discrimination and
gender inequality, which necessitate “not only working to meet the imme-
diate needs of the affected populations, but also implementing strategies—
as early as possible in any humanitarian action—that promote long-term
social and cultural change towards gender equality.” Such strategies include,
among others, ensuring leadership and active engagement of women and

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girls, men and boys, in community-based groups related to the humanitar-

ian area/sector.” The IASC impresses on humanitarian actors that they

must be aware of the risks of GBV and—acting collectively

to ensure a comprehensive response—prevent and mitigate
these risks as quickly as possible within their areas of oper-
ation. Failure to take action against GBV represents a failure by
humanitarian actors to meet their most basic responsibilities for
promoting and protecting the rights of affected populations.37

The IASC is clear on the strong humanitarian imperative to prevent and

mitigate GBV,38 yet in the case of domestic violence, little further guidance
is provided by the IASC Guidelines on how to act, pointing yet again to the
need for research and the development of evidence-based strategies and
tools for preventing domestic violence in emergencies.

Collateral Repair Project: Community-based Model

for Violence Prevention
The policy guidance clearly points to a well-documented pattern of escalat-
ing violence among displaced populations. A growing body of work calls
for early prevention approaches that engage women and girls, boys and
men, including in humanitarian contexts. Where, then, can we look for
concrete examples of work with refugee communities to raise awareness of
the increased risk of violence in refugee communities?
Jordan is home to well over 600,000 refugees.39 Much media attention
has been devoted to Za’atari Refugee Camp and to Jordan’s other smaller
refugee camps, but in fact, nearly 80 percent of the refugees in Jordan live
in urban areas, not camps. Many refugee families struggle with trauma-
related health issues, family separation, poverty, shifting gender roles, and
other stressors related to their status as refugees. Members of host commu-
nities are, themselves, experiencing pressures due to poverty, unemploy-
ment, increased competition for scarce resources, and a heightened sense
of tension within the community.
Hashemi Shamali is a low-income community in Amman that has
long been identified as a “poverty pocket” by the Jordanian authorities, and

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currently hosts a disproportionate number of refugees from Syria and Iraq.

Collateral Repair Project (CRP)40 is a community based NGO that has pro-
vided basic needs and psychosocial support to refugees since 2006. To ensure
that CRP never inadvertently contributes to increasing tensions between
the refugees and the Jordanians and Palestinians in the host community,
all services are provided based on need, not nationality or status. “We’re
a small, community-based center, with very little bureaucracy, so there is
really nothing stopping us from trying new things” explains Amanda Lane,
CRP’s Executive Director. “From the beginning, CRP has focused on meet-
ing emergency needs, but also on creating community. So the question is,
what does that community look like?” Responding to beneficiary requests,
CRP began offering English classes and computer training as well as a men’s
dominos night, and a women’s crafting collective. When CRP introduced
yoga classes, people warned Lane that refugees wouldn’t come. “They said
maybe a few women might try it, but for sure not the men. They will never
agree to take off their shoes and do yoga!” Today the Center offers weekly
yoga classes for men and women, and has recently added men’s and women’s
Trauma Release Exercise (TRE) classes. Male participants say the classes give
them a bit of peace, and the space to take their minds off their many worries.
In light of these successes, when women, and even some of the men in
the community, began to talk to staff about an increase in violence in their
homes, the CRP staff team felt it needed to take action. According to one
staff member “both the men and women were describing families under
increasing pressure: financial pressure, conflict-related trauma, frequent
bad news from home, and the ongoing stress of life as a refugee. Women
told us that the men needed help and support. And the men were telling us
pretty much the same thing.”
At first, the team looked for partner agencies to which they could refer
men. They quickly learned that while some resources existed for women
who were victims of violence, the resources for men were not there. “We
started a men’s circle, recruiting a mix of men who we know are leaders
in the community, and the men we felt really needed some help.” Using a
circle model, the group is led by the men themselves, with the support of
one of CRP’s staff, himself, a refugee. Two volunteers with experience host-
ing groups provide additional support and debriefing. “We are learning as

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we go, learning from the group, and from our experience trying to engage
men in finding healthy strategies for coping with stress, and shifting norms
in the community.”
The result has been a group that, nearly two years on, has grown due to
word of mouth referrals from its members. “No one else is listening to us”
says one participant when asked what the group means for him. The group
is one important aspect of the organization’s engagement of men, a critical
element of CRP’s evolving GBV prevention work.

Collateral Repair Project: Human Rights and

Violence Prevention
In the fall of 2015, CRP and the Government of the Netherlands partnered
on a new initiative designed to raise awareness of the rights of women and
girls, boys and men to live free of violence. Through this project, CRP has
engaged its staff, and men, women and teen girls and boys from the refu-
gee community on rights education and awareness, violence prevention,
healthy relationships, stress management, and promotion of non-violent
masculinities. The project has a bottom-up, community-based approach.
CRP’s experience shows that programming has the most impact when
beneficiaries define the issues, set priorities, and imagine possible solutions
within the context of their lives and community.
Having community members take a leadership role in address-
ing issues and articulating how to raise them in the wider community
helps ensure an approach that is culturally sensitive, and increases the
likelihood that the community will buy into the behavioral change
proposed. The CRP team was concerned that it not be seen as “para-
chuting” values and knowledge into the community that do not fit its
realities and culture. The approach developed reflects the belief that
behavior change does not happen by learning a new way to behave, but
rather by integrating an understanding of the full impact of current
behaviors and generating new attitudes, understandings, and behav-
iors from within.
Most of CRP’s staff and volunteers are, themselves, either refugees,
or members of the local host community. An important component of

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the project is to build the capacity of CRP’s staff and core volunteers to
understand women’s rights and gender justice and effectively and pro-
fessionally respond to families struggling with domestic violence. Gaps
in staff training were identified and addressed, including gender equity
in humanitarian assistance and work with refugees. A review of the early
phases of the CRP and Government of Netherlands project show that the
project addresses important needs, and elicits strong engagement from
participants. CRP is currently considering the best way to monitor longer-
term impacts of the project as well a means to move forward with pro-
moting gender justice and violence prevention work, which supports the
community to promote safe and peaceful families.
The training and engagement components of the project follow.

Staff and Volunteer Assessment

The project began with an environmental scan, and staff and volunteer
needs assessments. This focused on two thematic areas:

(1) Organizational Context: How do team members see the organization’s

engagement on issues of gender education and training, and the level
of comfort around discussing such topics? This thematic area also
looked at team members’ desire/readiness to engage in such a conver-
sation within the organization.
(2) Knowledge and skill base: Team members’ attitudes towards basic
principles of gender equity and non-violent relationships between
men and women were assessed. This thematic area also assessed per-
ceptions on gender-based violence in the local community.

Prior to this project, CRP’s staff training consisted of a general code-

of-conduct orientation and briefing on work with refugees, and did not
include an orientation or training for new staff or volunteers that specif-
ically addressed gender and gender-based violence. Although most team
members demonstrated a level of comfort discussing issues related to
gender and gender-based violence, some expressed the need for caution
due to sensitivities between people from different cultural backgrounds

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(Iraqis, Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians). There was an agreement among

all staff and volunteers both on the need for this project, and the desire to
be involved. Because the CRP staff are the face of the organization to the
public, as well as being influential members of the community in their own
right, their role as models for the attitudes and behavior change targeted in
the project was seen as very important.
Although most team members had a positive attitude towards gender
equity, some referenced what the facilitator described as “traditional/
religious” views on women and relationships. Examples included the
perception that women are weak, more emotional, need help and pro-
tection from men, or that women have responsibility for enabling men
to be violent. A clear divide between Arab and non-Arab staff and vol-
unteers was evident on this topic. Religion was a major reference point
for most Arab staff interviewed and it influenced their positions on gen-
der and equity, both positively and negatively. Team members who came
from the refugee community had a much clearer understanding of the
impact of the refugee experience on families, women’s empowerment
and the increased levels of domestic violence the community was expe-
riencing. For example, two male staff members who are also refugees
themselves had a ready understanding of the impact of injustice and
violence on their own lives, and as a result, messages around gender
rights and GBV prevention resonated with them. They were able to then
relate to the idea of connecting family health to the security of the com-
munity in general.
Iraqis and Syrians interviewed had different perceptions of the refugee
experience, women’s empowerment and gender-based violence, suggesting
that among refugee populations, different approaches and entry points are
needed. For example, women in the Iraqi refugee population were often
more vocal, active and “empowered” than the Syrian refugee women, and
as a result, conducting mixed gender groups was easier with Iraqis than
with Syrians. However, there is a wider cultural and ethnic diversity among
Iraqi urban refugees in Amman that can result in tensions between differ-
ent groups. The greater social cohesion among Syrian refugees provided
opportunities for education and mobilization work with less community-
building effort required.

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Identifying and Training Community Mobilizers

Based on the initial assessment, all CRP staff members were provided spe-
cific training on principles of gender, human rights and GBV prevention
as well as cross cultural work, organizational development and self-care. In
consultation with the staff, two four-day trainings were developed for two
groups consisting of 29 refugee men and women. From this group, 12 were
identified by trainers and staff as having the ability to mobilize others, and
offered additional training to enable those community mobilizers to pro-
vide further sessions to the community.
The newly trained community mobilizers varied in education, literacy
and life experience. While some had relevant experience in the past that
could help them run discussion groups and deliver educational content,
others did not. Given this reality, the goal was not to graduate professional
trainers within the scope and capacity of this project, as much as it was to
provide basic skills and tools that community mobilizers could use to engage
other community members in open conversations. These include session
curriculum and guides that offer a flexible platform for mobilizers to deliver
the content and messaging in a manner that fits with their own communi-
cation styles.
Syrian and Iraqi refugees from diverse backgrounds participated in the
trainings, ranging from late teens to people in their sixties. Participants self-
identified as Muslims, Christians, Sabe’a and Yazeedis. Members of other
religious groups may have participated without identifying themselves. All
trainings were conducted in Arabic and involved a mix of methods and
tools. Direct presentations on main topics and themes provided the gen-
eral framework of the training, with a number of interactive exercises and
breakout groups. The methodology ensured that there was sufficient space
for questions and answers, participants’ contributions and group discus-
sions. Three interactive exercises were conducted in each training to help
visually illustrate principles of gender, stereotypes, and the impact of lan-
guage and power imbalances in relationships between men and women.
A number of participant-generated exercises helped frame the topics and
relate them to the local context. For example, participants were asked to
work in small groups to brainstorm and present what they saw as the costs

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and benefits of gender inequality. The outcomes were then referenced and
built on throughout the training. This helped solidify concepts and ideas
discussed in the presentations and offered participants a sense of owner-
ship of their learning experience.

Training Community Mobilizers on Gender and

Gender Justice
The first four-day training, on gender and gender justice, covered the fol-
lowing topics:

• Introduction to Gender, Gender Based Violence (GBV) and Identity;

• Language and Gender;
• Principles of Gender and Stereotypes;
• Violence as a Gender Issue;
• GBV – Local and Cultural Context;
• GBV – Incidental Context (War and Refugee Experience);
• Role of Men and Boys;
• Challenges and Opportunities to Working on GBV Prevention;
• Cost and Benefits of Gender Equality/Inequality;
• Fatherhood/Parenthood;
• Impact of the Refugee and Forced Migration Experience on Gender
Dynamics and GBV;
• Self-Care for Men;
• GBV and People Living with Disabilities.

Key elements for engagement and participation were identified including

making time for questions and answers and participants’ contributions;
ensuring space for women’s voices; conducting group discussions; and
facilitating interactive exercises. Incorporation of participant-generated
content helped ensure that the learning was locally relevant. The goals of
the training included language and knowledge acquisition; listening to the
voices of others; embodying personal change/envisaging change in fam-
ilies and community; and combating social isolation.
Feedback was gathered from participants informally throughout the
training, as well as through structured “check-out” sessions at the end, and

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in an anonymous, written evaluation form. Some highlights and observa-

tions from the participant evaluations include:

• The training provided an opportunity to leave the house, engage with

others and feel useful, which is something participants highly valued;
• Most participants had never had the chance to learn and talk about
issues relating to gender and GBV;
• Many participants reported that they gained a new ability to have con-
versations in their family and community around healthy relationships
and gender equality;
• The interactive, semi-casual facilitation style was identified by many par-
ticipants as one of the elements that lead to the success of the training;
• Providing the opportunity for women’s voices to be heard during the
training (for example, to express how they experience street harass-
ment) was impactful, and served as practice for real life;
• CRP staff, who co-facilitated the sessions, valued the opportunity to inter-
act with beneficiaries and get to know their realities better and in person.
Community participants expressed appreciation of staff and the work
CRP does after getting to know them closely throughout the training days.

The quotes from participants’ anonymous feedback (translated from Arabic)

put forward their thoughts:
“The topic of this training is very important in these circum-
stances we live in”;
“It was a fantastic workshop that I benefited from a great deal in
a way I did not expect… I did not feel the time passing and wish
there was more days to continue presenting topics, our society
needs change”;
“At first we thought the time of the training is too long, but as
the first day went by we wanted more and looking forward to
coming back”;
“We learned and understood many new things about life that we
did not know about”;
“we got to realize new things although we live these issues every
day because of the well-designed teaching style”;

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 Women and Borders

“I will talk about what I learned with my friends and family and
try to influence them to create positive change… This experi-
ence was unforgettable”;

“I will be proud to convey what I learned here to my friends and

family… I learned a lot from the diverse experiences of partici-
pants from different backgrounds”;

“One of the best courses I had attended in Jordan, it made me

feel much better and left a positive impact that will help me con-
trol my behavior and how to interact with people from diverse
backgrounds.”41

Next Steps
CRP intends to continue the workshops and make them an ongoing part of its
activities with the goal of reaching more people and further developing com-
munity leaders’ abilities to engage with and present the material. CRP staff are
encouraged by the quality of the discussions that took place during the work-
shops, the enthusiasm and increased confidence of the community trainers
and, more generally, the enthusiastic reception of the project. Participants
say they are happy for the opportunity and outlet to express themselves and
engage in these topics, and affirm that they are relevant to their current lives.
The peer education/engagement component, in which the initially trained
community members take the knowledge and skills to their community using
the 20-session lesson plan has now been delivered twice. CRP is also explor-
ing strategies to keep the group that is already trained, engaged. This could
include working more intensively on trainer/facilitation skill-building.
In the longer term, this work is not just about awareness-building and
education, but also, and more importantly, developing skills to integrate gen-
der awareness in everyday practices and interactions. The project makes a
contribution towards shifting the dynamics in people’s daily lives, and link-
ing an understanding of gender dynamics to their well-being and that of
their community. Now that members of the community are learning and
engaging in these issues, what comes next? How can they begin to influence
those around them to adopt change? As a follow-up step, CRP is looking at

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

designing action projects and initiatives that give beneficiaries the opportun-
ity to implement the values of gender justice in practical, real life situations.

Conclusion
For many refugees, violence does not stop at the border. Once the dan-
gers associated with armed conflict are put behind, the risk of other types
of violence and exploitation linked to displacement and marginalization
increase for many. However, displacement contexts can also present an
opportunity for engagement and awareness-raising, including challen-
ging the notions of traditional masculinity. Refugees and other displaced
people, by necessity, are in a process of redefinition of identity, often tak-
ing on roles or responsibilities they may never have previously imagined.
Especially in contexts where they are prevented from working, as is often
the case in displacement across borders, many may have more time to
devote to exploring new ideas, and may welcome a space to come together
with others to share experiences, and seek support.
An important factor in the CRP project was that the organization already
had robust and well-known programming designed to address the basic sur-
vival needs of refugees in the community where it worked. Many people who
were involved in the project initially approached the organization with urgent
needs for assistance, and this served as the basis of their relationship with
CRP. Through this initial connection, a strong level of trust and engagement
with the community was built prior to the start of the project, which then
allowed CRP staff to engage beneficiaries in its psychosocial programming.
Another key element was the deep belief on the part of staff and volunteers
in community members’ own desire to heal and move in a positive direction.
The Collateral Repair Project pilot, along with the promising work being
done by some other international organizations, shows there is value in cre-
ating safe spaces to engage refugees, and, in particular refugee men and
boys, on the issues of gender equality and sexual and gender-based violence
during protracted humanitarian crises. Existing cultural norms and ideas
around issues of masculinity and power imbalances between genders can be
exacerbated by the stresses associated with displacement, including loss of
employment and status, and the sense of powerlessness many refugees feel.

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 Women and Borders

However, when properly approached these norms can also be challenged,

with the possibility of new, non-violent concepts of masculinity emerging.
In this community project, meaningful, respectful engagement is building
initiative and ownership we hope will allow the community to address the
issues of domestic violence families raised with CRP. We believe this is a
solid model on which to build community initiative and ownership for pre-
venting and responding to the violence that is too often present in commu-
nities whether displaced internally or across borders.

Notes
1. According to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (Guidelines for Gender-
Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings, IASC, 2005), the sever-
ity and incidence of gender-based violence often increases in the aftermath of
both natural disasters and humanitarian crises. With regard to the Syria crisis
see for example: Ghida Anani, “Dimensions of gender-based violence against
Syrian refugees in Lebanon” Forced Migration Review, No. 44, September 2013,
http://www.fmreview.org/detention/anani.html (accessed on August 15, 2016);
UNHCR, “Sexual and Gender Based Violence Prevention in Refugee Situations in
the Middle East and North Africa,” 2015, https://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/
download.php?id=9843 (accessed on August 18, 2016); UN Women, “Interagency
Assessment [of] Gender-Based Violence and Child Protection among Syrian
Refugees in Jordan, with a Focus on Early Marriage,” July 2013, https://data.unhcr.
org/syrianrefugees/download.php?id=4351 (accessed on August 18, 2016); CARE
Jordan, “Baseline Assessment of Community Identified Vulnerabilities among
Syrian Refugees living in Amman”, October 2012, https://data.unhcr.org/syrian-
refugees/download.php?id=1177 (accessed on August 15, 2016).
2. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC),
“Unseen, Unheard: Gender-based Violence in Disasters,” 2015, http://www.
ifrc.org/Global/Documents/Secretariat/201511/1297700_GBV_in_Disasters_
EN_LR2.pdf (accessed on September 3, 2016).With regard to disaster-related
displacement, the IFRC notes: “Researchers have found significant increases
in GBV after disasters in high income countries, including Australia, Canada,
Japan, New Zealand, and the United States; fewer academic studies have been
undertaken in other parts of the world. Overall, it seems that disasters tend to
increase the risk of GBV and that new forms of GBV can emerge in their after-
math.” (pp. 7–8) Based on its research, one of the IFRC conclusions was that
in some settings, “both domestic violence and sexual violence (assault, sexual
abuse, and exploitation) increase following disasters. In other settings, notably

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

where levels of GBV are already high, it is difficult to determine whether vio-
lence increased as a result of disaster.” (p. 8)
3. Women’s Refugee Commission, “Mean Streets: Identifying and Responding to
Urban Refugees’ Risks of Gender-Based Violence,” 2016. https://www.wom-
ensrefugeecommission.org/gbv/resources/document/…/1272 (accessed on
December 10, 2016).
4. UNHCR, “Policy on Alternative to Camps,” 2014, p. 4. http://www.unhcr.org/
5422b8f09.pdf (accessed on December 14, 2016).
5. Women’s Refugee Commission, p.4.
6. Ibid.
7. For example, in Canada, the White Ribbon Campaign “is the world’s largest
movement of men and boys working to end violence against women and girls,
promote gender equity, healthy relationships and a new vision of masculinity.
Starting in 1991, we asked men to wear white ribbons as a pledge to never com-
mit, condone or remain silent about violence against women and girls. Since
then the White Ribbon has spread to over 60 countries around the world.”
See http://www.whiteribbon.ca/. The Moose Hide Campaign, a First Nations’
initiated violence prevention campaign, whose goal is “to end violence towards
women and children.” Their solution: “To use our cultural teachings to moti-
vate and enlighten men to our indigenous ways of being ultimately changing
the cycles of violence in our communities.” http://moosehidecampaign.ca/,
Lebanon’s Abaad at http:// www.abaadmena.org.
8. For example, Uganda’s RaisingVoices at http://raisingvoices.org/; Brasil’s
Promundo at http://promundo.org.br/ (Spanish and Portuguese) or
Promundo Global at http://promundoglobal.org/ (Portuguese and English).
Regionally, for example: Sonke Gender Justice at http://www.genderjustice.
org.za/; Engender Health at https://www.engenderhealth.org/index-main.php;
and South East Asia’s Partners4Prevention, a joint program of UNDP, UNFPA,
UN Women & UNV at http://www.partners4prevention.org/; and MenCare at
http://men-care.org/.
9. Rebecca Holmes and Dharini Bhuvanendra, “Preventing and Responding to
Gender-Based Violence in Humanitarian Crises” (Overseas Development
Institute, Humanitarian Practice Network: 2014), p. 1. http://odihpn.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/02/NP_77_web.pdf (accessed on September 3, 2016).
In response to the above-noted challenges, the objective of the Network
paper was to map and critically analyze “good practice in preventing and
responding to gender-based violence in humanitarian contexts to support
humanitarian practitioners and policymakers to improve the quality of GBV
programming.”
10. Ibid. Note the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s 2015, updated version
of the Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian

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 Women and Borders

Settings, is a good example of such guidelines, although less so where domestic

violence prevention is concerned (see below).
11. See for example: B. Heilman, L. Hebert, and N. Paul-Gera, “The Making of Sexual
Violence: How Does a Boy Grow Up to Commit Rape? Evidence from Five IMAGES
Countries,” Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women (ICRW)
and Washington, DC: Promundo, June 2014, http://promundoglobal.org/wp-con-
tent/uploads/2014/12/The-Making-of-Sexual-Violence-How-Does-a-Boy-Grow-
Up-to-Commit-Rape.pdf (accessed on September 2, 2016); Instituto Promundo,
“Engaging men to prevent gender-based violence: A multi-country intervention
and impact evaluation study,” Washington, DC: Promundo, 2012, http://promun-
doglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Engaging-Men-to-Prevent-Gender-
Based-Violence.pdf (accessed on September 2, 2016).
12. Gary Barker, J.M. Contreras, B. Heilman, A.K. Singh, et al., “Evolving Men:
Initial Results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey
(IMAGES),” Washington, DC: International Center for Research on Women
(ICRW) and Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Promundo, January 2011. http://www.
icrw.org/ sites/ default/ files/ publications/ Evolving- Men- Initial- Results-
from-the-International-Men-and-Gender-Equality-Survey-IMAGES-1.pdf.
Michael Kaufman, “Engaging Men, Changing Gender Norms: Directions for
Gender-Transformative Action: MenEngag-UNFPA Advocacy Brief ” 2014, p.
4. https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/resource-pdf/Advocacy%20Brief-
%20Gender%20Norms-1.pdf (accessed on September 2, 2016). Starting in
2009 and 2010, MenEngage partners carried out large-scale household sur-
veys on men’s attitudes and practices. Led by Promundo and the International
Center for Research on Women, partner researchers, supported by UNFPA in
several countries, administered the International Men and Gender Equality
Survey (IMAGES) to more than 20,000 men and women in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India,
Mali, Mexico and Rwanda. (Subsequent surveys are underway in Malawi and
other settings. A similar survey, based in part on IMAGES, is being coordi-
nated in several countries in Asia by the UN project Partners for Prevention,
also in collaboration with UNFPA). The survey covers attitudes and practices
relating to men’s employment, education, childhood experiences, domestic
and parenting duties, ideas about gender equality, sexual relations, use and
experience of policies related to gender equality (IMAGES, 2011). Such data is
important for gauging men’s actual support (or rejection) of gender equality.
This allows for a realistic assessment of national attitudes and helps advocates
refine their messages and policies, as well as providing a baseline to measure
the impact of future campaigns and initiatives. The data suggests broad shifts
are underway in men’s relations with gendered social, economic and political
structures.

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 Risks of Gender-Based Violence that Follow Refugees

13. Canadian Red Cross, “Predictable, preventable: best practices for address-
ing interpersonal and self-directed violence during and after disasters,” 2012.
http:// www.ifrc.org/ PageFiles/ 94522/ ViolenceInDisasters- English- 1up.pdf
(accessed on September 2, 2016).
14. Dean Peacock and Gary Barker, “Working with men and boys to promote gen-
der equality: A review of the field and emerging approaches” 17–20 September
2012, Expert Group Meeting: Prevention of violence against women and
girls. Bangkok, Thailand. (2012), p.1. http://www.unwomen.org/~/media/
Headquarters/ Attachments/ Sections/ CSW/ 57/ EGM/ EGM- paper- Peacock-
and-Barker%20pdf.pdf (accessed on September 2, 2016).
15. UN General Assembly, Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against
Women, A/RES/48/104, 85th Plenary Meeting, 20 December 1993.
16. Bulbeck as cited by Raewyn W. Connell, “Change among the Gatekeepers:
Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena”, Signs, Journal
of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2005, 1801. http://xyonline.net/
sites/default/files/Connell,%20Change%20among.pdf (accessed on September
3, 2016).
17. Ibid., pp. 1801–25.
18. United Nations Population Fund, “Programme of Action, International
Conference on Population and Development” (ICPD, 1991).
19. Report of the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994)
(United Nations publication, Sales No. E.95.XIII.18), chap. I, resolution 1, annex,
para. 4.27. An overview of recommendations is available at: ww.un.org/women
watch/daw/egm/menboys2003/language.pdf (accessed on September 1, 2016).
20. ICPD, para. 4.24.
21. United Nations, “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Fourth World
Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development and Peace” (Beijing,
1995), paragraph 25.
22. MenEngage Alliance, “Men, Masculinities and Changing Power, A discus-
sion paper on engaging men in gender equality from Beijing 1995 to 2015”
(2014) p.18 (emphasis in original). https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/
resource-pdf/Men-Masculinities-and-Changing-Power-MenEngage-2014.pdf
(accessed on September 1, 2016).
23. Connell, “Change among the Gatekeepers,” 2005, pp. 1801–25.
24. UN Secretary General, “Thematic issue before the Commission: The role of
men and boys in achieving gender equality”; E/CN.6/2004/9; (Commission
on the Status of Women, Forty-eighth session, 2004). http://www.unhcr.org/
543b9ea66.pdf (accessed on September 6, 2016).
25. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Agreed Conclusions
of the Commission on the Status of Women on the Critical Areas of
Concern of the Beijing Platform for Action 1996–2009” (2010) para. 6(r),

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 Women and Borders

p. 136. http:// www.un.org/ womenwatch/ daw/ public/ agreedconclusions/

Agreed-Conclusions-English.pdf (accessed on September 1, 2016).
26. Sylvia Chant and Matthew C. Gutmann, “‘Men-streaming’ gender? Questions
for gender and development policy in the 21st century,” Progress in Development
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2002, p. 271.
27. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and
consequences, Rashida Manjoo” (Human Rights Council, 26th session, Agenda
item 3: 28 May 2014) (A/HRC/26/38). http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/
HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session23/A_HRC_23_49_English.pdf
(accessed on September 2, 2016).
28. Ibid., p.10.
29. Promundo, “Program H/M/D: A Toolkit for Action/Engaging Youth to Achieve
Gender Equity” Promundo, Instituto PAPAI, Salud y Género and ECOS, Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil and Washington, DC, USA: Promundo, 2013. p. 2 http://pro-
mundoglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Program-HMD-Toolkit-for-
Action.pdf (accessed on September 2, 16).
30. Ibid. p. 3.
31. Ibid.
32. Michael Kaufman, “Engaging Men, Changing Gender Norms: Directions
for Gender-Transformative Action”; (UNFPA & MenEngage, 2014), p.9.
https:// www.unfpa.org/ sites/ default/ files/resource-pdf/Advocacy%20Brief-
%20Gender%20Norms-1.pdf (accessed on September 2, 2016).
33. Ibid., p. 2.
34. IFRC, “Unseen, Unheard”, p.41.
35. IASC, “Guidelines for Integrating Gender-Based Violence Interventions in
Humanitarian Action (2015); p. 2. (emphasis in original). http://gbvguide-
lines.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2015-IASC-Gender-based-Violence-
Guidelines_lo-res.pdf (accessed on August 22, 2016).
36. Ibid., p. 9.
37. Ibid., p. 14 (emphasis omitted).
38. Ibid., p. 16.
39. For a general overview of the Syrian refugee situation in Jordan, see http://syri-
anrefugees.eu/jordan/; for more detailed data and information on the Syrian
refugee response in Jordan and elsewhere in the region, see “Syria Regional
Refugee Response” at http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php.
40. More information on Collateral Repair Project’s work may be found at www.
collateralrepairproject.org
41. Human Rights Awareness and Domestic Violence Prevention Project. Final
Report, Collateral Repair Project, 2016.

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 5
Trapped in a Cycle of Abuse and
Violence: A Case Study of Nigerian Women
in Italy

Carolina Montenegro

Introduction
Favour is a 9-month-old baby girl from Nigeria rescued in the
Mediterranean Sea by the Italian coast guard. The boat that capsized, left
dozens of people dead and many others adrift. Her pregnant mother died
during the shipwreck. Before the rescue teams arrived, Favour was taken
care of by a group of women survivors of the wreck. They took turns
holding the child for hours adrift. Hours later, safe on the Italian island
of Lampedusa, Favour became famous after a picture of her in the arms of
an Italian doctor became viral online. The tragedy of the unaccompanied
child moved Italy and quickly authorities initiated procedures to find her
a legal guardian. The Italian President visited Lampedusa and declared
Favour would become an Italian. Favour, however, is not the first one.
What is rare is this fortunate outcome, as the Mediterranean Sea becomes
an increasingly this dangerous “border,” especially for women and girls.
Trying to escape wars, poverty and hunger, they end up trapped in an
endless cycle of violence.

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 Women and Borders

According to the European Commissioner for Human Rights, in March

2016, for the first time since the beginning of the refugee and migrant cri-
sis in Europe, women and children on the move outnumbered adult men.
“While in 2015 about 70 percent of the population on the move were men,
women and children now make up nearly 60 percent of refugees and other
migrants crossing into Europe. This also means that more women and chil-
dren risk and lose their lives in the Mediterranean Sea and on the land
routes to Europe. Of more than 360 persons who died in the Mediterranean
in January 2016, one third were women and children.”1 In July, the United
Nations children’s fund (UNICEF) reported: more than 9 out of 10 refugee
and migrant children arriving in Europe in 2016 are unaccompanied. In
the first five months of the year, the total was about 7,009 children, the dou-
ble of the same period last year. Besides death, this situation may pave the
way towards abuse and exploitation as more and more separated children
cross the Mediterranean from North Africa, to reach Italy. Most of them
rely on human smugglers, getting a “free ride” on the boat in exchange for
work or sexual exploitation later.
The enticement of refugee and migrant girls into prostitution is one of
the most under-reported angles of the Mediterranean refugee crisis. This
chapter analyzes the issue, with a focus on Nigerian women and girls in
Italy. Many of them fled extreme poverty or Boko Haram attacks in Nigeria
and risked their lives to reach Europe. They represent one of the biggest
groups of migrants today in Italy subject to smuggling, human trafficking,
prostitution, abuse and violence. Lack of protection, medical care, housing
and employment are some of the big challenges for their integration in the
host country.
This complex situation makes one speculate about the fate of the
9-month-old baby from Nigeria. What would have happened if Favour was
a teenager or if she was a pregnant woman or even a woman all by herself?
What risks would she have confronted after crossing the Mediterranean in
search of a new life?
The aim of this chapter is to assess the problematic situation refugee
and migrant women and children confront after arriving in Italy. The
intersection of border, conflict and gender is the background in which this
study is constructed. It is primarily based on interviews conducted with

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experts and practitioners assisting victims of trafficking in Italy. By looking

at the challenges from the perspective of Nigerian women, this study aims
to mainstream the plight of refugee and migrant women.

Trafficking in Persons: Definition and

Worldwide Status
The United Nations emphasizes three elements while defining trafficking in
persons: the act, the means and the purpose. According to the Trafficking
in Persons Protocol, adopted by 160 UN member states, “act” means the
recruitment, transport, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons. The
“means” are threat or use of force, deception, coercion, abduction, fraud,
abuse of power, giving payments or benefits. The purpose is always exploita-
tion that can take various forms, including, sexual exploitation, forced labor
and removal of organs. Different countries and jurisdictions may define
these terms differently. The broad definition provides the states flexibility
to adapt their national legislation to criminalize trafficking in persons as a
specific offense. This, however, creates a diverse legal framework, leading to
the weakening of the judicial response to trafficking in persons.
In response to the urgency of human trafficking on the international
policy arena, several potentially important international legal instruments
have been introduced in the past decades, including the UN Convention and
Anti-Trafficking Protocol and the Council of Europe’s 2008 Convention on
Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. Several states quickly ratified
the Anti-Trafficking Protocol. The Anti-Trafficking Protocol, in particular,
represents an important step forward, by providing an internationally rec-
ognized definition of human trafficking as well as introducing three impor-
tant policy dimensions: prosecuting (criminalizing) traffickers, protecting
victims, and preventing the crime of human trafficking.2 Officially known
as the “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
especially Women and Children,” it is one of the three Palermo protocols
adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000. The United Nations Office
on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is responsible for implementing the pro-
tocol and offering practical help to states with drafting laws, creating com-
prehensive national anti-trafficking strategies, and assisting with resources

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 Women and Borders

to implement them. Furthermore, the protocol commits the ratifying states

to prevent and combat trafficking in persons, protecting and assisting vic-
tims of trafficking and promoting cooperation among states in order to
meet the objectives.
Although the exact magnitudes and dimensions of the trafficking in per-
son are unknown, available statistics suggest that human trafficking is one
of the most serious transnational crimes in the 21st century. According to
the US Department of State’s 2010 Trafficking in Persons Report, there are
more than 12 million victims of human trafficking worldwide. Interpol esti-
mates that human trafficking is a multibillion-dollar business, amounting to
the third largest transnational crime, following drug and arms trafficking.3
According to UNODC’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons (2014),4
trafficking in persons is a global phenomenon: between 2010 and 2012, vic-
tims from at least 153 countries were detected in 124 countries worldwide.
Trafficking for sexual exploitation is the main form registered in Europe
(66 percent), while forced labor accounts for 26 percent of the cases. A
great majority of the victims detected are females (49 percent). Women
and girls are not only trafficked for sexual exploitation, but also for forced
labor and other purposes. The percentage of children among victims is
increasing. They now comprise nearly one-third of all detected trafficking
victims in the world, a 5 percent increase compared to the 2007–10 period.
Out of every three child victims, two are girls and one is a boy.
The data from UNODC indicate women are involved in trafficking in
persons, not only as victims but also as offenders. For nearly all crimes,
male offenders vastly outnumber females. This is true for the case of traf-
ficking in persons as well. The share of women offenders in this crime
is nearly 30 percent.5 And, although 90 percent of the countries covered
by UNODC criminalize trafficking in persons and many countries have
passed new or updated legislation on the issue, impunity prevails. There
are few convictions for trafficking in persons.

Nigerian Women: A Special Case

Recently, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warned
that the trafficking of Nigerian women from Libya to Italy by boat was

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reaching a “crisis level.” According to IOM, from January to May 2016,

as many as 1,692 Nigerian women reached the ports of Italy, compared
to 738 in the same period of 2015. From January to 31 July 2016 the total
jumped to 5,346, out of this 1,616 were minors and 1,435 unaccompan-
ied. In the entirety of 2015, 5,633 Nigerians arrived in Italy compared to
1,454 in 2014. If the numbers are already staggering, the most worrisome
is that 80 percent of the Nigerians landing in Italy are victims of traffick-
ing, according to IOM. “What we are seeing at the moment in terms of the
numbers and scale of the criminal trade in Nigerian women is unprece-
dented,” said Simona Moscarelli, an anti-trafficking expert at the IOM, in
an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian.6 “Earlier also these
women were exploited but there was a possibility to pay off their debts and
become free. Now these girls are literally slaves and subject to terrible vio-
lence. The age of these victims is getting younger, to the extent that a large
percentage of those arriving now are considered unaccompanied minors
when they get off the boats,” she added. The age of these women is wor-
risome. Most are now between 15 and 24 years but declare themselves to
be over 20 even when their physical appearance clearly shows otherwise.
Experts claim that these young women are instructed to do so by the traf-
fickers in Nigeria. They arrive in groups of four or five and declare that they
did not pay for the trip and even show signs of recent violence. During the
trip from Nigeria to Libya and later in Libya, many suffer repeated physical
and sexual violence and arrive pregnant to Italy. According to IOM, these
women speak little and hesitate to talk to the Italian authorities. All of them
already have a phone number to call in Europe, provided by the traffickers’
network.
The women are deceived to believe they would be working in Italy. “It
is common that trafficking starts with the help of someone close to the
family, an aunt, a neighbor. This person pays for the trip; around 30,000 is
the price. The Nigerian women think this value is in naira (the local cur-
rency). Only later they are informed that the currency is Euro,” informed
Alessia Cassia, a cultural mediator at NGO AccoglieRete NGO in Syracuse,
Italy.7 Cassia has been working with the Nigerian women for the last four
years. Although many are aware or suspicious that this journey could end
up in prostitution, they are not informed about the conditions they would

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face in Europe; working in the streets or earning 5 Euros for a ride in a cli-
ent’s car (and under precarious situations related to hygiene, informal mar-
ket, violence and exploitation). By Italian law, prostitution is not a crime,
but the exploitation of it is. “These women trust people bringing them to
Italy. Most do not understand exactly the conditions. However, even this
is acceptable to many. Arriving in Italy through all possible ways and stay-
ing there irrespective of all the problems and exploitation is a solution for
earning money and supporting the family in Nigeria. The living in Nigeria
is not considered a good option. Even if there is 1 percent hope for a rela-
tively better life abroad, the women would opt for it,” said Cassia.
The factors promoting the trafficking of women in Nigeria include
corruption, poverty, illiteracy and unemployment. Nigerian researcher
Emmanuel Duru, argues that in Nigeria figures and statistics on the num-
ber of Nigerians involved in trafficking have been inconsistent but recent
statistics show that the number is increasing.8 From March 1999 to April
2000, about 1,126 trafficked women were deported from various countries,
according to the Nigerian Police Force and the Women Trafficking and Child
Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF). For Duru various factors are
responsible for the upsurge in human trafficking in Nigeria. These factors
include: social, cultural and religious practices of the people, weak institu-
tional and legal framework, official and institutionalized corruption, unequal
access to education; poverty and lack of legitimate and fulfilling employment
opportunities, increasing demand for foreign workers, globalization, lack of
access to legal redress, devaluation of women and children’s human rights,
perversion of cultural traditional practices and lack of information.
Known as the “Giant of Africa,” Nigeria has one of the largest popula-
tion and economy in the continent. Its 184 million inhabitants, represent-
ing 500 different ethnic groups, make the country one of the most populous
in Africa. The majority in the South of the country follow Christianity and
Muslims are the biggest religious group in the North. Since 2014, Nigeria
overtook South Africa as Africa’s largest economy. Inequality and corrup-
tion, however, continue to cripple the country and create huge disparities
between different regions of the country.
Most of the Nigerian women and girls arriving in Italy come from Edo,
Delta, Lagos, Ogun and Anambra regions. The regions are predominately

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in the rural South of the country and these women, in general, have little
access to education and belong to poor families. Edo state, in the South
of Nigeria, is the main point of origin of women and girls being trafficked
from the country to Italy. Although the region is rich in oil production,
corruption and inequality have been taking a heavy toll on the region’s
development. Estimates suggests that 85 percent of the Nigerian women
trafficked to Europe come from this region, renowned for being a very
poor area.
Even if the legal framework to fight human trafficking is fully in
place in Nigeria, compliance is rare. Implementation of the legal frame-
work and lack of will to prosecute and punish traffickers are considered
a major problem. It is nevertheless important to note that Nigeria offi-
cially recognizes international regulations, such as the UN Convention
Against Transnational Organized Crime (2000) and the Supplementary
Trafficking Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol, 2003).
Nigeria is also a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms
of Discrimination Against Women. It is also a signatory to important
international treaties on women’s rights, like the Maputo Protocol and the
African Union Women’s Rights Framework. Nevertheless, women con-
front generalized discrimination in a series of spheres of public life in
Nigeria. Forced marriage of girls and female genital mutilation are still
common practices, although the federal ban on both practices is in place
since 2015.9
Regionally, other legal mechanisms have been adopted by Nigeria for
the prevention of trafficking in person. This includes the African Charter
on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981), the African Charter on the Rights
and Welfare of the Child (1990) and the Protocol to the African Charter
on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the Rights of Women (2003). Also, the
1999 Constitution of Nigeria clearly stipulates gender equality, but custom-
ary and religious laws continue to restrict women’s rights. The disparities
between Nigerian women and men in terms of political, social, educational
and economic achievements are inseparable from other problems that hin-
der parity between the two genders. Such problems include low participa-
tion of women in politics, limited rights in terms of access to resources

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 Women and Borders

(land ownership and credit) and opportunities (education, training, occu-

pation), especially for the predominantly Muslim northern women. There
are also more than 250 ethnic groups with various customs, with many,
constraining women’s full participation in society.10
The challenge of gender parity in Nigeria is less in the provisions of
the Constitution but more their implementation. Nigeria falls short of the
desired result of according gender equality and equal access to opportuni-
ties to advance socially, economically and politically. Evidence abounds of
several forms of gender-based discrimination in Nigeria.11

Key Elements
Two key elements are particularly significant to understanding the traf-
ficking of Nigerians to Italy: the madams and the juju. Madams are older
Nigerian women, in general, themselves ex-prostitutes that after paying
their debts continue in the “business,” enticing younger women. Many of
them approach girls and women in Nigeria. They may even travel with
them to Italy to guard them during and after the journey.
“Juju is a voodoo ritual. All these rituals are to control the girls, to ensure
they do not run away from the madams. The girls are afraid of dying, get-
ting crazy, or putting in danger their families in Nigeria. Everything is run
and organized by Nigerians,” explained Cassia. Widely practiced in various
countries in West Africa, countries in Central America and Brazil, voo-
doo is a traditional religion or system of belief devoted to the cult of the
ancestors. In these countries, many of those who are officially Christian
or Muslim also incorporate some voodoo elements into their beliefs. For
some, voodoo is more than a belief system; it is a complete way of life,
including culture, philosophy, language, art, dance, music and medicine.12
Among the common practices of the voodoo are the use of herbs to cure
diseases, and sacrifices of animals (like chickens, birds or sheep). It is esti-
mated that 5–10 percent practice indigenous religious traditions.13
These elements were present even 30 years ago when the trafficking of
Nigerian women to Italy became known. The difference is that in the past,
women would arrive in Europe through regular flights, with fake pass-
ports provided by the traffickers. The instable situation in Libya allowed

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traffickers to cut the travel cost by using the sea route to Italy. Women,
therefore, embark on a dangerous 2,500-mile journey through Africa and
Libya to cross the sea and reach Italy.
At the Italian ports, a team from IOM, Save the Children and Italian
authorities try to intercept women and children that may have been traf-
ficked. If intercepted the victims are isolated from the bigger group of
migrants for interview and legal orientation. If they are declared to be
victims of trafficking they are offered to join special protection programs
run by the Italian government. “It is rare that they denounce traffickers
at the port itself…. Around 90 percent of the Nigerian women request
asylum, but most of the time(s) their appeals are rejected,” informed
Cassia.
IOM also works with special anti-trafficking teams in Sicily. “We
noticed that the incidents of Nigerian women trafficking are increasing.
So we established two anti-trafficking teams,” said Simona Moscarelli in an
interview for this study.14 At the ports, IOM works with cultural mediators
and legal counselors. “Their work is crucial. Most important is to speak
individually with the women and especially with minors. We have little
time to identify and talk with women, only during their arrival at the ports,
before they are transferred,” added Moscarelli. “But we cannot deal with
everything. Our team is still small. Maybe later we will be able to have
more people. There are also other NGOs working in Italy on this issue. Our
focus is on (the) capacity building,” she said.
While waiting for the asylum request acceptance, Nigerian women live
in reception camps. Unaccompanied children and families are sheltered
in special camps and cannot be sent back to their country of origin even if
their asylum process is rejected, according to Italian law. The process can
take months or even a year. For this period, the applicants remain cap-
tive of the trafficking network, which penetrates the Italian administration.
“They work as prostitutes on the roads during the day, when they can go
out of the camps. Even in the camps there are madams living with the traf-
ficked Nigerian women. Other Nigerians also try to persuade them to fear
the juju. Many girls escape from the camps; traffickers take them in cars to
the north of Italy or other parts of Europe. Traffickers use persuasion tech-
niques, like offering mobile phones, and Nigerian food. Authorities in the

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camp are supposed to report the irregularities, such as someone receiving

by post a mobile from France,” explained Cassia.

Limitations of the Protection Programs

For women confessing to being victims of trafficking, Italian law provides
extra protection through a special protection program. In practical terms,
it means women are isolated from their friends and family in Italy and
transferred to other areas of the country where they can be sheltered and
receive help to find a job and restart their lives. Although Italy has in place
effective protection programs for victims of trafficking, some major issues
raise concern. The first issue is related to the difficulties for victims of traf-
ficking to be inducted in the protection programs.
Besides fearing the consequences of the voodoo ritual, women fear
harm from the traffickers to themselves and to their families in Nigeria.
“Programs of protection are not only about security. They should promote
social insertion for the women victims of trafficking to become independ-
ent, to work and study. Many women prefer not to denounce their traffick-
ers because the protection programs can protect them but not their family
back home, and not even against the ‘juju,’ ” explained Oriana Cannavò,15
from Italian NGO Penelope.
The trafficked women can experience violence in various forms.
“Women fleeing abuse or violence may get trapped by brokers, recruiters
and traffickers. Women who have been trafficked may encounter abuse and
violence from their employers (e.g. violence towards sex workers or women
working in factories) and/or from their agents or brokers (e.g. using vio-
lence to prevent the escape). Unfortunately, women may also experience
violence if she has escaped her trafficker. She may encounter violence by
the authorities (e.g. abuse in detention centers, abuse by law enforcement)
or by service providers who control women’s movements as a method of
“saving” them. Violence can also be a risk when a woman returns to her
community, either from traffickers or from her community, because of the
stigma related to the trafficked women.16
To rebuild life far away from friends and the primary network of Nigerian
contacts that first helped to bring these women to Italy is also a challenge.

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“This is a global problem. Identifying the victims of trafficking is possible but

helping them to abandon this network system is the hardest,” said Moscarelli
from IOM. Some Nigerian victims of trafficking, however, were able to dis-
engage from the networks to rebuild new lives in Italy through protection
programs or by personal will. Those who managed individually to get out of
the prostitution racket were motivated primarily by weddings or formation
of new personal relations. Those who opted for the protection program were
counseled by NGOs working with trafficking in persons.
The story of a Nigerian woman named Princess Inyang Okokon is
emblematic. She was a single mother of three young children, when in 1999
she accepted an offer to relocate to Italy for work. She came to know the
woman who approached her at the restaurant she worked in Nigeria. The
deal was that she would be able to pay back her debt working in another
restaurant in Europe. She flew to London with a fake passport and a man
picked her up at the airport and drove her to Italy, where she ended up in a
house in Turin with other Nigerian women. The next day she learned from
her madam that she would have to work as a prostitute in the streets to pay
back her 45,000 Euro debt before being able to leave. After refusing to work
as a prostitute, Princess was severely beaten and hospitalized.
For the next eight months she worked every day and night on the streets of
Turin. Princess was threatened and beaten by Italian clients. She wanted to leave
this life but did not know how. However, things started to change when she
met an Italian DJ working in nightclubs in Turin, called Alberto Mossino. He
approached her and offered help to pay off her debts. Mossino kept his promise
and since then they have been partners in life and work. She and Mossino got
married. Princess sued her madam and won the case. The trafficker was sen-
tenced to four years of imprisonment. Mossino founded an NGO for assisting
victims of trafficking, PIAM. Later Princess also started working with him. She
is now a cultural mediator, reaching out to Nigerians in the streets and roads
of Italy to provide them with legal counseling, orientation and offer help and
medical assistance. When they started the association they were working with
10 to 15 women a year, now they work with 30 to 40 women per month.
“I decided to help the victims, it is my mission,” said Princess in an
interview for this chapter.17 “Our main objective is to help the women. We
provide them shelter, home, enrol them in school and find jobs for them.

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To save their lives from trafficking is our main job,” she added. According to
Princess, many Nigerian women work 5 to 6 years on the streets of Italy to
pay their debt. “As a cultural mediator, they trust me, and also because I’m
Nigerian. I always declare myself as a victim of trafficking and they imme-
diately relate with me,” she explained. “Our biggest challenge now is that the
Italian government decided to cut our funds. All the shelters are going to be
shut down in the Piemonte region. The assisted women will have no food,
no shelter. We are not having anymore the street units. The girls are call-
ing me every day and I do not know what to say to them. The government
authorities said the NGOs lost the public call because of technical faults on
our submission. However, we all are working for more than 15 years on the
issue of human trafficking in Italy. They should have called us, or alerted us,
if there was a problem,” said Princess. Presented in 2014 to the Council of
Europe by the Italian government as a model of best practices in anti-traf-
ficking initiatives, PIAM is now confronting financial crunch.
In the beginning of August 2016, the Ministry of Equal Opportunities
announced the result of a public call to finance anti-trafficking institutions
and allocation of resources. Among the measures was a cut of funding for
anti-trafficking programs in Sicily and in the other regions in the North
of the country. Only one program in Ragusa will continue to be financed,
while funding in Palermo, Messina and Catania will be ending. Likewise,
anti-trafficking organizations in Piemonte, Sardinia, Basilicata and Liguria
will stop receiving public financial support.
Many organizations working for ten years in the area had their projects
rejected, some for technical problems in the application and others over
alleged concerns of the government over the quality of the services provided.
However, the government shared little information with the organizations.
The NGOs and United Nations agencies warned that the Italian govern-
ment’s decision risked undermining efforts to create a national response to
the country’s human trafficking problem and it would severely jeopardize
assistance to the victims in a very sensitive moment of flow of migrants in
Italy. Furthermore, they recalled that according to the Italian law the protec-
tion of victims of trafficking has to be ensured at the national level.
The government defended the decision and declared that the amount
of resources for anti-trafficking programs and policies has been increased

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from 8 million Euros to 13 million Euros, but the funds would be distrib-
uted to a smaller number of service providers. Nevertheless, IOM repre-
sentatives expressed concern over the cuts and the risk of reduction of
places for trafficking victims in protection programs. “We definitely need
more shelters for the victims of trafficking in Italy,” said Princess.

Conclusion and Recommendations

According to Princess, the trafficking of Nigerians to Europe, and especially
Italy, has been increasing recently because of two reasons. “Traffickers are
using the migration routes through Libya as business. And because the
political and economic situation in Nigeria is very bad, it is easier for traf-
fickers to convince women, offer them a job or tell them about prospects of
earning lots of money in Europe,” she said.
Since 2011, Libya has been engulfed in an ongoing conflict that started
with popular protests to overthrow the president Muammar Gaddafi.
Violence, instability and a lack of a united government has turned Libya
into a hub for traffickers of all kinds. Arms, drugs and people have been
systematically smuggled from Africa to Europe through Libya. Most of the
trafficking takes place in the Mediterranean, via crossings from Libya to
the Italian coast. Most testimonies collected from Nigerian women cross-
ing the sea to Europe involved passages through Libya.
Princess stressed the fact that there is no international program to raise
awareness about the risks and dangers of trafficking in persons in the coun-
tryside of Nigeria. “Most of these women and girls arriving in Europe are from
rural areas, they have little education and they have no access to no information.
There is no TV and few radios. In 2008, IOM organized a program in Nigeria to
raise awareness about the risks of trafficking and being exploited as a prostitute
in Europe and it worked, the trafficking was reduced then,” she recalled.
Although powerful, public awareness campaigns about trafficking have
been under scrutiny from experts.

Most of these campaigns have a strong focus on women, chil-

dren, or both. The messages are often based on ideas about
women’s vulnerability rather than a gender-based analysis of
the issue. Concerns have been raised over the type of message

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communicated in anti-trafficking public campaigns, specifically

confusing sex work with trafficking and the theme of “victim-
hood” that is displayed on posters, in print and visual media, in
commercials, and movies, these campaigns capture only certain
elements of women’s stories. The traditional “helpless/hopeless
victim” storyline that is communicated in these campaigns very
often leaves out other potential storylines, such as how a traf-
ficked person decided to migrate, how she resisted exploitation,
or how she survived, escaped and recovered.18

While the “victimhood” appeal can catch media and fundraising attention,
it focuses mostly on violence and specific cases, not dealing with the bigger
picture or the reasons behind the trafficking, as for example the lack of migra-
tion opportunities for working-class women. The use of radicalized women in
Western anti-trafficking public awareness campaigns also provides a socially
acceptable way to sustain ideas about women’s vulnerability, by defining a cer-
tain type of women in need of assistance from women in wealthier countries,
e.g. female victims from the “third world” needing rescue.19
Another important aspect of some media or campaigns is that the abuses
suffered by the trafficking victims can be exposed with details but they are
not so commonly identified as human rights violations. A human rights-
based approach can be more empowering for trafficked persons and includes
a more holistic approach to human needs (e.g. right to livelihood, right to
health) so it is puzzling why a human rights-based approach is not embraced
in public awareness campaigns. Trafficked persons may be able to exercise
their power and agency in a human rights-based framework. A human rights-
based approach can also maintain the focus on redressing the wrongs done
to a person rather than a protective approach’s focus on what makes certain
persons weaker or more vulnerable. A protective approach can perpetuate
the pattern of doing something “to” a person whereas a human rights-based
framework allows more space for people to assert what they are entitled to.20
For Princess, grassroots awareness is important.

We need to work in Nigeria. Let’s go to schools, let’s go to mar-

kets in rural areas of Nigeria. They need our voices. We need to
have operators working on the ground, the same way the traf-
fickers have; they map regions, they know the people and their

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needs. Maybe 50 percent of the women and girls would decide

not to leave for Europe, and that would be a big change.

Other crucial steps to be taken on fighting trafficking of Nigerian

women are to encourage more victims to offer testimony, improve assis-
tance and to increase awareness and education efforts on the issue in Italy.
There is a lack of employment opportunities being offered to the Nigerian
women by the Italian authorities. Hence, it is still far from an incentive for
them to abandon their prostitution work. Princess suggested

The Italian police is doing their job but we have to make it bet-
ter. The criminals have good lawyers, they know their way out.
The women have to identify more traffickers that is why it is
urgent to employ more mediators to talk with them during the
entry in Italy, to identify as fast as possible the smugglers and
the madams. Another important question is: what are we offer-
ing the victims? The traffickers are offering money, job oppor-
tunities, and perspectives. Italy should also offer access to jobs,
because even if they receive a smaller salary they would have a
life of peace and dignity and they would understand that money
is not everything. Something else to be done is sexual education
in Italy to reduce trafficking and prostitution. There is traffick-
ing because there is a demand for prostitution.

Deterring the traffic of Nigerian women to Italy requires commit-

ment and political will in a holistic manner, at three important pol-
icy dimensions, as detailed first in the UN Anti-Trafficking Protocol:
prosecuting traffickers, protecting victims and preventing the crime of
human trafficking. It means that, in the case of Italy, the government
should envisage concerted solutions and alternatives in close partnership
with the actors on the ground, the NGOs and local associations assist-
ing victims on a daily basis across the country. Furthermore, improving
and expanding protection programs for women victims of trafficking is
urgently recommended, given the constant increase of migrants in Italy
in the last two years. To guarantee a regional coverage of the anti-traf-
ficking programs it is also of ultimate importance for the First National
Plan against Trafficking21 (adopted by the Italian government in February
2016) to be fully implemented. NGOs and organizations assisting the

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victims of trafficking in Italy should assure that their services are in

full compliance to international standards and laws. They should also
increase activities to approach Nigerian women working as prostitutes.
There is also a need to actively provide legal counseling and assistance
to victims of trafficking during their arrival at the port and their stay at
camps for asylum-seekers. The National Commission judging the asylum
requests should enforce a special procedure (of identification and infor-
mation-sharing with the interviewers about the protection programs)
concerning Nigerian women, specifically, given their confirmed situation
of risk and vulnerability as victims of trafficking. This special procedure
should be applied on a fast-track manner especially during the summer,
the period in the year when Italy records the highest increase in migrant
arrival via sea.
The role of UNODC and IOM to safeguard international laws and
standards on the fight against trafficking in persons is crucial. They should
be promoted by the Italian government, especially regarding the monitor-
ing and early identification of victims of trafficking during arrival of res-
cue boats and later in the camps, where asylum-seekers live for up to one
year waiting for their case to be judged. Special attention should be paid to
Nigerian girls being trafficked to Italy, as they are vulnerable to the same
prostitution and exploitation networks Nigerian women are susceptible. In
this context, stronger partnerships with UNICEF (UN fund for children)
and international organizations such as Save the Children are highly recom-
mended, not only in terms of monitoring but also in relation to providing
assistance and care. It is important to note that local NGOs assisting migrant
and refugee children have been facing severe financial and human resources
constraints for the last two years, especially in Sicily, where the largest num-
ber of reception centers for minors are located. To date, the Italian legis-
lation does not have a national reception system for minors, even though
there is already one for migrant and refugee adults arriving in the country.
The Italian government should also consider supporting and imple-
menting long-term policies for fighting trafficking, based on prevention
and awareness, in close collaboration with the Nigerian and Libyan gov-
ernments. While the lack of a unified and internationally recognized gov-
ernment in Libya still poses a challenge to establish dialogue, Nigeria has

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been consolidating its relations with Europe and with Italy on many fronts
in the last few years, especially on economic terms, which in turn has pro-
vided room for closer relations and exchanges in the political sphere.

Notes
1. “Human rights of refugee and migrant women and girls need to be better pro-
tected.” See: http://www.coe.int/be/web/commissioner/-/human-rights-of-refu-
gee-and-migrant-women-and-girls-need-to-be-better-protected (accessed on
July 23, 2016).
2. Seo-Young Cho, Axel Dreher, Eric Neumayer. “Determinants of Anti-
Trafficking Policies: Evidence from a New Index,” The Scandinavian Journal of
Economics, Vol. 116, No. 2, April 2014, pp. 429–54.
3. Ibid.
4. UNODC, “Global Report on Trafficking in Persons,” See more at: https://www.
unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/GLOTIP_2014_full_report.
pdf (accessed on July 30, 2016).
5. Ibid.
6. See more at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/07/
nigeria-trafficking-women-prostitutes-italy (accessed on July 26, 2016).
7. Personal interview, August 5, 2016.
8. Emmanuel Joseph Chukwuma Duru and Ufiem Maurice Ogbonnaya,
“Combating human trafficking in Nigeria: An Evaluation of State Policies
and Programmes,” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 3,
September 2012, pp. 161–4.
9. CM: National Population Commission, Demographic and Health Survey
Survey 2013, Nigeria, 2014, p. 345.
10. Chinwe R. Okoyeuzu, P. Egbo Obiamaka, J. U. J. Onwumere, “Shaping the
Nigerian Economy: The Role of Women,” Acta Universitatis Danubius.
Œconomica, Vol. 8, No. 4, September 2012, pp. 15–24.
11. Ibid.
12. BBC, “The reality of voodoo in Benin” (11/18/2011). See http://www.bbc.com/
news/world-africa-15792001 (accessed on July 24, 2016).
13. “Nigeria,” Harvard Divinity School, https://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/nigeria-over-
view (accessed on March 23, 2017).
14. Personal interview, August 8, 2016.
15. Personal interview, August 11, 2016.
16. GAATW, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, Beyond Borders:
Exploring Links between trafficking and Gender. Series 2010. See http://www.
gaatw.org/publications/WP_on_Gender.pdf (accessed on July 24, 2016).

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 Women and Borders

17. Interview by phone, Italy, August 23, 2016.

18. GAATW.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. “Primo Piano nazionaled’azionecontro la tratta e il grave sfruttamentodegliesseri-
umani.” http://www.pariopportunita.gov.it/images/Piano%20nazionale%20di%
20azione%20contro%20la%20tratta%20e%20il%20grave%20sfruttamento%20
2016%202018.pdf (accessed on July 24, 2016).

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 6
Unhindered Flow of Gendered
Suffering through the India-Nepal Open
Border: Trafficking and Commercial Sexual
Exploitation

Seema Shekhawat

The border was calm, but busy when we crossed it. We were
three school-going girls with two men. All three of us dreamt
(of) a good life – getting a dignified job in India, earning good
money, coming back to our family, and getting married to rich
men and living a settled life. None of our dreams turned real.
Forget getting a dignified job, now I can never go back to my
family and get married…. I don’t know the whereabouts of the
other two girls.1

The case of a foreign diplomat in India sexually abusing his domestic help
of Nepalese origin in 2015 highlighted a crucial but often less-focused
issue of women trafficking through peaceful and open international
borders. Thousands of women are trafficked each year through borders,
which may not necessarily be contested or violent, and, the majority of
these women are forced to join the much-loathed but flourishing industry

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of commercial sex. In Asia, India has emerged both as a destination as

well as transit for the trafficked women for commercial sexual exploit-
ation. India is an infamous destination for the trafficked women forced
into commercial sex, mainly from two neighboring countries- Nepal and
Bangladesh. And, consequently, India is also an infamous destination for
sex tourism.
The porous border between India and Nepal witnesses smuggling,
trafficking and cross-border crime, which not only affect the relations
between the two countries but also wreaks havoc for various vulnerable
groups, particularly women. Arguably, the open border can be character-
ized as “conduit for dehumanizing women,” keeping in mind the unre-
strained flow of the trafficking and the consequent suffering and stigma
the women undergo. Trafficking through the open border, and forcing
vulnerable women to engage in commercial sex, has become a low-risk
and high-profit business. These women are mostly sold to brokers in
exchange for a meager sum, who in turn sell them to Indian brothels at
exorbitant rates. The consequences for these trafficked women are life-
long. Notably, many of these women blame the open border for their suf-
fering. By documenting the narratives of the Nepalese women crossing
an open border to become sex workers, this chapter aims to broaden the
prevailing discourse on borders and violence. It contends that amidst the
discourse of a borderless world, it is crucial to understand that an open
border can equally be a tormentor. It argues that the intersection of gen-
der with border and violence in the case of India-Nepal is instructive for
understanding the complex nature of borders in this part of the world.
It further makes a case for India and Nepal to jointly address a critical
humanitarian issue emanating from a peaceful and open international
border.
This chapter is a product of the narratives collected over the years due
to my sustained interest in this issue, following an unforgettable encounter
during a train journey in 2012. In this qualitative study, I have primarily
relied on the informal interactions, and formal, unstructured interviews in
person and by phone. Keeping in mind the sensitivity of the topic, it was
not easy to identify the respondents and, more so, to know their stories
even after identifying them.2

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 Trafficking and Commercial Sexual Exploitation

India-Nepal Border: The Openness

The modern-day Indo-Nepal economic and political relations can be
majorly traced to the Indo-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship of
1950 and related documents. The Treaty allowed free movement of
people and goods between the two countries and called for close col-
laboration on matters of defense and foreign policy. Article 7 of the
Treaty read: “The Governments of India and Nepal agree to grant, on
reciprocal basis, to the nationals of one country in the territories of
the other the same privileges in the matter of residence, ownership of
property, participation in trade and commerce, movement and other
privileges of a similar nature.” 3 The Treaty, however, did not clearly
define the procedures for the regulation of the international border and
movements across it.
The socio-cultural, ethnolinguistic similarities are inevitably pro-
nounced across the Indo-Nepal border; hence, any distinction becomes
difficult in many places. The access is extremely easy and interaction,
hence, is frequent. The citizens live and work in the other country without
bothering about the physical boundaries, which exist de jure but not de
facto, at least for the people. Crossing the border is central to the lives of
many Nepalese and Indians as they move back and forth without bothering
about immigration issues. For a considerable number of people in India
and Nepal, the open border is, in fact, the lifeline. Scores of people from
nearby places cross the border every day to meet their relatives, to go to
their jobs, for marketing and many other activities. In fact, the number
of local people crossing the border is noticeably higher than the travelers
from outside.

The Problematique
The open nature of the Indo-Nepal border has recently been subject to
increasing scrutiny due to the growing reports of misuse of the open border.
The ever-increasing number of security personnel deployed on the either
side to keep a greater vigilance is an indication of an open, desecuritized,
border becoming resecuritized. Ironically, the increasing deployment of

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forces has not able to prevent misuse. The illegal movement of people and
goods, even dangerous ones – violent extremists and weapons – is not
uncommon. The recent reports in this context are quite revealing wherein
it is contended that the terrorists are using the open Indo-Nepal border
to their advantage. The developments raise the question whether a closed
border is better in this era of growing global violence with terrorist net-
works making use of every means, including open and flexible borders, to
their advantage.
The issue of a closed vs open border in the context of India and Nepal
has become a matter of debate with many scholars and even common
people arguing in favor of a closed border to ensure state security. While
researching for this chapter, my thoughts swung like a pendulum on
whether I favor an open or a closed Indo-Nepal border. As a student of
Political Science, I studied and even argued in favor of flexible borders
across South Asia while answering essay-type examination questions.
The threat of terrorism has increasingly become an issue of concern for
South Asian states and even for states across the globe, and this devel-
opment has strengthened the argument in favor of closed borders.
However, there are other threats, some of which are of serious concern
for humanity, and need to be raised in while debating the issue of a
closed vs open border.
There is no dearth of literature on how open borders pose a threat to
the economic and political stability of a state. The issue of human traffick-
ing is also the focus of many studies. The case of human trafficking through
India-Nepal border has been an area of concern as well as research for
quite some time. Smuggling in contraband items is also a major issue as far
as the border under scrutiny is concerned. However, illegal smuggling of
goods and people are two different issues. The smuggling of goods, drugs,
arms, movement of criminals and terrorists are issues of major concern for
states. For this chapter, I contend that the smuggling of people, or what is
widely known as trafficking, is not only illegal but also inhumane, and it
becomes further worse when an open border, which most of us cherish in
this era of globalization and liberalization, becomes a facilitator. The issue
of human trafficking needs specific attention in the context of the openness
of Indo-Nepal border.

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Human Trafficking
Despite being widely recognized as a case of a human rights violation,
human trafficking has emerged as an ever-growing global menace. It is one
of the world’s largest organized crimes along with drugs and arms trafficking.
Bechard termed it as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world in the
mid 2000s and the trend has not changed.4 “The international trade in human
beings is on the increase, and the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of
women and girls for forced prostitution is one of the most difficult to fight,”
argues Deane.5 Human trafficking is a multi-dimensional threat – depriving
the victims of their basic rights and freedom, leading to their exploitation in
multiple ways, with life-long physical and psychological implications. It also
propels global health risks of deadly diseases, and fuels organized crime to
the extent of threatening security of states. A report details, “Human traf-
ficking has a devastating impact on individual victims, who often suffer
physical and emotional abuse, rape, threats against self and family, and even
death. But the impact of human trafficking goes beyond individual victims; it
undermines the health, safety, and security of all nations it touches.”6
The United Nations defines trafficking as:

illicit and clandestine movement of persons across national and

international border, slavery from developing countries and
some countries with economies in transition, with the end goal
of forcing women and children into sexually or economically
oppressive and exploitative situations for the profit of recruiters,
traffickers and crime syndicates, as well as other illegal activities
related to trafficking, such as forced domestic labor, false mar-
riages, clandestine employment and false adoption.7

The international organization also expressed “its grave concern over

the worsening problem of trafficking, particularly the increasing syndica-
tion of the sex trade and the internationalization of the traffic in women
and girl children.”8 Trafficking is largely understood as the procurement of
people through improper means including, but not limited to, deception,
force, or fraud, with the goal being exploitation. Trafficking, hence, involves
two acts: the means used to procure people and the goal. These two inter-
related acts, while helping the traffickers to make good money, ruin lives

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of the trafficked, especially the ones forced to get involved in selling their
bodies, with most of the time, irreparable physical, psychological and social
consequences.
Human trafficking is a global concern with borders in conflict regions
facilitating sustenance of this inhuman act in a highly condemnable way,
argues a United Nations report. This ever-growing instance calls upon the
states to develop new approaches, warned a United Nations rights expert.
“Trafficking in people in conflict situations is not a mere possibility but
something that happens on a regular basis,” the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, told
the United Nations General Assembly during the presentation of her
report. She further argued:

Conflicts always create a favourable situation for human traf-

fickers… As institutions break down, the protection normally
offered by families and communities is destroyed. Organized
criminal groups can operate with impunity, and people are
impoverished or displaced…. Traffickers target vulnerable
people and offer them an opportunity to leave the country.
However, this places people at high risk of sexual or labour
exploitation, as they are compelled to repay the traffickers in
order to continue their journeys.9

The Special Rapporteur talked about the need to implement the dec-
laration that which was agreed upon earlier at the New York summit on
migrants and refugees. The summit called for the establishment of safe
channels for human movement across the borders to check trafficking and
exploitation. The report of the Special Rapporteur brought into the fore-
front, the link between conflict and trafficking. This is also a subject of
concern for the International Organization for Migration, which claimed
that more than 70 percent of refugees and illegal migrants reaching Europe
from North Africa become victims of exploitation, primarily human traf-
ficking.10 With the substantial increase in vulnerabilities during conflict
situations, trafficking becomes easy and frequent. However, the issue of
trafficking transcends conflict situations. Not only do the conflict-infested
fragile borders facilitate this human tragedy; the peaceful, largely settled
international borders also need to be critically investigated in this context.

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And, the Indo-Nepal border is a case in point. The brutal and predatory
nature of this open border as far as human trafficking is concerned is all
perceptible.
Millions of people are trafficked annually across international borders,
peaceful or contested, violent or silent. A recent report rightly contends,
“Victims are trafficked along a multitude of trafficking flows; within coun-
tries, between neighbouring countries or even across different continents.
More than 500 different trafficking flows were detected between 2012 and
2014.”11 The majority of those trafficked are women. According to Rice,
“Trafficking in persons is a modern-day form of slavery, a new type of
global slave trade. Perpetrators prey on the most weak among us, primar-
ily women and children, for profit and gain. They lure victims into invol-
untary servitude and sexual slavery.”12 Trafficking is a gendered problem
even though men and boys too become victims of this global menace.
Women and girls are primary victims of trafficking worldwide owing to
their socially vulnerable status in almost all societies, developing or devel-
oped, with varying intensity. Poverty continues to be a primary factor con-
tributing towards a person’s vulnerability to being trafficked, with porous
borders lavishly facilitating the unabated continuation of this inhuman
activity. The victims are trafficked to become sex workers, domestic serv-
ants, beggars, factory workers in hazardous situations, mine workers, and
whatnot. And, women are forced to be involved in sex work. Even while
human trafficking in itself is a heinous crime, what is arguably considered
worse is sex trafficking. Sexual exploitation is the most common form of
human trafficking, followed by forced labor. Sex trafficking may be com-
monly defined as the usage of coercion or deception to engage vulnerable
victims in commercial sex activities.
The India-Nepal border is one of the busiest borders as far as traf-
ficking for commercial sex is concerned. There are no reliable statistics
available regarding the number of trafficked women for commercial sex
through this open border. Generally, it is estimated that between 5000
to 10,000 Nepalese women are annually trafficked into India to sell their
bodies. Some estimates even suggest that about 50,000 Nepalese women
are trafficked to Indian brothels each year. Estimates aside, it remains a
fact that the poverty-stricken people of Nepal consider it an easy way

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out to enter India for livelihood through an open border, but they are
actually duped by the traffickers. Even though poverty continues to be
a major factor facilitating the trafficking, it becomes worse with natural
disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The vulnerability of vulnerable
demographies, particularly women and children, increases during the
times of human-made conflict situations and during times of natural
disasters. Trafficking becomes easier and if there is an open border, such
as in the case of India-Nepal, then it becomes more lucrative and risk-
free. According to reports, the aftermath of the earthquake in Nepal in
2015, the trafficking business witnessed a sharp rise. To quote a news
report:

The urge to escape depressing poverty has for years forced

the Nepalese to cross over to India, either legally or illegally.
However, the April 25 earthquake that ravaged large parts of
the neighbouring country seems to have pushed the illegal
exodus in an unprecedented way. According to home ministry
data, human trafficking from Nepal has seen a three-fold jump
after the quake. Compared to 2014, human trafficking from
Nepal has seen a 500 percent rise in 2015, with two months
yet to go.13

India has already emerged as a popular transit as well as a destin-

ation for Nepalese and Bangladeshi women trafficked for sex work,
even while continuing to be a source of sex trafficking. As per a report
of Reuters,

India is working to find ways to curb the widespread trafficking

of women and children in the country, including those from
neighboring Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, said Maneka
Gandhi, India’s Minister for Women and Children. South Asia,
with India at its center, is the fastest-growing and second-lar-
gest region for human trafficking in the world, after East Asia,
according to the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime.
Speaking at a conference on child adoption in India’s north-
eastern state of Meghalaya, Gandhi told delegates that the
government was in the process of putting in place a series of
policies to prevent human trafficking.14

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“India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and
children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” contends the 2016
Trafficking in Persons Report released by the US department of State.15 It
details;

Experts estimate millions of women and children are victims

of sex trafficking in India. Traffickers use false promises of
employment or arrange sham marriages in India or Gulf States,
and then subject women and girls to sex trafficking. In addition
to traditional red light districts, women and children increas-
ingly endure sex trafficking in small hotels, vehicles, huts, and
private residences. Traffickers increasingly use websites, mobile
applications, and online money transfers to facilitate commer-
cial sex. Children continue to be subjected to sex trafficking
in religious pilgrimage centers and tourist destinations. Many
women and girls—predominately from Nepal and Bangladesh,
and from Europe, Central Asia, and Asia, including minority
populations from Burma—are subjected to sex trafficking in
India. Prime destinations for both Indian and foreign female
trafficking victims include Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Gujarat,
Hyderabad, and along the India-Nepal border; Nepali women
and girls are increasingly subjected to sex trafficking in Assam,
and other cities such as Nagpur and Pune. Some corrupt law
enforcement officers protect suspected traffickers and brothel
owners from law enforcement efforts, take bribes from sex traf-
ficking establishments and sexual services from victims, and tip
off sex and labor traffickers to impede rescue efforts.16

India, with a significant section of vulnerable demographies is confronting

internal trafficking on a large scale and the issue needs an urgent analysis
and response. However, keeping in mind the scope of this study wherein
the intersection of border and gender is the focus, it would be prudent to
remain focused on how an open border is aiding sex trade. The open and
unregulated border provides an easy passage in and out of India for organ-
ized human trafficking to flourish.
Many of those belonging to vulnerable demographies including poor
uneducated young men, children and young women cross the peaceful and
open Indo-Nepal border every day in search of a better life in India. Little

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do they know what will unfold once they cross. Young men most often
become servants in middle-class Indian families, who prefer to hire them
as they are considered less threatening and are ready to work for min-
imal wages. And many Nepalese women, especially young ones, take a
different course or to put it bluntly, are forced to take a different course,
a course which changes their lives forever. Arguably, exploiting vulner-
abilities seems to be basic human nature. As the famous British philoso-
pher, Thomas Hobbes argued, the state of human nature is “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish and short.” One can find the perfect play of this Hobbesian
human nature if one goes into the intricacies of sex trafficking. The sellers,
mediators, buyers and most prominently of all – available customers (who
are part of mainstream, normal society unlike the trafficked women who
belong to a marginalized group, unable to lead a normal life) makes one
wonder whether duplicity and hypocrisy are the defining traits of human
beings. All of these groups of people go back to normal life after playing
their part; only their women victims are left to live an abnormal life, a life of
perpetual exploitation, suffering and disdain. And, it is notable that while
“traffickers are overwhelmingly male, women comprise a relatively large
share of convicted offenders, compared to most other crimes. This share
is even higher among traffickers convicted in the victims’ home country.
Court cases and other qualitative data indicate that women are often used
to recruit other women.”17
The plight of trafficked Nepalese women for sex has been well-narrated
by Soma Wadhwa. According to her,
Every year between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepalese girls are trafficked
into the red light districts in Indian cities. Many of the girls
are barely 9 or 10 years old. 200,000 to over 250,000 Nepalese
women and girls are already in Indian brothels. The girls are sold
by poor parents, tricked into fraudulent marriages, or promised
employment in towns only to find themselves in Hindustan’s
brothels. They’re locked up for days, starved, beaten, and
burned with cigarettes until they learn how to service up to 25
clients a day. Some girls go through ‘training’ before being ini-
tiated into prostitution, which can include constant exposure
to pornographic films, tutorials in how to ‘please’ customers,
repeated rapes.18

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She continues,

Trafficking in women and girls is easy along the 1,740 mile-long

open border between India and Nepal. Trafficking in Nepalese
women and girls is less risky than smuggling narcotics and
electronic equipment into India. Traffickers ferry large groups
of girls at a time without the hassle of paperwork or threats of
police checks. The procurer-pimp-police network makes the
process even smoother. Bought for as little as Rs (Nepalese)
1,000, girls have been known to fetch up to Rs 30,000 in later
transactions. Police are paid by brothel owners to ignore the
situation. Girls may not leave the brothels until they have repaid
their debt, at which time they are sick, with HIV and/or tuber-
culosis, and often have children of their own.19

Nothing much has changed for the better since her writing in 1998. The
plight of those trapped into this inhuman profession continues to remain
the same.
The trafficking for commercial sex through the open India-Nepal bor-
der is a curious mixture of deception and coercion, one following the other.
First, the victims are lured to cross the border and then they are coerced
to sell their bodies. The process starts in Nepal. The traffickers work to iso-
late victims from their poor families, in lieu of meager money or with the
promise of fetching them a good job. This promise of a better life for them-
selves and their families back home through crossing a border is sufficient
to keep the women silent. The border is open, there are no major restric-
tions, no major checking and when the women do not object in any way,
the crossing is a cake walk. The silent woman would have no idea of what
is going to happen to her until she crosses the border and reaches her des-
tination, a place which is not actually her dream destination, a place that
would make her repent the decision to cross the border throughout her
life. These women are often kept locked in filthy places with several other
women and are not permitted to communicate with each other. The tem-
porary residences serve multiple purposes: they may be used as temporary
shelters (until the trafficked are sold), as training centers (to help the nov-
ice to become professional) and even torture cells (to “tame the unruly,”
as told an ex-broker).20 tags depending largely on age, the younger the girl

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the higher price. These women are sold as a commodity, the height of the
objectification of women, while at times forced to display their “assets” to
several brothel owners before being purchased. Once sold, the girls are
then the property of the brothel owners until the time they are able to pay
back the amount that was paid for them, at times with interest, by selling
their bodies. These women are permitted to keep a small portion of the
money earned for their basic necessities such as food and clothes, while
their owners take up to 95 percent of their earnings. They are forced to see
as many as 20 to 30 customers a day with, at times, no rest, and no break.
And, a considerable number of these Nepalese women are made to cross
several other international borders, essentially peaceful and even closed
ones, to serve an international clientele.

The Narratives
There are myriad narratives of human trafficking through the Indo-Nepal
border. These narratives need to be documented not only to bring the stor-
ies of the victims to the center of discourse on gender, border and vio-
lence, and help engender enabling policies, but also to interrogate the very
nature of an open border, which instead of facilitating positive human
engagement has contributed to a human tragedy of catastrophic nature.
“This open border has made lives of vulnerable women like us hell. Back
home our families and friends would say it is good for us to have an open
border. Some even talked about a borderless world. But, they need to see
our condition. We are living examples of being victims of an open border,”
said a respondent during an informal introduction during a train journey.
This respondent was a “call girl” and was sharing the air-conditioned coach
along with me and other passengers. She was somewhat different from
my other respondents, speaking English, well-dressed, with an expensive
purse in her hand. I was traveling from Mumbai to Jaipur and Neena, her
pseudonym, was also going to Jaipur. I was writing an article and Neena
asked what I was typing on my laptop. I told her that I work on women’s
issues and she got interested. She talked a lot about Nepal and the status of
women there. We got along well and talked about a lot of things. I asked
what she was doing in Mumbai and her reply was in the form of a question.

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“If I tell you the truth would you continue talking to me?” she asked and
my response was the affirmative, but with a tinge of surprise. She then said,
“Didi (elder sister) I am a call girl.” It was an unexpected answer and admit-
tedly I did not know how to react. There was a long pause. She then contin-
ued, “I know you must be feeling odd sitting with me. No good girl would
like to talk to us. We are in demand but we are not allowed to be part of the
mainstream society.” Her words were unnerving. We again started talking
but now the discussion was led by her. She detailed her horrifying story of
becoming a “bad girl” from a “good girl” “just by crossing a border.” In fact,
her constant reference to the open Indo-Nepal border for all her suffering
prompted me to keep thinking how borders can be so hostile, particularly
for women.
As soon as we crossed the border our lives changed forever.
There is no going back. This border is not open for women like
us – we can cross it but cannot go back. This open border has
proved to be a curse for unaccounted Nepalese women… If you
get a chance, please publish my story – that of fraud, that of
a border which appears peaceful but hostile, that of suffering,
exploitation, stigma, misery and that of a being a living dead, a
person who does not even own her own body…I wish this bor-
der gets closed once for all.

Neena was going to Jaipur to “attend a marriage party where I will be serv-
ing drinks and sex to the chosen few. The host is a wealthy businessman so
I will be staying in a luxurious hotel and will have a chauffeur-driven car.
I dreamt of this luxury but not in this way. This luxury would cost me my
body and that too in many filthy ways,” Neena said. Neena was traveling all
alone and I even suggested to her to run away. “No, there is no escape. If I
do not oblige, my family would have to pay the cost. And, even otherwise,
our owners have networks all over, so sooner or later they will find me. I
tried running during the early days but every time I was caught and the
consequences were unbearable. Even otherwise I am used to this life now,”
she said. On reaching the destination, Neena hugged me tightly, whisper-
ing in my ears, “Didi pray for me, do not forget me and do write about me
one day.”21 I was short of words to assure her that everything will be fine
since I knew things will never be the same for her. But, I remember her,

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her story, her tragedy and her bête noire – the open border. This volume,
and particularly this chapter, is a product of my interactions with Neena.
Unfortunately, Neena is not alone in her suffering. Thousands of such stor-
ies of fraud, exploitation and life-long suffering are scattered across the
Indian landscape. Documentation of all these stories may not be possible
but a glimpse at some of these narratives is enough to gauge the tragedy
that has befallen the Nepalese women due to their proximity to an open
border.
It may not sound logical to make an open border the raison d’être for
all the suffering that women crossing the border undergo. However, it is
plausible to argue that had the border been closed, thousands of women
might have been saved from the exploitation. “This business has flourished
because of the open border. I know women are brought illegally into India
even through other borders such as from Bangladesh but when we walk
across an open border, where there is no questioning, no restrictions, no
hiding, no need to cross at night, with so many dreams and finally land
in these filthy places we have no one but the border to blame,” said a New
Delhi-based respondent with whom I met only after a lot of persuasion in
November 2014. “From being a school-going girl I became a sex-serving
woman overnight. Thanks to the open border,” she sarcastically summa-
rized standing near a busy bus stand, a place I interviewed her because, in
her words, “here no one recognizes me and no one can threaten me over
talking with you.” The young girl came to meet me “directly from the home
of a regular customer” where she spent the night with “a group of drunk
men.” Sensing the guilt I felt for making her speak about her traumatic past
and present, the girl said, “Didi, don’t bother, this is routine now. I have
reconciled with my fate.” At the end, she said, “you cannot do anything for
me but please tell our governments to close this border. This border is even
more violent than the Indo-Pak border. The violence that our Nepalese
women are suffering due to this open border is beyond description and
beyond documentation.” She went away saying “I need to go and have a
good sleep to keep off under-eye dark circles to retain my customers.”22
I asked the respondents why they do not run away or go to the police.
The answers reflected on the corrupt law and order system, which instead
of stemming the trafficking, has contributed to its growth. “The police

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are corrupt. Even if there is a raid, we are back in these places after a few
days. And, going back to Nepal is not an option. The open border allows
us to come to India but crossing it again to go back is forbidden. Our fam-
ilies would not accept us now,” said another respondent.23 In that sense, it
can be argued that in practice the border, which was open to cross to the
Indian side, is closed for the return journey. This very paradoxical nature
has been one of the reasons for sex-trafficking. Neena was rather succinct,
“you must be knowing the Bollywood song, jeena yahan marna yahan (we
have to live here and we have to die here).” And then added, “there is no
escape from this work. The humiliating work continues because there are
people who oppose it in the day and love it in the night.”24 The ordeal of
being a sex worker starts with the trafficking and ends with the life of the
trafficked. “It is a life-long ordeal. Let me tell you my story,” told a respond-
ent in her late 30s who was forced to “retire” because the customers ask for
“young flesh.” She then resorted to tasks such as managing the brothel and
training the newcomers. “This is a vicious circle. There is no going back.
The border is open for us to come but is closed if we want to go back. Here
the border is not just physical but also social and psychological. Once a
prostitute, always a prostitute. I know people say prostitute is a derogatory
word but using a better word [does] change our fate or circumstances.”
She then returned to her story, “I was sixteen years old when a relative of
our neighbor, during his stay in our village, talked to my parents about the
opportunities in India. He portrayed as if India was a place of fairy tales.
The person wanted that my parents send both my sister and me. My sister
was only 14 then. Since our two brothers had died a year ago in an accident
my parents wanted at least one of us to be with them.” After a brief pause
she added, “I am glad that she did not come with me.”25
The post-trafficking ordeal does not merely revolve around the chaos
of being unwanted in civilized society and at the same time being wanted
in the dark of the night by the civilized. It continues to haunt the victims
throughout their lives in the form of stigma, misery and scores of sexu-
ally transmitted diseases including AIDS. “People hate us and even say this
is our chosen life. A chosen life? Selling your body and sleeping with all
kinds of people with all kinds of demands – can this be a chosen life? And,
then, dying a slow death with sexually transmitted diseases – can this be a

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chosen life? We did not cross the border for this life,” said a respondent.26 It
was revealing that many customers prefer Nepalese women; they being con-
sidered “more attractive.” “Many of the customers ask for Nepalese women.
They find us more attractive. We are in demand and you know more the
demand, more the supply. We have to make the customers happy,” said a
Nepalese woman having her “own business of supplying girls to customers
in hotels and homes.”27 Another revelation was even more horrifying: sex
with a Nepalese virgin is believed to cure AIDS. “When a teenaged virgin
girl arrives here, we get the highest payment from her first customer. At
times there is a bidding and the one able to pay the highest would sleep with
the girl. This happens not only because our customers cherish virginity but
also because sex with a virgin may cure the disease of AIDS,” the respond-
ent added.28 AIDS is a deadly disease spreading widely all over the globe,
including in India. Generally, in India, it is considered that those people
who visit brothels often fall prey to this disease. “I know I got this dis-
ease from a prostitute,” said an AIDS patient, while confessing that he had
sexual relations with several of his office colleagues as well.29 “Prostitutes
are the ones who are spreading this disease,” he loathed. The other side of
the story remains unheard. Are sex workers spreading AIDS? Who infects
them? Who forces them to have sex without protection? Imagine the plight
of a young virgin Nepalese girl forced into offering sex services to a man
suffering from AIDS, just because of the belief that he may get cured. There
are ample chances that the girl would get infected too. And, certainly, her
owner would not allow her to quit after one night. She would continue to
be part of the dangerous game until the deadly disease would be difficult
to hide. She would then be out of the game but would lead probably even
a worse life. The stigma of being a sex worker would continue to haunt her
throughout her struggle to live a lonely and miserable life until the death
would come to her rescue. Once HIV infected, Nepalese girls, trafficked
and sold into prostitution in India, are abandoned.30 A report suggests that
out of the 218 Nepalese girls rescued in February 1996 by Mumbai police
about 60–70 percent were HIV positive.31 Wadhwa succinctly argues, “HIV
is what India’s given them,” while documenting the tragedy of Nepalese girls
rescued from Indian brothels.32 Citing a report, Eller and Mahat argue that

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about 50 percent of HIV-positive women in Nepal have been deported

from India, where they worked in the sex industry.33 I have come across
several such narratives of extreme suffering brought by a cocktail of decep-
tion and coercion, emanating from an open border, in loud voices, in whis-
pers and in silence since I started working on this issue.

Conclusion
There are petitions to close the Indo-Pak border due to increasing sex traf-
ficking. A petition from a non-profit organization titled, “To close the bor-
der between India and Nepal and put an end to human trafficking,” read, “At
present, the border between India and Nepal is ‘open’ and human trafficking
is thriving. This means that Nepalese women and children can be freely traf-
ficked into India without documentation, identification or a passport. Every
26.28 minutes a girl in Nepal is trafficked across the border to India for an
average price of $104.63 (AUD). That’s 54 girls every day, almost 20,000
every year. Once in India, they will be lost forever. They may be trapped in
brothels, repeatedly sold and abused or their body parts auctioned off to
the highest bidder. There are communities in Nepal, completely devoid of
women and children. Communities without mothers and daughters, with-
out futures and without generations of families.… We ask you to sign this
petition and help us force the government to close the borders and protect
the Nepali people from these predators.”34 The details provided in the peti-
tion are horrifying. Should India and Nepal follow the unusual pattern –
from debordering to rebordering – to put an end to this human tragedy?
Charting a new course in bilateral relations, India and Nepal agreed
in 2014 to “review, adjust and update” the 1950 Treaty of Peace and
Friendship to “better reflect the current realities” and expand ties in “a for-
ward looking manner.” The agreement between Prime Ministers Narendra
Modi and Sushil Koirala is supposedly aimed at addressing the Indian
concerns over the use of Nepalese territory for terror activities directed
at India. It was relayed to the media that Modi and Koirala directed
respective authorities to ensure that “the open border, a unique feature of
Nepal-India bilateral relations, is not misused by unscrupulous elements

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posing security threats to either side.”35 There are many other concerns
such as human trafficking, which may not pose a threat to state security,
but certainly pose a threat to humanity. Neither India nor Nepal should
turn an ostrich eye to this humanitarian disaster – the human trafficking
for sexual exploitation. The moot question then arises – should the open
border be closed?
There are several laws in place, in India as well as in Nepal, to regulate
trafficking of women for commercial sex. But, they seem to be ineffective
keeping in view the nexus between corrupt officials and trafficking agen-
cies. Although, both countries are aware of this activity as expressed in
occasional official concerns, trafficking continues, or rather, thrives. Misuse
of this open border is a serious concern, which needs to be addressed. Both
countries have on more than one occasion agreed to control the illegal
activities across the border, but an effective approach continues to remain
a chimera.
The closure of the border may not put an end to the trafficking. There
are borders in the South Asian region, such as India-Bangladesh or
India-Myanmar, which are highly controlled but they have not been suc-
cessful in eliminating trafficking. “Poverty increases one’s susceptibility
to becoming a victim of trafficking, but even if poverty is eradicated,
trafficking will remain a problem as long as the industry is one of low-
risk and high profits for the traffickers themselves. This is particularly
challenging because the traffickers face a rapidly growing demand.”36 An
open border increases the susceptibility of the vulnerable demographies
to trafficking, but even if a border is closed, trafficking will remain a
persistent problem while it remains a low-risk, high profit and, hence,
lucrative industry. Until there is a demand and until there is a vulner-
ability, trafficking for commercial sex will remain a flourishing industry.
As mentioned earlier, Indo-Nepal open border is a life-line for many
people. The need is to better control, coordinate and collaborate to put
an end to human trafficking through the open border. A sustained, inte-
grated and genuine approach towards making the border impermeable
for the traffickers may prove effective in rescuing uncounted Nepalese
women from deception and eventual sexual exploitation in India and
elsewhere.

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Notes
1. Informal interaction with Neena during a train journey, June 12, 2012. And, I
dedicate this piece to Neena.
2. I wish to acknowledge the help of my Delhi-based friends, Sushant and Ruhi.
They helped me to connect with my respondents. And, I hope to continue col-
lecting many such narratives to give voice to a vulnerable and voiceless group.
3. Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs. “Treaty of Peace and
Friendship between the Government of India and the Government of Nepal,
Kathmandu, July 31, 1950. http://mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/
6295/Treaty+of+Peace+and+Friendship (accessed on May 13, 2016).
4. Raymond Bechard, Unspeakable: The Hidden Truth Behind the World’s Fastest
Growing Crime, New York: Compel, 2006.
5. Tameshnie Deane, “Cross-Border Trafficking in Nepal and India – Violating
Women’s Rights,” Human Rights Review, Vol. 11, No. 4, 2010, p. 493.
6. US Department of State, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons,
Trafficking in Persons Report, June 4, 2008. http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/
tiprpt/2008/105376.htm (accessed on May 13, 2016).
7. Traffic in women and girls, United Nations, General Assembly, December 23,
1994, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/49/a49r166.htm. 23 (accessed on
May 15, 2016).
8. Ibid.
9. “UN expert urges fresh action on conflict-related people trafficking – New
UN report,” New York / Geneva, October 31, 2016. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/
NewsEvents/ Pages/ DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20803&LangID=E#sthash.
l12BxQkO.dpuf (accessed on November 2, 2016).
10. Ibid.
11. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Global Report on Trafficking in
Persons 2016,” Vienna, 2016, p. 5. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-
and- analysis/ glotip/ 2016_ Global_ Report_ on_ Trafficking_ in_ Persons.pdf.
(accessed on December 26, 2016).
12. US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2007. http://www.
state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf. (accessed on May 15, 2016).
13. “Three-fold jump in human trafficking from Nepal to India after quake: MHA,”
The Indian Express, November 4, 2015.
14. “India is working to curb trafficking of women, children: minister,” April 19,
2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-trafficking-idUSKCN0XG1AX
(accessed on May 13, 2016).
15. US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2016. https://www.
state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/countries/2016/258784.htm (accessed on November
6, 2016).

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16. Ibid.
17. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2016, p. 7.
18. Soma Wadhwa, “For Sale: childhood,” Outlook, February 23, 1998. http://www.
outlookindia.com/magazine/story/for-sale-childhood/205123.
19. Ibid.
20. Phone interview, August 23, 2015.
21. Informal interaction, June 12, 2012.
22. Personal interview, November 13, 2014.
23. Ibid.
24. Informal interaction, June 12, 2012.
25. Phone interview, March 14, 2015.
26. Phone interview, March 18, 2015.
27. Phone interview, February 24, 2015.
28. Ibid.
29. Informal interaction, March 14, 2016.
30. Robert Hardman, “Prince brings hope to Nepal’s rescued sex slaves,” Telegraph,
February 9, 1998.
31. Tim McGirk, “Nepal’s Lost Daughters, ‘India’s soiled goods,’ ” Nepal/India
News, January 27, 1997.
32. Wadhwa, 1998.
33. Lucille Sanzero Eller, Ganga Mahat, “Psychological Factors in Nepali Former
Commercial Sex Workers with HIV,” Journal of Nursing Scholarship, Vol. 35,
No. 1, 2003, pp. 53–60.
34. Petition: “To close the border between India and Nepal and put an end to
human trafficking,” 3Angels Nepal, https://www.change.org/p/the-trafficking-
in-persons-office-tip-to-close-the-border-between-india-and-nepal-and-put-
an-end-to-human-trafficking (accessed on 3 November 2016).
35. “2014 and beyond: India, Nepal agree to refresh 1950 treaty,” The Indian
Express, August 5, 2014.
36. Deane, “Cross-Border Trafficking in Nepal and India,” 2010, p. 509.

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 7
Migration, Border Crossing and Women:
Female Migrant Sexualities Between
Objectification and Empowerment

Andreanne Bissonnette and Elisabeth Vallet

In the context where migration is either represented or studied as a

homogenous male flow, female sexuality is depicted as a barrier to female
mobility. The specifics of migrant women are often overlooked in studies
focusing on the effects of the migration process on individuals: most of the
research will focus on sexual violence as being the only impact on women.
This representation generates an image of migrant women as solely vic-
tims; they are seen as passive actors objectified by other migrants or crimi-
nal organizations.
Women’s sexualities1 in a context of migration can also become an asset
to the migration and a space of empowerment during and after migration.
Interviews conducted with migrant women have shown that the research
may observe a different relation to sexuality. While it is true that women
are particularly submitted to sexual violence and abuse (rape and forced
prostitution for instance), some of them tended to depict the articula-
tion of their prostitution, in the context of migration as positive. Instead
of understanding their gender solely in terms of risks of violence, some
choose to reclaim their sexualities in order to articulate it in a framework

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that would benefit them in achieving their goal: crossing the border. For
some, it also became a means of social change in the destination country.
Moreover, the way women relate to their sexualities, how they view it and
how it is articulated, either as an asset or a drawback, varies with a large
scope of criteria (whether cross-border migrants, temporary workers in
the US, or at the border on the Mexican side). This chapter will explore this
dual embodiment of sexuality in a context of migration through double
lenses: we will focus on the way migrant women perceive their own sexual-
ity while we assess its instrumentalization by women and other actors at
the border. We will therefore delve into the case of the Mexican-American
border, where there is clearly a feminization of the migration process over
the recent years – as 20 percent of all undocumented migrant at the border
are women.2

Sexual Objectification as a Liability

One of the greatest causes of violence against women is linked
to the regulation of their sexuality…recognizing women’s rights
to sexual autonomy and sexual health will be a major step for-
ward in eradicating violence against women.3

Sexual violation appears to be the most documented consequence of inter-

national migration for women. In 2014, 80 percent of women and girls
migrating from Central America to the United States reported being raped
during the journey through Central America and Mexico4 – a 20 percent
jump from Amnesty International’s estimates in 2010.5 As many authors
and scholars have claimed over the years, these numbers are only an indi-
cation of the scope of the problem, and remain an estimate since migrant
women are reluctant to speak up about any form of physical abuse in fear
of consequences due to their undocumented status or due to authorities’
involvement in the abuse.6 Initially, scholars were linking rape to illegality
and therefore to smugglers. Recent studies though, have shown that rape
and other forms of sexual violence on migrant women involve, directly or
indirectly, other actors.7 Other scholars have tried to widen the definition
of sexual violence itself, to include prostitution at the border as a form of
sexual abuse.8

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We have chosen in this chapter to adopt the broad definition of sexual

violence as defined by the World Health Organization where sexual vio-
lence is stated as: “any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted
sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed,
against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their
relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home
and work.”9 This definition allows for the inclusion of rape, sexual abuses,
psychological sexual violence as well as forced prostitution and mari-
tal rape. However, in the context of migration, the interpretation of what
constitutes a sexual assault is modulated according to the sociocultural
background of women: “the place (or places) where a woman has lived,
the sociocultural landscape where she developed as a woman, necessarily
influence her interpretation of an act or event as sexually violent or not.”10
Regardless of the definition adopted though, two conclusions appear to be
general to all studies: first, rape is an endemic problem affecting almost all
women at some point during migration; and secondly, women’s bodies are
considered as objects that can be controlled, used, sold and treated vio-
lently by men, a reality that in some cases leads to murder.11

When sexual violence becomes the norm

The representation of rape as an inescapable reality of migration for
women is preeminent not only in studies on women and migration, but
more broadly in migration studies. The most common, and best-docu-
mented, cases of rape along the border or during the crossing of Mexico
remain the abuses perpetrated by smugglers. In order to facilitate the
migration process and increase the chances of success while faced with an
ever-increasing security dispositive at the border,12 a constantly increas-
ing number of migrants seek the services of smugglers. While, for some
smugglers, it seems to be an explicit part of the border crossing deal since
the beginning of the negotiation,13 others will ask women for sexual favors
during the crossing of Mexico: “Coyotes14 may refuse to take a woman with
them, threaten to turn her over to unknown men or abandon her midway
if she refuses his advances.”15 That has been highlighted by Maria Salinas’
story as reported by PBS. The 43-year-old woman who traveled with her

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18-year-old daughter and hired the services of a coyote stated that “she
couldn’t keep up. One coyote said he’d help – on one condition. “If I gave
him my daughter, then he’d wait for me.”16
As smuggling activities are more and more linked with drug cartels
and other criminal gangs, scholars are including the study of rape by gang
related individuals.17 As presented by Olivia Ruiz and the organization Beta
Sur, sexual assault has become part of the modus operandi of gang-related
individuals who attack and rob migrants either in northern Mexico or on
migrant routes in the Chiapas province (closer to the Guatemala-Mexico
border).18
The important contribution of scholars studying women’s life and
sexualities at the border, resides in their work on female prostitution.
While many scholars consider women’s sexuality through the narrow
spectrum of sexual assaults (physical sexual violence),19 these studies20
broaden the range of what constitutes sexual violence, to include forced
prostitution. Along the migration route, women and girls face the risk of
being abducted by individuals, related or not to gangs or cartels, which
then proceed to sell them to crime-related individuals.21 Even though
the individuals who buy and sell women may not sexually abuse them
directly, they are part of an activity that profits from their sexual exploit-
ation. In the United States, between 14,500 and 17,500 females are
estimated to be victims of trafficking; in Mexico, estimates are around
18,000.22
Contrary to a convenient popular belief that danger is on the other side
of the border, migrant women also reported being sexually assaulted and
raped by Border Patrol agents once in the United States. Through her work
on sexuality at the border, Eithne Luibhéid offers a review of some of the
cases that were brought before the courts in the United States regarding
rape of migrant women by Border Patrol, INS or ICE agents.23 Although
the cases studies occurred in different locations and at different times,
they all share a similar pattern of rape, which led Luibhéid to reconsider
her assumption that “rape functioned as a form of crude, violent, border
defense strategy.”24 Indeed, rather than arresting migrant women, raping
them and then taking them into custody, agents would release raped women
downtown or in remote areas to continue their routes. Amy Lind and Jill

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Williams state that “undocumented migrant women are thus vulnerable to

sexual violation from Border Patrol agents who promise to release them
if they are sexually compliant.”25 To support their conclusion, the authors
bring forward the case of Scott Anthony Sullivan, which has been studied
by Roebuck: “Agent Scott Anthony Sullivan was convicted in April of 2007
of violating an undocumented woman’s civil rights when he pulled her over
at a checkpoint in 2003, confiscated her birth certificate and then raped her
several times at a nearby hotel.”26 It has been suggested by some scholars27
that Border Patrol agents are re-creating and reinforcing the definition of
“otherness” through the domination of female bodies, migrant women rep-
resenting in that instance something foreign “due to their national origins,
undocumented status, poverty, and gender.”28 This is even more accurate
when considering that many cases brought before other police officers are
dropped due to lack of proof or credibility.29 In recent years, cases have
arose in detention centers where some migrant women have decided to
speak up. One case reported in early 2016 occurred in the Immigration and
Custom Enforcement (ICE) facility in Santa Ana, California where ICE
agents strip searched and physically and sexually abused migrant women.30
This situation led 31 women to file a civil complaint, while Human Rights
Watch investigated the matter.31 While these complaints are presented by
Human Rights Watch as being still under investigation, they highlight
some critical realities of migration detention in the United States, not only
in terms of how women’s bodies are being sexually abused and violently
treated, but also when it comes to filing a complaint. Taking legal action
against Border Patrol agents or ICE agents is a challenging step for migrant
women who are facing deportation threats. For Sylvanna Falcón, in that
sense, rape is no less than a weapon of war, reinforced by the militarization
of the border and, hence, the idea that the border is at war. Whether at the
US-Mexico border or at the borders of war-torn countries, “the outcome
remains the same – the systematic degradation of women,”32 but there is
definitely, according to Falcon, at the US-Mexico divide, “a symbolic con-
nection between women’s bodies and territory.”33 Olivia Wood goes fur-
ther by stating that the objectification and exploitation of female body on
the US-Mexico divide “represent the unequal transnational relationship
between these two nations.”34

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Therefore the inherent risk in migration of being sexually assaulted

leads many migrant women to take birth control pills or seek other means
of contraception before engaging on the migration route in order to
diminish the possibility of a forced pregnancy.35 While the decision to take
birth control beforehand rest on the migrant, it can be seen, in the light
of human rights, as a form of sexual violence36 in the sense that migrant
women make their decision based on a risk of sexual violence and not for
personal reasons. On the other side, women face scarcity of contraceptive
means, which make them switch methods in some cases, as mentioned by
Anna Ochoa O’Leary and Gloria Ciria Valdéz-Gardea’s study of reproduc-
tion rights in the Altar, Sonora region.37

“Private is public”: when the State takes control

of women’s sexualities
Less studied is the objectification and violation of migrant women’s bod-
ies by government policies on both sides of the border. While the actions
of other migrants, criminal groups or citizens are visible due to their dir-
ect impact on migrant women’s bodies, the actions of government entities,
both local and national, fall under the radar. On the American side of the
border, many laws were enacted in the 1990s and more in the years fol-
lowing 9/11 in order to limit the attractivity of the United States and to
encourage those living illegally on US soil to migrate back to their country
of origin. Through these laws, many states restricted access to social and
healthcare services by mandating the organizations in charge of providing
those services to check the identity of users, or even to report undocu-
mented migrants to immigration services.38 Through these procedures,
states are limiting undocumented migrants’ access to basic health services.
This situation is particularly critical for women: they may not be able to
seek medical help to get an abortion or contraception or supervise a diffi-
cult pregnancy. Not being able to access medical help in order to termin-
ate an unwanted pregnancy constitutes a two-fold violence against migrant
women: first, it is a direct violation of women’s sexualities as states frame
women’s options and sexual freedoms by restraining their access to abortion.
Second, it is violence in the sense that, due to this lack of access to abortion

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services, women will have to pursue an unwanted pregnancy and ultimately

birth a child – who could be the result of rape. This is further emphasized
by Nora’s story, recounted by Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, “Her only daugh-
ter was the consequence of this assault. During our interview, she showed
anxiety when the topic of virginity came up. Nora had refrained from any
sexual activity for 28 years.”39 A critical example of those legal impacts is
obvious in Texas where access to abortion services has already been limited
by a conservative legislature.40 Therefore, following the adoption of a law
defining strict conditions under which clinics are allowed to perform abor-
tions, many of them were forced to close, leaving only 19 clinics where legal
abortions can be performed.41 All Texan women are of course impacted by
theses measures but migrant women are more concerned since all of those
clinics cannot be accessed from the border without crossing a checkpoint:
all of them are located inland, further from the border, making it more
difficult for undocumented migrant women to seek medical help during
pregnancy or to access birth control prescriptions.42 Hence, states Ana
DeFrates, Texas director for policy and advocacy at the National Latina
Institute for Reproductive Health, “undocumented families are literally
landlocked. When you eliminate clinics that were south of those internal
checkpoints, you limit access to care.”43 By restricting women’s access to
health and social services in an effort to put an end to illegal immigration,
US officials, both at the federal and local levels, against women and limit
their ability to take control of their bodies.
The Mexican government also plays a defining role in the ill-treatment
of migrant women through its inaction regarding the murders of hundreds
of women in border towns (such as Ciudad Juárez where an epidemic situ-
ation of feminicide is taking place since 1993).44 Moreover, government
officials fuel the representation of women as sexual objects in the public
discourse, invoking sexism rather “than to admit that the murders reveal
a masculine attitude of power, subordination, and fatal indifference to the
health and welfare of poor working women.”45 Indeed, in a public state-
ment, the governor of the state of Chihuahua blamed the victims for the
way they dressed and implied that they were immoral since they were
seen in bars and clubs.46 By blaming the victims, the Mexican authorities
“absolve themselves from blame for the crimes and divert public sympathy

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from the victims.”47 Through the use of these sexist public statements,
authorities reinforce the already violent gender division in Mexican soci-
ety and try to control women’s sexualities by reinterring what is considered
as moral in a gendered way. This adds to the already difficult legal reality of
Mexican women. Indeed, in the state of Chihuahua, the domestic violence
category is often mobilized to hide systemic sexual feminicide while the
Criminal Code provides for far more lenient sentences to men who murder
their wives for extramarital affairs than men who commit “feminicide.”48 In
2001, state legislators went even further when they “passed a bill that mini-
mized sentences for rapists who were ‘provoked’ by their victims.”49 This
bill considers female rape victims as “immoral,” therefore reinforcing the
hardship for victims and implicitly supporting men’s control over women’s
sexualities by diminishing criminals’ responsibilities and by trivializing
women’s death. More so, it accentuates the idea that women’s sexualities
are men’s private property.

“Las que se quedan”: Definition of sexualities for

those left behind
In relation to policies and practices on the Mexican side of the border,
there are some specifics concerning women’s sexualities in maquilado-
ras. About 60 percent of all maquiladoras employees are women, many
of whom are migrant women coming from southern Mexico and Central
America in search of a job and independence. Employers in maquiladoras
hire women into unskilled positions, which allows for a lesser salary than
their male counterparts. In addition to this discrimination against women,
maquiladoras make it mandatory for any female employee to go through
a medical exam prior to being hired – in order to confirm that she is not
pregnant. As Jessica Livingston’s extensive work on maquiladoras workers
has shown, after being hired, women workers must undergo random preg-
nancy tests to certify that they are still not pregnant and are offered full
health coverage for birth control pills. This has also been documented by
Norma Iglesias Prieto, who, for the purpose of her research, interviewed
for a position in a maquiladora in Tijuana. The practices regarding repro-
ductive monitoring go from simple questions to abdomen palpation,50

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pregnancy tests, and even verification of menstrual pads.51 In order to

avoid paying for women’s social security coverage during the third trimes-
ter of pregnancy as required by Mexican law, maquiladoras employers are
“regulating the lives of female employees”52 by controlling their reproduct-
ive rights. Indeed, when a female worker gets pregnant, she is pressured to
quit or is harassed until she does so.53 Elvia Arriola highlights the fact that
female worker’s bodies are sexualized while maquiladora work reinforces
gender division: female workers are preferred to their male counterparts
due to their obedience and fastidiousness.54 Maquiladoras manager also
play on existing gendered and sexualized roles in order to implement con-
trol mechanisms, cultivating a “highly-sexualized environment” which
leads to sexual harassment and promises of job security in return for sex-
ual favors.55 Therefore “the maquila program relies strongly on prevailing
patriarchal family relations”56 in order to maintain the female worker as
docile and less likely to organize into unions. For Wood, this work environ-
ment contributes to the objectification of Mexican women and leads to the
redefinition of women sexualities by men.57 Thus, through the definition
of women as a consumable and disposable good, maquiladoras contribute
to the redefinition of women’s sexualities and worth in society, reinforcing
an inherent machismo. Therefore, many men tend to see “the women as
part of their male rights over their sexuality and reproductive capacity.”58
Mexican law regarding extra-marital sexual relations further emphasizes
this.59 As highlighted by Monárrez Fragoso in her research on women
and feminicide in border towns, the violence towards women reinforces
unequal social relations and differentiation between sexes and gender.60
These violations and objectifications of migrant women’s bodies, by
smugglers, criminal gang-related individuals, other migrants or state offi-
cials, all contribute to the (re)construction of borders. As shown by many
border scholars, borders are not solely defined by a physical line between
two states, but rather as the addition of external and internal borders.
Internal borders involve social, economic, political, psychological and
symbolic border layers that include gender and sexuality. In that sense,
rape is a border per se since it “is a site for reinscription by the state of the
social body as stratified by gender, sexuality, race, class, and legal status.”61
Therefore, although female migration is rising steadily in the US-Mexico

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context, needless to say that gender and sexuality remain as borders in the
sense that they constitute barriers to female migration, women’s mobility
and women’s opportunities to maintain/regain control of themselves.
However this approach fails to address the perspective where migrant
women see their own bodies as an asset rather than a liability.

Sexuality as an Asset
In immigration policies as well as in migration studies, migrant women are
too often considered as passive objects, dependant on male migrants. This
is why Mirjana Morokvasic has tried to demonstrate that migrant women
can also be positive agents through migration.62 Even though migration
does not invalidate the gender order, migrant women can instrumental-
ize these barriers in order to defend their interests. Furthermore, immi-
gration also constitutes a process leading to life changes and can remodel
“the gendered way daily life is lived,”63 or, as argued by Deborah A.
Boehm, can reconstitute and compromise masculinity “which, in turn,
liberates and puts new controls on women, redefining what ‘I’ means to
be a woman.”64 Therefore, when studying migrant women sexualities in a
context of migration, we must transcend the dominant representation of
women and consider sexuality as a means through which empowerment
can be gained.

Empowerment during migration

When the Immigration Reform and Control Act was enacted in 1986,
provisions regarding women migrants were essentially centered on fam-
ily reunification: that, per se, perpetuated women’s dependency on their
male counterparts. When studying migration from Central America and
Mexico to the United States, one cannot omit the feminization of those
flows, especially since the 1990s,65 and the striking increase in numbers of
women migrating alone or with their children. Women migrate for eco-
nomic reasons, but also for security reasons. They are 20 to 29 years old
and are mainly coming from from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and
Mexico.66 The demographics of migration have changed strikingly and so

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do the assessment of women migrants: they cannot be reduced to a duality

halfway between victimization and threat: if scholars view female migra-
tion as a multilayered phenomenon favoring “favours agency over victim-
ization,”67 sexuality can be assessed by migrant women themselves as an
empowering tool to migrate north.
The most common use is sexuality as a means to gain protection.
Indeed, many women coming from Central America stated in the tes-
timony of their journey that in exchange for sex they were able to gain
protection.68 Indeed, as stated by Luis Flores, head of IOM in Tapachula,
“Sexual abuse has lost its terror.” He further explained how this has led to
a change in the representation of the migrant’s body: “The body becomes
a credit card, a new platinum-edition “bodymatic” which buys you a little
safety, a little bit of cash and the assurance that your travel buddies won’t get
killed. Your bodymatic, except for what you get charged, buys a more com-
fortable ride on the train.”69 This is further emphasized by Gloria González-
Lopez; “But virginity is not the only aspect of a Mexican woman’s sexuality
that has an exchange value. Within the context of marriage and family life,
sexual intercourse may be subjected to a process of commodification.”70
While this practice can be, and has been, indirectly questioned by exter-
ior actors or researchers,71 migrant women who used sex as a way to gain
security tended to view and represent it as a powerful tool: according to
their testimonies they were able to gain control over their sexualities and
use it at their convenience, rather than being viewed and treated as sexual
objects. This is shown by the story of Erlinda, a 31-year-old woman from
Honduras: “And if sexuality was going to be part of the clandestine route,
maybe it’d be necessary to give it a utility value […] Erlinda consented to
have a relationship in exchange of migratory experience and protection.”72
It is reiterated in Myriam’s story: “Myriam, like Erlinda, knew that her body
could simultaneously be a handicap and an asset on the clandestine route.
She wasn’t blind to the power relations governing the passage space, and
that is why she was going to instrumentalize them.”73 In those terms and
the way migrant women have chosen to represent those options, sexuality
becomes an asset because these women maintain the perception that they
had a choice. By choosing a partner among other migrants, these women
felt that they were reducing the risk of being raped, and had the clear feeling

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that they had limited the level of violence they were going to face along the
way.74 Through their migration process, they claim that they regained con-
trol of their sexualities, using it to pursue their venture and secure their
future. The lack of studies on the matter and the few testimonies available
or used by authors and researchers raise questions regarding the free will
of these women. Is it really a sexual emancipation and an empowerment
through the control of their own sexuality? Or is it another expression of
an internalized masculinist system? Could it be that migrant women are
simply responding to the representations that are made of them, as being
weak and in need of male support to migrate, and therefore responding
with sexual submission? Even though these questions remain, the current
state of the information available leads us to the conclusion that through
migration, at least some women are able to regain control over the articu-
lation of their own sexualities.
Another way by which women are using sexuality as an empowering
tool during the migration process is through sex work. Indeed, as men-
tioned by Morokvasic, sex work is multiform “and are not all related to
prostitution.”75 Following this idea, Laura Agustin, through her work on
sex tourism, sex work migration and police and immigration authorities’
interventions,76 “seeks to break down this duality of seeing migrants as
unwanted intruders or powerless victims.”77 This is further highlighted
by Melissa Wright’s work on women in Ciudad Juárez and sex workers
in La Paz. Sex workers in La Paz, Juárez do not have pimps; “they are
independent entrepreneurs.”78 Many of them migrated north in the hopes
of finding a paid position in a maquiladora but chose to work in prosti-
tution instead mainly due to the important difference in salary.79 These
women regained control of their bodies through the process of migration
and, for some, during migration, as Ciudad Juárez is not the last stop
on their journey. But the control they gained became an empowering
tool as they faced oppression from authorities and organized themselves
to fight against their removal from downtown Ciudad Juárez.80 They
gained leverage and claimed their place in the public space while fighting
women’s devaluation. The simple decision made by women to migrate
north contributes to the redefinition of gender roles and to women’s
empowerment.

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Migrating to get control and empowerment

As we have seen previously, while for some women the process of regaining
control of their sexualities is articulated through and along the migration
process, for others the whole idea of migration and its results (a life in a
new social, cultural, political and economical environment) constitutes the
way through which they regain control of their sexualities and morph it
into an empowering tool. For some, migration comes as a solution to the
shame they were put through after being raped in their hometown, either
by a family member, a boyfriend or a stranger, for others it is the new social
and economic context in which they live in the US that challenges their
conceptions of sexuality and alters their intimate lives.81
In Mexico and Central America, policies tend to leave aside women
victims of sexual or physical abuses and assaults. Building on the idea
that sex outside of marriage is unforgivable, rape is often represented as
a shame that affects the whole family rather than as what it is: a violation
of one’s body and will. Some established migrant women in the San Diego
region reported that after being raped, they were pressured into marrying
their attacker in order to “make it right.”82 Others were told to stay silent
in order to preserve the family ties: “Although ‘sexual silence’ might not
be exclusive to Mexican families it functions as a protection from a fear
of family rejection and shame in the lives of Mexican women exposed to
sexual assault.”83 For many women, this has led to prompt migration, like
in the case of Candelaria who, after being sexually assaulted by a family
friend, decided to migrate. During her interview with Gloria Gónzalez-
López, she stated: “He was one of the reasons why I came to the United
States.”84 While the decision to migrate after being raped can be seen as
an act of empowerment in itself, the success of the migration process is
often, as we have seen above, the trigger to sexual empowerment. Indeed,
many women who migrated from Mexico to the San Diego area reported
that they chose to fight against the machismo culture and patriarchal gen-
dered ideology inherent to the Mexican upbringing once established in
their new socio-cultural environment.85 “He can be kind of a machista,
but I don’t put up with it any more […] I can support myself, I can live
without a man. So now I have sex only if I want to, not just because he

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wants to.”86 Indeed, as shown in the interviews conducted by Olivia Ruiz

with women aged between 25 and 50 in the San Diego area, women who
were raped or sexually assaulted in their hometown before fleeing Mexico
or during their migration process, tended to adopt a different approach
when it comes to the sexual education of their children.87 Women who have
experienced sexual violence, either before or during migration, use sexual
education, and sexuality more broadly, to break the cycle of misogyny and
machismo that are very much anchored in social norms in Mexico and
Central America. This is further analyzed by Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez work
on migrants’ sexual journeys: “families – via maternal authority – become
an important institution establishing and shaping beliefs and practices
with regard to femininity and masculinity, courtship, heterosexual love,
and sexuality.”88 Therefore, by regaining control of their sexualities through
migration and by expressing their will to change the perceptions of wom-
en’s sexualities, these women, through parenting, impact not just their own
lives but that of generations to come.89 For other women, coming from
indigenous communities in Southern Mexico, migration to northern parts
of the country or to the United States also constitute a way to regain con-
trol of their sexualities by running away from an arranged marriage to an
older man, a violent marriage or from the possibility of being sold by poor
parents, as Elizabeth Maeir describes in her work on indigenous women in
California and Baja California,90: in her research, those indigenous women
who have chosen to defect forced matrimony through migration do claim
their will not only to better their condition and empower themselves but
also to change the future of their daughters. They do not renounce their
culture and traditions, but they advocate for, if not equal rights for women
and men, at least the consideration of women and girls as human beings
and not sexualized objects.91 In that sense, they use their sexuality as an
empowering tool, therefore becoming powerful agents of change.
A similar result can be seen through a different lens in maquiladoras.
Maquiladoras contribute to the reproduction and reinforcement of male
control and definition of women’s sexualities. However the maquilado-
ras industry can also be seen as a means for women to access a form of
financial independence, and more broadly a form of liberalization through
the decompartmentalization of gender roles.92 Indeed, “the opportunity

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for women to earn their own income has emancipated them from their
dependence on men.”93 Capitalizing on this economic emancipation, some
women will therefore see these economic opportunities as a way to gain
control over their sexualities since they are breaking the link of depend-
ence within their family units.94 Indeed, for many Central American as
well as Mexican women and indigenas living in southern states, migrating
north to seek jobs in maquiladora plants is not only a way by which they
can gain financial independence, but it is also an opportunity to be sexually
emancipated.95 Theoretically at least, their financial empowerment allows
women to make choices in what they choose to accept or not. But as stated
by Ursula Biemann, “sexuality has become a site where desires for self-
expression and control mechanisms converge violently.”96 Therefore, even if
maquiladoras constitute a space where women’s sexualities are often instru-
mentalized, redefined by men and controlled by employers, the economic
attractiveness they hold and the financial relief they provide for women
who are still too often confined to gendered roles, constitutes a side of the
maquiladora reality that has yet to be acknowledged and would deserve
further investigation. This is however limited to the few migrants who try
to transcend their own experience of violence and perceive themselves as
agents of change. They are still few and the limits to their empowerment are
back into male hands: “even as migrant women in Salinas, California, and
Alburquerque, New Mexico, transform gender relations through their pol-
itical activism and participation in the workforce, respectively, they never-
theless continue to live under the threat of deportation and new forms of
male control.”97 This idea of empowerment through work and money is fur-
ther analyzed by Gloria González-Lopez. The author highlights how work
and money lead to power and “sexual bargains” through women’s stories
in post-immigration situation: “That ended a long time ago! I do not have
to cry if he doesn’t give me money, or if he doesn’t give me enough to buy
groceries. I don’t even have to have sex with him. I do not depend on him.
It [sex] is not an obligation anymore”98 (Azalea, a 43-year-old woman who
migrated to the Los Angeles area from Mexico City).
Even though they are now a definite part of migration flows aiming
northward, women are depicted either as passive victims or as intruders
and women’s sexualities are often viewed and analyzed as an infirmity

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and a danger.99 But women migrants cannot be reduced to that sole duality;
they need to be viewed as a multilayered phenomenon, “one that favours
agency over victimization,”100 which is why sexuality is here represented as
an empowering tool for women migrating north. And migration is lead-
ing to new forms of empowerment: “even as people move and struggle to
change the foundations on which social relations are built, these structures
may remain the same, requiring migrants to come-up with creative ways
to transform social and institutional practices.”101 However, the masculine
framing of policies, and the male dominant discourse at the border defines
the terms of border violence in a way that still predominantly affects
women more than men.

Notes
1. Following feminist theorist Lynne Segal’s proposal that women have multiple
heterosexualities, this chapter will refer to “women’s sexualities” rather than
to “women’s sexuality.” See Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of
Pleasure, California: University of California Press, 1994.
2. Olivia Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence. Lessons from Mexico’s
borders,” in Kathleen Staudt, Tony Payan and Z. Anthony Kruszewski, eds,
Human Rights along the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gendered Violence and Insecurity,
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009, p. 32.
3. R. Coomaraswamy, Integration of the human rights of women and the gender
perspective. Presentation to the Commission on Human Rights, 58th session,
April 10, 2002, Geneva, Switzerland.
4. Erin Siegal McIntyre and Deborah Bonello, “Is Rape the Price to Pay for Migrant
Women Chasing the American Dream ?” Fusion. http://fusion.net/story/17321/
is-rape-the-price-to-pay-for-migrant-women-chasing-the-american-dream/
(accessed on June 30, 2016).
5. Amnesty International, “Invisible Victims: Migrants on the Move in Mexico,”
April 2010. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR41/014/2010/en/
(accessed on June 23, 2016).
6. UNHCR, Women on the Run – First-Hand Accounts of Refugees Fleeing El
Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, 2015, p. 43. The UNHCR report
cites one woman: “In Guatemala, the police got all of us off the bus and robbed
one of the migrants. Then, five police got a beautiful girl off the bus. We were
pretty sure that they took her off to rape her. This story illustrates why there
is a lack of trust from migrant women in police officer and law enforcement

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groups.” See also: Human Rights Watch, Brutality Unchecked: Human Rights
Abuses Along the U.S. Border with Mexico, 1992. In a handful of cases, INS
agents have been prosecuted for rape of undocumented migrant women, but
more frequently it is not reported. Undocumented female rape victims are
doubly vulnerable: not only must they endure the humiliation of being raped,
but they also risk deportation or retaliatory criminal charges if they complain.
Thus, even when cases of sexual assault come to the attention of human rights
groups, the women involved commonly refuse legal assistance or any form of
publicity regarding what happened to them.” (p. 35)
7. See, Alyson L. Dimmitt Gnam, “Mexico’s Missed Opportunities to Protect
Irregular Women Transmigrants: Applying a Gender Lens to Migration Law
Reform,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal Association, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2013,
pp. 713–49. See also, Maureen Meyer and Stephanie Brewer, “A Dangerous
Journey through Mexico: Human Rights Violations against Migrants in
Transit,” Washington Office on Latin America, 2010, https://www.wola.
org/ sites/ default/ files/ downloadable/ Mexico/ 2010/ DangerousJourney.pdf.
Also important: Human Rights Watch, “US: Immigration Detainees at Risk
of Sexual Abuse: Government Should Act Quickly to Increase Protection,
Improve Procedures,” August 25, 2010. https://www.hrw.org/news/2010/08/
25/us-immigration-detainees-risk-sexual-abuse. For abuses by Mexican offi-
cials in detention centers see: United States Department of State, Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2014 – Mexico, July 25, 2015. http://
www.state.gov/documents/organization/236914.pdf.
8. Melissa Farley, “Prostitution is Sexual Violence,” Psychiatric Times, Vol. 21,
No. 12, October 2004. See also: C. Stark and C. Hodgson, “Sister Oppressions:
A Comparison of Wife Battering and Prostitution,” in M. Farley, eds,
Prostitution, Trafficking and Traumatic Stress, New York: Haworth Press,
2003, pp.17–32.
9. Etienne G. Krug et al., eds, “World Report on Violence and Health,” World
Health Organization, Geneva, 2002, p. 149. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/
10665/42495/1/9241545615_eng.pdf (accessed on June 25, 2016).
10. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p. 34.
11. Pascha Bueno-Hansen, “Feminicidio: Making the Most of an Empowered
Term,” in Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, eds, Terrorizing Women:
Feminicide in the Americas, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 304.
In the last two decades or so, it has been possible to observe a tragic increase
in the number of deaths among women throughout Latin America. These gen-
der-related crimes paved the way to the theorization of feminicide which con-
sists in the murder of women due to their gender. The introduction of the term
feminicidio “recognized women as subjects and, more important, reveals them
as subjects with the right to freely exercise their sexuality. This free expression

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of women’s sexuality is exactly what the murder of women due to their gender
extinguishes in order to maintain patriarchal power and control.”
12. See Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, Brooklyn,
Verso, 2016.
13. UNHCR, 2015, p. 44. “One woman from Guatemala who was traveling with
her daughter said that the coyote raped her every day of her 20-day trip. She
said the coyote offered a reduced smuggling fee if she had sex with him, but
she accepted only because she was afraid that he would kill her or rape her
daughter if she protested.”
14. A coyote is person who smuggles migrants across the US border for money.
15. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p.35.
16. Jude Joffe-Block, “Women Crossing the U.S. Border Face Sexual Assault
with Little Protection,” PBS, March 31, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/
updates/facing-risk-rape-migrant-women-prepare-birth-control/ (accessed
on June 24, 2016).
17. See Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, Camden:
Rutgers University Press 1990, p. 420 on rape as a rite of passage.
18. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p. 32.
19. See: Gloria González-López, “Nunca he dejado de tener terror: Sexual Violence
in the Lives of Mexican Immigrant Women,” in Denise A. Segura and Patricia
Zavella, eds, Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Durham:
Duke University Press, 2007 pp. 224–46. See also: Argán Aragón, Migrations
clandestines d’Amérique centrale vers les États-Unis, Paris: Presses Sorbonne,
2015.
20. Ananda Rose, “Northbound: What Happens After Crossing the Border,”
Foreign Affairs, July 2, 2014. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/1069541
(accessed on June 20, 2016).
21. Ibid.
22. Mario Luis Fuentes. “Urge combatir la esclavitud en Mexico,” Centro de
Estudios e Investigation en Desarollo y Asistencia (CEIDAS), Mexico,
http://www.iesam.csic.es/doctrab2/dt-0506.pdf. As cited by Ruiz, “Women,
Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009.
23. Jones, Violent Borders 2016.
24. Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border, Minnesota:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p.128.
25. Amy Lind and Jill Williams, “Engendering Violence in De/Hyper-nationalized
Spaces: Border Militarization, State Territorialization, and Embodied Politics
at the US-Mexico Border,” in Anne Sisson Runyan and et. al., eds, Feminist (Im)
Mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in
Transnational Perspective. Farnham, GB: Ashgate, 2013, p.110.
26. Ibid.

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27. See Sylvanna Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War: Advancing Human Rights for
Women at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” Social Justice, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2001, pp. 31–2;
Sylvanna Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War: Militarized Rape at the U.S.-
Mexico Border,” in Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, eds, Women and
Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Durham: Duke University Press,
2007.
28. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p.37.
29. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 2007, p.208.
30. Jorge Rivas. “Immigrant women say they’re being illegally strip searched
by male officers,” Fusion, February 1, 2016. http://fusion.net/story/261668/
women-male-stripped-search-santa-ana/ (accessed on June 23, 2016).
31. Adam Frankel. “‘Do You See How Much I’m Suffering Here?’ Abuse against
Transgender Women in US Immigration Detention”. Human Rights Watch,
March 23, 2016. https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/03/23/do-you-see-how-
much-im-suffering-here/abuse-against-transgender-women-us (accessed on
June 23, 2016). Through its investigation, Human Rights Watch intended to
highlight how transgender women are particularly affected by the strip searches
in detention facilities.
32. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War: Advancing Human Rights” 2001.
33. Falcón, “Rape as a Weapon of War: Militarized Rape” 2007, p.204.
34. Olivia Wood, “An Investigation into Exploitation of the Mexican Female Body
along the U.S.-Mexico Border,” http://womenontheborder.org/2012/01/an-
investigation-into-exploitation-of-the-mexican-female-body-along-the-u-s-
mexico-border/. (accessed on June 23, 2016).
35. See UNHCR, Women on the Run 2015, p. 8 and 44. See also: Kathryn
Kessler, Shira M. Goldenberg and Liliana Quezada, “Contraceptive Use,
Unmet Need for Contraception, and Unintented Pregnancy in a Context
of Mexico-U.S. Migration,” Field Actions Science Reports, Special Issue 2,
2010.
36. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p. 34.
37. Anna Ochoa O’Leary and Gloria Ciria Valdéz-Gardea, “Neoliberalizing
(Re)Production: Women, Migration, and Family Planning in the Peripheries
of the State,” in Anne Sisson Runyan et al., eds, Feminist (Im)Mobilities in
Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships, and Identities in Transnational
Perspective, Farnham, GB: Ashgate, 2013, p.85.
38. Gabriel J. Chin, Carissa Byrne Hessick and Marc L. Miller, “Arizona Senate
Bill 1070: Politics through Immigration Law,” in Otto Santa Ana and Celeste
González de Bustamante, eds, Arizona Firestorm: Global Immigration Realities,
National Media, and Provincial Politics, New York: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, 2012, p.76. See also: Senate Bill 1611, State of Arizona – Senate, 50th
legislature, First regular session, Lanham, Maryland 2011.

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39. Gloria González-López, Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and their Sex
Lives, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005, p. 36.
40. Texas State Legislature, H.B. No. 2 – An Act relating to the regulation of abor-
tion procedures, providers, and facilities; providing penalties, Legislative ses-
sion 83 (2), July 15, 2013. http://www.legis.state.tx.us/tlodocs/832/billtext/
pdf/HB00002F.pdf#navpanes=0 (accessed on July 2, 2016). The enactment
of this law led to the closing of about half of the state’s abortion clinics
in 2013 alone. Today, there are 10 clinics (out of the initial 36) that are
still in services. Women have to travel up to 4 times as far to get to a
clinic. See: Alyssa Figueroa, “6 Abortion Clinics for 13 Million Women?
Inside Texas’ Latest Assault on Women’s Rights,” Alternet, April 2, 2014.
http:// www.alternet.org/ activism/ 6- abortion- clinics- 13- million- women-
inside-texas-latest-assault-womens-rights. See also: Emily Crockett.
“Study: Women had to drive 4 times farther after Texas laws closed abortion
clinics.” Vox, March 20, 2016. http://www.vox.com/2016/3/20/11269226/
texas-abortion-women-drive-study.
41. Alexa Ura et al. “Texas Abortion Clinics That Have Closed Since 2013,” The
Texas Tribune, June 28, 2016, https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/28/texas-
abortion-clinics-have-closed-hb2-passed-2013/ (accessed on July 13, 2016).
42. Rachel Pearson. “Texas abortion law ruling: Latinas more likely to avoid
clinics and self-terminate.” The Guardian, June 10, 2015. https://www.the-
guardian.com/ us- news/ 2015/ jun/ 10/ texas- abortion- latinas- immigrants-
poverty (accessed on July 18, 2015). See also: National Latina Institute for
Reproductive Health. “Immigrant Latinas & Abortion: The Fight for Access to
Comprehensive Coverage and Care.” Fact Sheet, March 2015. http://www.lati-
nainstitute.org/sites/default/files/NLIRH_ImmWmnAbrtn_FactSheet_Eng_
R6.pdf
43. Ibid.
44. Bueno-Hansen, Feminicidio 2010, pp. 290–311. See also, Marie-France
Labrecque. Féminicides et impunité: le cas de Ciudad Juárez, Montréal:
Écosociété, 2012.
45. Elvia R. Arriola, “Accountability for Murder in the Maquiladoras: Linking
Corporate Indifference to Gender Violence at the U.S. Mexico Border,” Seattle
Journal for Social Justice, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2007, p. 616.
46. Ibid.
47. Wood, “An Investigation into Exploitation of the Mexican Female Body” p.38.
48. CLADEM (Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Defense
of Women’s Rights). Investigación feminicidio. Monitoreo sobre femicidio/femi-
nicidio en El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua y Panamá.
CLADEM regional, 2007. http://www.cladem.org/images/archivos/investiga-
ciones/regionales/violencia/sistematizacion-feminicidio-2007.pdf.

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49. Melissa W. Wright, “Protests to Politics: Sex Work, Women’s Worth, and
Ciudad Juarez Modernity,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Vol. 94, No. 2, June 2004, p. 378.
50. Norma Iglesias Prieto, Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladora, Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1997.
51. Elvia Arriola, “Where the Borders of Class, Race, Age and Sexuality Meet,”
Women on the Border, http://www.womenontheborder.org/sexdiscrimination.
htm (accessed on 23 June 2016).
52. Jessica Livingston, “Murder in Juarez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the
Global Assembly Line,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1,
2004, p. 61.
53. Labrecque, Féminicides et impunité 2012, p. 40, 48.
54. Melissa W. Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life: Murder, Women, and
Maquiladoras,” In Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella, eds, Women and
Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Durham: Duke University Press,
2007, p.195.
55. Wood, “An Investigation into Exploitation of the Mexican Female Body” p.28.
56. Ursula Biemann. “Performing the Border: On Gender, Transnational Bodies,
and Technology,” in Claudia Sadowsky-Smith, Globalization on the Line:
Gender, Nation, and Capital at U.S. Borders, New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2002, pp. 99–118.
57. Wood., “An Investigation into Exploitation of the Mexican Female Body” p.28.
58. Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso, “Las diversas representaciones del feminicidio
y los asesinatos de mujeres en Ciudad Juárez, 1993, 2005” in El Colegio de la
Frontera Norte, Sistema Socioeconomicoy Geo-referencial sobre la Violencia de
Género en Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua: Propuesta para su Prevencion, Ciudad
Juárez: Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Vol. 2, 2006, p. 365. Translation of “los
hombres […] tienen la tendencia a visualizar y pensar en las mujeres como
parte de la adquisición de derechos masculinos sobre la sexualidad y la capaci-
dad reproductiva de las mujeres.”
59. Ibid., p.365.
60. Ibid., p.376.
61. Luibhéid, Entry Denied 2002, p.130.
62. Mirjana Morokvasic, “Migration, Gender, Empowerment,” in Ilse Lenz,
Charlotte Ullrich and Barbara Fersch, eds, Gender Orders Unbound.
Globalization, Restructuring and Reciprocity, Farmington Hills: Barbara
Budrich Eds., 2007, pp. 69–97.
63. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “New directions in gender and immigration
research,” in Laura Oso and Natalia Ribas-Mateos, eds, International Handbook
on Gender, Migration and Transnationalism: Global and Development
Perspectives, Cheltenham, GB: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013, p. 233.

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64. M. Bianet Castellanos and Deborah A. Boehm, “Introduction: Engendering

Mexican Migration: Articulating Gender, Regions, Circuits,” Latin American
Perspectives, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2008, p. 8.
65. Lourdes Benería, Carmen Diana Deere and Naila Kabeer, “Gender and inter-
national migration: globalization, development and governance,” in Laura Oso
and Natalia Ribas-Mateos, eds, International Handbook on Gender, Migration
and Transnationalism: Global and Development Perspectives, Cheltenham,
GB: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013, p. 45.
66. Rodrigo Domínguez Villegas and Victoria Rietig, “Migrants Deported from
the United States and Mexico to the Northern Triangle: A Statistical and
Socioeconomic Profile,” Migration Policy Institute. http://www.migration-
policy.org/research/migrants-deported-united-states-and-mexico-northern-
triangle-statistical-and-socioeconomic (accessed on 23 September 2016).
67. Hondagneu-Sotelo, “New directions,” 2013, p. 238.
68. Nicanor Madueño Haon, “El impacto de la variable de género en la migración
Honduras-Mexico: el caso de las Hondureñas en Frontera Comalapa,” Estudios
Sociales y Humanísticos, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2010, p.166.
69. Oscar Martinez, The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant
Trail, Verso Books, 2013.
70. González-López, “Nunca he dejado de tener terror” 2007, p.199.
71. Among others, see: Joyce Outshoorn, “The Political Debates on Prostitution
and Trafficking of Women,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender,
State and Society, Vol. 12, No. 12, Spring 2005, p.141–55.
72. Aragón, Migrations clandestines 2014, pp.123–4. Translation by the author:
Original text: “Et si la sexualité allait être une dimension de la réalité de la route
clandestine, peut-être allait-il être nécessaire de lui donner une valeur utili-
taire (…) Erlinda consentait à une relation amoureuse en échange d’expérience
migratoire et de protection.”
73. Ibid., p.124. Translation by the author. Original text: “Myriam, comme Erlinda,
savait que son corps de femme pouvait être à la fois un handicap et un atout
sur la route clandestine. Elle ne se faisait pas d’illusions quant aux relations de
pouvoir qui régissaient l’espace de passage, et c’est pour cela qu’elle allait tenter
de les instrumentaliser.”
74. Ibid., pp.123–4
75. Mirjana Morokvasic, “Le genre est au cœur des migrations,” in Jules Falquet
et al., eds, Le sexe de la mondialisation: Genre, classe, race et nouvelle division
du travail,” Paris: Presses de Science Po, 2010, p.166.
76. See Laura Agustin, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the
Rescue Industry, Zed Books, 2007.
77. Hondagneu-Sotelo, “New directions,” 2013, p. 238.
78. W. Wright, “Protests to Politics” 2004, p. 380.

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79. Ibid. p. 380.

80. Ibid., pp. 381–2.
81. González-López, “Nunca he dejado de tener terror” 2007, pp. 224–46.
82. González-López, Erotic Journeys 2005, p. 98.
83. González-López, “Nunca he dejado de tener terror” 2007, p. 228.
84. Ibid., p. 231
85. Ibid. pp. 232–3
86. González-López, Erotic Journeys 2005, p. 188.
87. Ruiz, “Women, Migration, and Sexual Violence,” 2009, p. 35.
88. González-López, Erotic Journeys 2005, p. 17.
89. González-López, “Nunca he dejado de tener terror” 2007, p. 233.
90. Elizabeth Maier, “The Unsettling, Gendered Consequences of Migration for
Mexican Indigenous Women,” in Doreen J. Mattingly and Ellen R. Hansen,
eds, Women and Change at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Mobility, Labor, and
Activism, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2008, pp. 31–2.
91. Ibid., pp. 26, 28, 33.
92. Frieda Molina, “The Social Impact of the Maquiladora Industry on Mexican
Border Towns,” Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol 2, No.1,1985, pp. 35–6. See
also: Benería, Deere and Kabeer, “Gender and International Migration” 2013,
pp. 45–68.
93. Ibid., p. 36
94. W. Wright, “The Dialectics of Still Life,” 2007, pp. 184–202.
95. Maier, “The Unsettling, Gendered Consequences of Migration” 2008, pp.
19–35.
96. Biemann, “Performing the Border” 2002, pp. 99–118.
97. Castellanos and Boehm, “Engendering Mexican Migration,” 2008, p. 10.
98. González-López, 2005, p. 187.
99. Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the
Nation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. As cited in Pierrette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013, p. 241. “The bodies of immigrant women – namely
poor immigrant women, women of colour and especially Mexican women –
were seen as a threat to the US. Perceived as prolific breeders, they were
also construed as racial threats to demographic homogeneity, social welfare
drains on public schools and hospitals and as the culprits responsible for the
social reproduction of immigration children and entire communities.”
100. Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2013, p. 238.
101. Castellanos and Boehm, “Engendering Mexican Migration,” 2008, p. 11.

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 8
Gendered Everyday Bordering: An
Ethnographic Case Study on the Border
Between Finland and Russia

Olga Davydova-Minguet and Pirjo Pöllänen

What, Where and Why?

Although it is said that the world is getting smaller and that borders are
becoming increasingly transparent and unrecognizable, for the Niirala-
Värtsilä border area between Finland and Russia, this is not the case. The
Finnish-Russian border was contested and redrawn during World War II,
and since that time it has been highly controlled. During the Soviet era it
acted as a border between states and their economic-political blocs, and is
even now considered as a “border between continents” or at least the two
different border regimes of the European Union (EU) and Eurasian Union.
The influences of recent developments between the EU and Russia (namely
the sanctions and counter-sanctions resulting from the Ukrainian-Russian
conflict, and a decrease in tourism from Russia to Finland), and the agree-
ment reached between Finland and Russia to tighten the border-crossing
regime for third-country nationals are also tangible in the Niirala-Värtsilä
border area. It can be said, that after a period of opening up the Iron Curtain

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 Women and Borders

in the global area of Niirala-Värtsilä, the border has since become more
controlled and has tightened once again. Thus, the period of de-border-
ing which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s has changed to become a
period of re-bordering in mid-2010.
During the de-bordering era, the relative openness of the border has
led to transnational areas emerging on both sides of the border, and within
these areas, the interpenetration of people, transnational families, ideas,
material goods, cultural activities and administrative contacts have been
highly visible. Typical of this area has been the gendered character of
migration, and the majority of Russian migrants in the region of North
Karelia on the Finnish side are women who have migrated to Finland
through marriage with Finnish men from nearby Russian areas. In an
opposite trend, those who are engaged in border crossings from Finland
to Russia, are predominantly men who take the role of fuel-byers, officials,
businessmen, cultural entrepreneurs etc.1
Our chapter concentrates on an analysis of bordering processes in the
areas of North Karelia (in Finland) and the Republic of Karelia (in Russia),
in a period characterized by a transition from de-bordering to re-bor-
dering. Specifically, we ask how gender is presented and constructed in
these processes. Theoretically, we look at the everyday bordering processes
through the prism of precarization. We claim that in the border areas, the
precarization of life has led to some ethicized and gendered features emerg-
ing, which in our case are represented in transnational care and national
celebrations. This chapter is based on our long-term ethnographic research
on the border area between Finland and Russia.2
Our research area consists of the eastern-most Finnish region, North
Karelia. The region has 302 kilometers of common border with the
Republic of Karelia of the Russian Federation, and the crossing point of
Niirala-Värtsilä is the fourth busiest checkpoint between Finland and
Russia. Our research field also crosses to the Republic of Karelia on the
Russian side of the border. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain at the begin-
ning of the 1990s, interactions between local people living on both sides
of the border have undergone consistent growth. On an everyday level,
this can be seen in the amounts of intercultural marriages between
Finnish men and Russian women, and also in the migrants from Russia

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

who form the biggest foreign-born population group both in North Karelia
and in Finland as a whole. On a daily basis, these migrants and members
of their families, cross the border between Finland and Russia with differ-
ent purposes: women often have care responsibilities on the Russian side,
migrants also visit the border area on the Russian side of the border to buy
groceries, tobacco and fuel, and to maintain social networks. Despite the
familiarity of crossing the border, it has to be taken into account that many
obstacles to cross-border interaction still exist. For example, crossing the
border requires a valid visa, and sending money (e.g. remittances) from
Finland to Russia or vice versa is an expensive and complicated process.3

Everyday Bordering in Transnational and

Precarious Conditions
The study is theoretically informed by the intersections of studies of gender,
transnational care and memory politics in the context of precarization and
border studies. The overall conceptualization of this chapter is informed
by the theoretical understanding of the processes of the precarization of
societies.4 Precarity can be understood in two ways: either as a hollowing-
out of the labor market, or as a hollowing-out of the whole society. Here,
our theoretical thinking follows the latter and wider conceptualization of
precarization. As Berlant puts it:
Precarity has taken shape as many things: a realist term, denot-
ing a condition of instability created by changes in the compact
between capital and the state; an affective term, describing the
historical present; and an ideological term, a rallying cry for a
new world of interdependency and care that takes the public
good as the apriori whose energies do not exist for the benefit
of private wealth and which should be protected by the political
class.5

It is obvious that contemporary capitalist societies are changing their

character. The forms of work, education, family life, sociality and leisure,
civic society and politics, and also their international relations are shifting
from life-time, stable endeavors towards temporary, unstable, uncertain
projects and phenomena. In labor market research, these processes have

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 Women and Borders

been defined as the feminization of work, and are addressed in research

considering theories relating to the precarization of work.6 Because of these
processes, many populations (especially women and migrants) have to face
uncertain circumstances not only from an economic point of view, but also
as a result of the emotional and functional frames that shape their lives.
As an additional consideration, the global geopolitical order has become
even more unstable and militant, and is now vulnerable to conflicts which
develop not only in the ‘traditional’ locations of the unstable Middle East,
but also in post-Soviet areas. This instability creates feelings of precarious-
ness, especially among groups of a population that have had some personal
connection to the territories where such conflicts arise.
Borders are also seen as precarious places, especially where the borders
represent a collision of different border regimes, or they experience the
effects of international conflicts. Bordering involves the border as a physi-
cal place, but as a theoretical concept, bordering addresses processes of
the production of borders in much broader contexts than the border itself
and these involve many different administrative, material and symbolic
practices. The most unequivocal influence on bordering is that exerted by
international conflict, and especially on the border, international conflict
is felt even before it has fully developed. In the globalized world, the effects
of international conflicts expand beyond concrete borders and territories.
For example, the recent Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-EU conflicts have
inevitably influenced all Russian and Ukrainian speakers in Finland, and
elsewhere. In our case, we analyze the everyday and symbolic bordering
processes that take place in the proximity of the border between nation
states. In our view, this influences the border population in two ways.
Firstly, for the inhabitants of North Karelia and the Republic of Karelia,
the border is part of their everyday lives. Secondly, it constantly reminds
them of the national meanings and symbolisms the border holds in today’s
precarious geopolitical situation.
When borders are seen not as fixed lines, but more as processes, prac-
tices, discourses, symbols, institutions or networks through which power
works, then discussions of bordering take on a contemporary meaning.7 In
opposition to post-modern conceptions of a brave new borderless world
with neutral lines, borders can be perceived as collations of emotions, fears

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

and memories that can affect differently those who cross them, or those
who stay on one side or the other.8 Bordering inevitably involves agency: it
is not only an activity involving the classification of people and the delimi-
tation of territory, but also one which highlights a struggle over represen-
tation and identity. Bordering is a political process that allows certain
representations of identity and memory to exist, while denying others.9
Borders and bordering are employed in creating collectivities or divisions,
social boundaries and frontiers. Bordering can develop in different direc-
tions depending on increases or decreases in the perceived influence of
the dividing function of the border. These are addressed as processes of
de-bordering or re-bordering.
On a symbolic level, and also on the level of everyday interactions –
bordering appears as a gendered process. On the symbolic level, bordering
reflects a complex mix of national feelings, experiences, stories and affili-
ations, and is rich in gendered symbols.10 In border areas, bordering also
becomes a part of everyday life, especially when crossing the border. On
the Finnish-Russian border, the position of Russian immigrant women is
different compared to that of native Finnish women, or to that of Russian
women who live in Russia. Crossing the physical national border can have
various notable effects: female bodies can become both sexualized and
ethnicized, and the feeling that the border evokes is always uncertain and
somehow frightening. The border represents a masculine dominance: both
border guards and border-crossers are predominantly men, and the border
itself can be considered as existing because of war, and which is guarded
and maintained by the exertion of the power of the bordering states. As
border crossers, women find themselves in an uncertain position: as
objects of men’s gaze, as those whose bodies have become marked in terms
of nationality and ethnicity, and as those whose “womanly” function as
carers is made difficult to exercise when the movements of border-crossers
are strongly prescribed.11
As an example of everyday bordering practices, we have used practices
of transnational care and national celebrations. Care is an obvious example
of everyday transnationalism that takes place in border settings, and in
addition to work, care is seen as the most explicit site of precarization. Be
it willingly or not, as humans we are all subject to care. In the globalized

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 Women and Borders

world, precarious conditions have changed the conditions in which care is

implemented, but care is also visible as an element of bordering processes,
although it may go unrecognized. Bordering and everyday transnational
practices are carried out by humans who have obligations towards each
other. When defining care, it is important to understand that care firstly is
bodily work, where one human body is caring for another human body lit-
erally or figuratively. Secondly, in many cultures care is seen as female work,
and this has significance in the border context. In caring matters there is
always the question: who is responsible for taking care of somebody?12
Celebration of a national day or national act of commemoration has to
do with both the construction of meaningful memory, and also the concept
of nation. National days represent an official self-understanding of nation-
states, so their celebrations are strongly orchestrated and controlled. These
days form a repetitive “religious service” in the civic religion of nationalism.
The main function of national days is to remember the nation, and through
remembrance of a foundational event of the nation’s past, to remind citizens
of their national membership, and also the approved ways of being a part
of a national community. National days accommodate “ecstatic,” emotion-
ally engaging nationalism.13 National day celebration is a repetitive, highly
formalized and prescriptive ritual. Its performance forms public emotions
and virtues, and within it hegemonic authority is conveyed and naturalized.
National day rituals often refer to or present a foundational historical event
of the nation, and involve a model by which it is remembered. Ritual in and
of itself is a transmission of its own discipline of memory and of its intrin-
sic temporality.14 From this point of view, it is interesting to think about
the foundational events of the bordering nations, their ways of remember-
ing, and how these celebrations include or exclude those who have become
members of local communities, yet originate from the nation “behind the
border.” Additionally, it is interesting to consider how present day national
celebrations contribute to the feeling of precariousness.
In this study we use theories of transnationalism as our viewpoint on
the processes of bordering. The theories of transnationalism underline the
multiplicity of networks and connections that go beyond the borders and
boundaries of the nation state. In the same time, transnational thinking
draws attention to the unequal power relations within these connections.15

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

The transnational approach paradoxically steers attention to the construc-

tion of borders and boundaries within the transnationally acting phenom-
ena. Khagram and Levitt propose to switch this research perspective:

In contrast to traditional perspectives, which see transnational

phenomena and dynamics as a subset of those occurring some-
where between the national and the global, TS [Transnational
Studies] includes another, in some cases, more productive option.
What are assumed to be bounded social units are understood
as transnationally constituted, embedded and influenced social
arenas that interact with one another. From this perspective, the
world consists of multiple sets of dynamically overlapping and
interacting transnational social fields that create and shape seem-
ingly bordered and bounded structures, actors and processes….
By transnational, we propose an optics or gaze that begins with
a world without borders, empirically examines the boundaries
and borders that emerge at particular historical moments, and
explores their relationship to unbounded arenas and processes.16

Although we do not discuss transnational theories in an explicit way in

this chapter, it is part of the wider theoretical framework of our study,
namely, to identify the interconnection between bordering and everyday
transnationalism.17
Our methodology is based on the tradition of the ethnography of every-
day life.18 Everyday ethnography refers to a holistic way of doing research
and an interest in knowledge rather than, for example, a way of collect-
ing data. We are specifically interested in the gendered everyday practices
taking place in the context of bordering and precarization.We have been
developing the conceptualization of intersection of bordering and gender in
our previous articles19 and this chapter exists on this on-going continuum.
Our case study comprises several data-sets, namely.

(1) ethnographic interviews,

(2) ethnographic observations of the border crossings in Niirala-Värtsilä
checkpoint (2007–16), and
(3) ethnographical observations of national celebrations in Joensuu
(Finland) and Sortavala and Petrozavodsk (Russia) (2013–16).

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 Women and Borders

The interview data consists of ethnographic interviews with Russian-

and Finnish-speaking inhabitants of the border municipality of Tohmajärvi
(2016, N=35). Most of the interviewees were women, but the spouses of the
Russian-speaking women featured in the study were also interviewed. In
addition, the data includes interviews with Russian wife-migrants20 (2003–4,
N=16) and group discussions with Russian immigrant women (2009,
N=10). During the group conversations, women discussed their working
careers, family connections, their relation with public authorities, trans-
national relationships, leisure time, and the peculiarities of life in North
Karelia.

Everyday Transnational Care and Gender

The most obvious task where bordering process is connected to every-
day gendered practices is transnational care. Care is a feature of human
interaction, and among Russian migrant women who live a transnational
everyday life, care is a distinctive issue. Russian migrant women living
in Finland have care obligations towards their relatives who still live in
Russia. In practice this means that women living their everyday lives in
Finland cross the border between Finland and Russia regularly to take care
of their relatives’ welfare on the Russian side of the border.
Care can take place in the public sphere (e.g. in nursing homes for the
elderly or kindergartens), or in the private sphere (at home). Commonly,
public refers to the masculine sphere of life, whereas private refers to the
feminine sphere of life – public is for an autonomous and rational man and
private is for the dependent and caring woman.21 In addition, this implies
that care is a female duty. Care is also a universal need. Fisher and Tronto
argue “human existence requires care from others and such caring is an
important part of life.”22 Even if care is a universal need and an element
of a good quality of life, it is often defined as the work of a woman. Fisher
and Tronto continue that women tend to care in the female sphere which
is seen to include private matters, family affairs, unpaid labor and personal
relationships.23 This therefore affects the nature of the care they provide,
which in terms of duty and work, is often invisible and low paid. Ways of
organizing care are culture-related, and definitions for good care and care

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

routines are also culturally constructed phenomena. Questions of how to

organize care for elderly people or how to organize childcare are not issues
of universal understanding, and in different cultures, different welfare state
systems and different times, these issues are often seen differently. Also the
division between public and private obligations is dependent on historical
and political contexts.
The caring systems of each society may be understood as being cultur-
ally organized systems. From the socio-political perspective, mainstream
research has for a long time concentrated on the study of care systems
within the public sphere. The hollowing-out of the welfare state and the
precarization of societies have influenced the ways of organizing care in
both private and public spheres. In the same way that state socio-political
systems differ from one another, the way of organizing care in private life
varies from one country to the next. In the sphere of private life, the con-
cept of care inevitably refers to the family and family relations. It is taken
that in many countries, the main unit of care is the family. However, there
are different ways of organizing care within the family and the concept of
family differs from one country to another. For example, the concept of
family in Finland is based on the ideal of a nuclear or elementary family,
whereas the concept of family in Russia follows either the extended fam-
ily model or the extended motherhood model.24 The precarization and
hollowing-out of welfare states emphasizes the importance of the family
as the main unit of care in both Finland and Russia. In the case of the
transnational family however, the inflamed geopolitical situation makes
them even more vulnerable, and their everyday life and care even more
precarious.
As pointed out, care is a female duty both privately and publicly.
Transnational care in Russian women’s lives means that they have care
duties towards their family members living on the Russian side of the bor-
der. In practice, most of the women we talked with during our fieldwork
in North Karelia were involved in providing transnational care for some of
their close relatives on the Russian side of the border. In the most extreme
cases, some women were the main carers for their parents who lived on the
other side of the border. This meant that women needed to travel to Russia
every weekend, in order to care for and look after matters concerning their

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 Women and Borders

parents. Once we know that taking care of a sick, elderly person requires
bodily care and an everyday presence, we realize that providing that care
changes considerably when the carer lives at a distance. As such, the inten-
sity of care tends to decrease in a transnational setting.
Border crossing is always unpredictable. One never knows if there are
queues at the border or how long the crossing may take, or whether there
are new protocols, requirements or limitations. In regard to providing care,
this creates both a paradoxical and precarious situation. Because care needs
are unpredictable and may also require a physical presence, an individual
may never know when your elderly relative who lives on the Russian side
may suffer a medical emergency, or whether you are able to immediately
respond. The interdependency between border regime/geopolitical crisis,
border-crossing and transnational care came to the fore in the story of one
of our informants, who told us about her feelings during Russian putsch
(19.8.1991) when the border was closed for several days. For a woman of
Russian origin living in Finland and her parents who stayed in Russia, the
situation seemed unbearable, when the only daughter of elderly parents
found herself on the Finnish side. Her situation felt chaotic and insecure,
being cut off from her family by the closed border, and having no way of
knowing how this situation would resolve.25 The same feelings of insecurity
and uncertainty were described by our informants during our most recent
field work in border areas in the summer 2016.
The most recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine has created simi-
lar situations and feelings, for example some women with Ukrainian citi-
zenship who live close to the border, have stopped their visits to Russia.
The present day Russian-Ukrainian conflict intertwines with the compli-
cated post-Soviet situation, when people moved from one post-Soviet state
to another, and some members of these families also moved to Finland.
Especially, if those who moved to Finland have care responsibilities
towards a Ukrainian citizen living in the Russian Federation, then the bor-
der becomes an unbridgeable obstacle for providing everyday care, even
if the caregiver would ideally like to move their relative to Finland for a
limited time. The Ukrainian citizen living in Russia cannot get a visa to
go to Finland (an EU state), and they would have to go to Kiev, which for
a person who is old or in poor health is an unrealistic task. On the other

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

hand, the Finnish family reunification policy is based on the nuclear fam-
ily ideology and does not consider elderly parents and their adult children
as members of the same family. In this light, the Finnish immigration and
family reunification policy is a bordering practice that affects transnational
families’ everyday lives in a fundamental way.
In our data there were cases where the woman of Russian origin did
not have elderly relatives in Russia or Ukraine, or she was not the main
carer, if such relatives existed. In such cases, women could distance them-
selves from the international conflict, although everybody, Russian- and
Ukranian-speakers, felt it very personally. The care obligations towards
somebody living across the border makes border and possibility to cross
it the most significant part of organizing transnational everyday life. If the
care responsibility towards elderly relatives was fulfilled by some other
member of a transnational family, who still lives in Russia or Ukraine,
the woman living in Finland could position herself as an observer of this
geopolitical situation, but not as one who feels involved in it personally
through her whole body. In such cases, traveling to Russia is not experi-
enced as an everyday necessity, although it can be pleasant and important.
The ways of organizing care vary from one country to another and
depend on the welfare state system of the country. As the state (public pol-
icy) provides less welfare services and income transfers for its inhabitants,
the meaning of family as a provider and organizer of care becomes more
important. The trend in providing welfare in both the bordering states
of Finland and Russia have run parallel: from universal generous wel-
fare towards liberal and minimal systems.26 This means that in the future,
(transnational) families will likely have to take on even more responsibil-
ities in organizing and producing welfare for their members.

National Celebrations as Everyday Bordering

From an everyday ethnographic point of view, celebrations and rit-
uals are part of mundane, everyday life. In this part of the chapter we
consider how national celebrations also cause (gendered) feelings of
precariousness in the border context. In both Finland and Russia, pre-
sent national days refer to World War II. In principle, the war and its

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 Women and Borders

representations always bring to the fore masculine functions and sym-

bolism.27 Finnish Independence day is celebrated on December 6 and
Russian Victory Day on May 9. The Finnish date does not refer to
World War II itself, but rather to the date of gaining its independence
from Russia in 1917. Still, the celebration concentrates on remember-
ing the defense of the independence of Finland during the wars with the
Soviet Union in 1939–44. In Finnish North Karelia, the celebration of
Independence Day is felt even more reverently than in the inner regions
of Finland, because of its closeness to the border and the visible traces of
battles and the defense fortifications that are well-maintained in some of
the border municipalities.
Historically, the present border in North Karelia is relatively new. Here,
the border between Finland and Russia was established as a result of the
so-called Winter War of 1939–40 (the term used in Finland – in Russia it
is known as the Finnish War). At the conclusion of hostilities, Finland lost
about 24,700 square kilometers of land, which accounted for approximately
a tenth of its entire territory. The lost Karelian territories were regained by
Finland during the so-called Continuation War (1941–4), which in Russia
is perceived as part of the Great Patriotic War, which in Russian historical
canon spans from 1941 to 1945. This territory was then regained by the
Soviet Union in 1944, and part of this territory (namely Ladoga Karelia)
was incorporated into the Soviet Karelia (up to 1990), which nowadays is
called the Republic of Karelia of the Russian Federation.
After the defeat of Finland in the Winter War in 1940, the entire popu-
lation of Finnish Karelia (the Ladoga region and Karelian Isthmus), more
than 400,000 people were evacuated to Finland. When the territory was
returned during the summer of 1941, almost all of the evacuees returned
to their homes. When Finland withdrew from the war against the Soviet
Union in 1944 and Ladoga Karelia again passed to the Soviet Union, the
entire population was once again evacuated to Finland. The loss of Ladoga
Karelia (and other Karelian territories), the sufferings of war and evacu-
ation, and experiences of a painful integration in new places make-up an
extremely important set of the national collective memory of Finland, and
also the personal and family memory of the original evacuees and their
descendants. This memory is very well articulated and institutionalized,

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

and there are a huge number of works of art on the subject, together with
large bodies of research,28 and civil society organizations including still
active fraternities of former residents of the lost Finnish Karelian locales.
The present day Russian population of the former Finnish Karelia was
formed by many migratory flows. The first settlers moved to the area in
1940, were then evacuated, and subsequently returned to Karelia after the
end of hostilities.29
During the Soviet time, the most important national celebration in
Russia was devoted to the anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution
and was celebrated on November 7. With the change of ideological
regime, the former ‘main’ celebration was abolished. The victory over fas-
cist Germany has been virtually the only event from the Soviet time that
Russians have evaluated as doubtlessly positive. Now, due to both inter-
national and internal developments in memory-politics, this event has
gained meaning as a celebration of a foundational event of the present-day
Russian nation.
Today, there is no common interpretation of the wars which took place
between Finland and Russia. In Russia, an interpretation of the war has
developed as a result of events which occurred in the processes of identity
creation for the Post-Soviet states (e.g. the Baltic states and those of Eastern
Central Europe), which started to interpret the post-war period as a Soviet
occupation. In the 1990s, open discussion on the role of the Soviet Union
in the war flourished, but in the 2000s, Russia returned to the Brezhnev era
myth of a “great victory.” Russia’s official memory-politics now promote a
view of Russia as an inheritor of a Soviet victory over fascism, and exploits
this image in contemporary propaganda. For example, in reporting the
events in Kiev in 2013–14 and the war in Eastern Ukraine in Russian
official media, pro-Ukrainian forces were presented as fascists and pro-
Russians as those who are defending the heritage of the Great Patriotic War
and therefore representative of forces for good. In Finland, after a short
period of establishing reconciliation with Russia in the 1990s, the public
interpretation of the Winter and Continuation wars become narrowed to
an existential fight against Russia for the survival of the Finnish nation.30
At the same time, different Finnish Karelian organizations in the former
Finnish territories, authorities, and private individuals became involved in

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 Women and Borders

different kinds of cooperation with local inhabitants, in order to make their

histories and memories part of the landscape.
Etkind proposes that the historical memory of societies should be
thought of as a profoundly mediated phenomenon.31 In analyzing the
mediation of appropriated events worthy of remembrance and the ways
of doing so, he proposes to differentiate “memory hardware” (the monu-
ments, artifacts and buildings that refer to such events and persons), and
“memory software” (different texts, including literature, historical narra-
tives etc.). Memory hardware is situated in the landscape and makes the
masculine representations of history (wars) which it refers to, visible and
present in people’s everyday life. War memorials are the most numerous of
all public monuments throughout Europe, and have many of common fea-
tures. They are probably the most ‘European’ in terms of symbolic culture,
are easily translatable, and also define the topography and iconography of
a historical period. When moving on the bordering areas, one can notice
that they are full of different kinds of war memorials. For example, in the
capital of North Karelia Joensuu, two of its three publicly funded museums
exhibit war artefacts.
The territory of the former Finnish Karelia has many Russian war mon-
uments that were erected at different times, and symbolize different peri-
ods in the understanding of the war. The monuments erected in 1950–60
represent a typical Soviet style, being realistic, made from cheap materials,
and showing mourning soldiers and sometimes mothers. The monuments
of 1970–80 use the same symbolism, but their style is more symbolic. In
the 1990s and early 2000s, memory activities involved larger circles of
people, and included officials and activists. An example of an attempt to
create common understanding of the war can be found about hundred
kilometers from the border on the crossroads of the roads to Pitkäranta
and Suojärvi. At the site of bloody clashes, authorities and organizations
from both Russian and Finnish sides built a cross, formed by two female
figures, leaning towards each other. These figures symbolize Finnish and
Russian mothers (nations) who are mourning their fallen sons. In the
2010s, Russian authorities and civic activists turned once more to the
traditional style of war monuments, many of which were renovated and
reconstructed. Typically, the reconstructions included fixing the decayed

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monuments and their surroundings, and also adding orthodox crosses to

them. Additionally, wartime military equipment is often used in newly-
erected monuments, acting as symbols of masculine triumph and power.
The popular historical narratives (memory software) are not so vis-
ible and tangible as monuments and museums (memory hardware). They
become explicit through the social interactions, lived experiences and are
emphasized during the celebrations of national days and commemora-
tions connected with them. For example, in Finland on Independence day
the movie Unknown Soldier based on the novel of Väinö Linna, is always
presented by the National broadcast company, Yle. This movie has been
reshot twice. Also in present-day Russia, the television program always
includes old Soviet-time war movies which evoke particular emotions
in the viewers. Our informant told us, that on Victory day she is always
watching Russian television, especially these movies. One of the most pop-
ular movies, The Dawns Here are Quiet was shot in Ladoga Karelia in 1972
and reshot in 2015. Now place of the shooting of this movie which is situ-
ated near Finnish-Russian border on the Russian side, is an unquestionable
sightseeing place for Russian tourists traveling in Karelia.
In the Republic of Karelia, from 2010 the celebration of Victory day
and other national celebrations returned to the Soviet pattern, and were
revitalized by the understanding of a victory as being ‘holy’ – not only as a
sacrifice made by the whole nation, but also as being led by divine provi-
dence. Representatives of the Orthodox church take an active part in all
celebrations, so producing the image of an Orthodox nation. In today’s
Russia, the church is firmly involved in the production of a conservative
ideology which in turn is promoted by the State as traditional Russian
values. In Ladoga Karelia however, the national celebrations (traditional
Russian Victory Day and the Day of Liberation of Karelia from the Fascist
Occupation) are ambiguous. They follow an official scheme and present
these territories as liberated from fascists, which sharply contradicts the
factual history of these places. The celebration of Victory Day is usually
organized as a rally in the main square of the particular city (e.g. Sortavala).
It is characterized by the speeches of authority representatives which reiter-
ate Soviet-era clichés about victory over the fascists, a march of citizens to
the grave of fallen soldiers and the main monument that is erected there,

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a memorial service by the grave and the laying of wreaths. Also so-called
search parties, which involve school pupils, are presenting their activities.
These activities involve searching and digging for the remains of fallen
Soviet soldiers on former battlefields and identifying them. Search parties
also collect the weapons and other equipment that can be found in the
woods of Russian Karelia, and exhibit them in school museums.32
This celebration creates a feeling of belonging to the contemporary Russian
nation, but the position of Finns and those who have personal connections
with Finns places individuals in a contentious and ambivalent position. On
the everyday level, this can be emphasized in the lives of transnational fami-
lies. We can only imagine how precarious the position of a Russian woman,
who has common children with her Finnish spouse, is in such a celebra-
tion. The meaning of the celebration, victory over the fascists, positions the
defeated Finns in the role of enemies again and again, although the actual
history of the territory is well-known. The celebration presupposes an inter-
pretation of World War II that represents Finland as an ally of Germany, and
therefore fascist and guilty of starting the war. Such a narrow understanding
of history is however common in younger groups who have not lived through
the experience of war, and have grown up in a post-Soviet Russia.
On the Finnish side of the border, during the 1990s and 2000s, the cre-
ation of war monuments followed the line of a reconstruction of defense
lines and marking the places of particular conflicts. Heroism and clever
fighting was emphasized, which served to strengthen the masculine image
of a Finnish nation.33 Also, the image of civilian suffering was presented
in different museums and art exhibitions in North Karelia. The theme
of a lost Ladoga Karelia is often present (for example in the Museum of
North Karelia), and cherishing the lost cultural and historic heritage of
Karelia is one of the central objectives of this museum. At the same time
however, only a few years ago, a play presented by the Joensuu municipal
theatre entitled, the Winter War, ended with a strong appeal to let the his-
tory of the Winter War rest in peace. The image of the Winter War as an
event which reunited the Finnish nation in the face of a common enemy
is commonly used in Finland when there is a need to emphasize national
unity. On the everyday level, appeals to the “Winter War spirit” are found
to produce the ground for racist bullying in the schools of North Karelia

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

where pupils of Finnish and Russian origin are studying together.34 The
play presented by the Joensuu Theater was however a strong statement in
the context of the Finnish conversation on historical memory, and called
for new bases for national solidarity to be established.
In Finland, the celebration of Independence Day follows the estab-
lished scheme and involves religious church services, laying wreaths on
the graves of fallen soldiers in cemeteries, and civic celebration where
representatives of the municipal government, intellectuals and artists give
speeches on the theme of independence. The celebration is usually seri-
ous, formal and fervent. Although speeches mostly address the memory
of the war, the need to cherish it, and expressions of gratitude towards the
veterans, some of the speeches reflect the changed character of Finland’s
present-day state and population. The form and tone of these celebrations
usually exclude immigrants, especially those from Russia. The television
programming also repeats old movies and documentaries that use the
vocabulary of the war, and legitimize terms of abuse about Russians that
are considered inappropriate in present-day language. Independence Day
is especially difficult for Russian immigrants in Finland, mainly because
it recreates an image of Russia as posing an everlasting danger, and of
Russians as the despicable racialized ‘other’ that was typical of Finnish
wartime propaganda.
Based on our ethnographic data analyses, the nationalized landscape is
marked by war memorials and national celebrations that remind their par-
ticipants of the approved collective memory, yet create a feeling of precari-
ousness for those who live transnational lives. Also, to other dwellers in the
border territories, these signs of national memory bring feelings of uncer-
tainty and fear, especially against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical
conflicts that have characterized recent years. In particular, they make an
especially explicit turn from the de-bordering which was seen in the 1990s
and 2000s, to a process of re-bordering which has been evident since 2010.

Discussion
In this article the theory of precarization is used in a loose way and detached
from its traditional context, namely, that of the welfare state and the labor

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 Women and Borders

market. We see precarization as a useful theoretical and methodological

tool, which broadens our understanding of bordering and everyday life in
transnational border societies. If precarization presupposes the hollowing-
out of stable institutional and everyday structures, then it is a usable con-
cept with which to analyze the present-day situation of the re-escalation
of international conflicts and their effects on the lives of transnationally
developing communities. As Eeva Jokinen et al.35 point out, precarization
forms a user-interface for our time, and in the transnational context, it
becomes even more evident.
According to our analysis, in a transnational setting, precariousness
can be seen as a clearly gendered phenomenon in such everyday practices
as transnational care, and in national celebrations. As a typical everyday
activity in bordering societies, transnational care is a familiar but some-
what precarious undertaking for immigrant women, and full of uncer-
tainty. Yet in the face of international conflict, the practice of care becomes
even more precarious and renders them to be more vulnerable. The actions
of bordering fall upon women directly or indirectly, through a combina-
tion of issues that link to migration, citizenship and border crossing
regimes. Nationalized memory landscapes and national celebrations laud
men as those who protect the intactness and purity of the nation, which
is typical of the nationalist imagination. In the territories of ‘lost Karelia,’
this historical conflict between states still exists on a symbolic level, and
has escalated due to the ongoing Russian-EU conflict. The atmosphere of
a nationalized landscape, and national celebrations that are infiltrated by
the nationalistic memory of the war have an impact on all of those dwell-
ing in bordering societies, but for women (and especially those who live
transnational lives) it creates an especially precarious feeling, as it places
women as objects or even abjects in these activities. In these border areas,
the processes and impacts of bordering involve all of the areas’ inhabitants,
and not only those who cross the border.
From the point of view of transnational and cross-border living, which
became possible in formerly divided territories during the post-Soviet
period, the creation of regional cross-border identity would be a func-
tional development. During the de-bordering period of the 1990s and
2000s, many forms of regional cooperation were developed, and even some

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 Gendered Everyday Bordering

common administrative bodies and cooperation forums such as Euregio

Karelia. In North Karelia, until 2013 the preparations to launch a visa-free
regime with Russia were taken seriously. In the spheres of culture, trade and
tourism, many concrete routines have been established, which help in the
everyday interaction between citizens of bordering territories. However,
the shift in the geopolitical situation has led to a drastic change in these
developments, and even the international checkpoint of Niirala-Värtsilä is
planned to change from being open round-the-clock to restricted opening.
This plan enhances feelings of insecurity, vulnerability and precarity on the
Finnish-Russian border.

Notes
1. Olga Davydova and Pirjo Pöllänen, “Gender on the Finnish-Russian Border:
National, Ethnosexual and Bodily Perspective,” in Joni Virkkunen, Pirjo
Uimonen and Olga Davydova, eds, Ethnosexual Processes: Realities, Stereotypes
and Narratives, Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2010, pp. 18–35; Olga Davydova
and Pirjo Pöllänen, “Border Crossing from the Ethnosexual Perspective: A Case
Study of the Finnish – Russian Border,” Eurasia Border Review, No. 2:1, 2011,
pp. 73–87; Pirjo Pöllänen, Hoivanrajat. Venäläiset maahanmuuttajanaiset ja
ylirajainen perhehoiva, Helsinki: Väestöliitto, 2013.
2. E.g. Olga Davydova, Suomalaisena, venäläisenä ja kolmantena. Etnisyys-
diskursseja transnationaalissa tilassa, Joensuu: Joensuun yliopistopaino, 2009;
Davydova and Pöllänen, “Border Crossing from the Ethnosexual Perspective”
2011; Pöllänen, Hoivanrajat 2013; Olga Davydova-Minguet, “Voitonpäivänjuhla
Sortavalassa. Juhlinnan ja muistin politiikkaa rajakaupungissa,” Elore, Vol. 22,
No. 2, 2015. http://www.elore.fi/arkisto/2_15/davydova-minguet.pdf (accessed
on March 15, 2016).
3. Davydova and Pöllänen, “Gender on the Finnish-Russian Border” 2011;
Pöllänen, Hoivanrajat 2013.
4. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2011; Paolo Virno, Väen kielioppi: ehdotus analyysiksi nykypäivän muodo-
ista, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2006.
5. Lauren Berlant, “Austerity, Precarity, Awkwardness,” 2011, p. 2. https://superva-
lentthought.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/berlant-aaa-2011final.pdf (accessed
on August 5, 2016).
6. See, e.g. Eeva Jokinen, Aikuisten arki, Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2005; Eeva Jokinen,
Jukka Könönen, Juhana Venäläinen & Jussi Vähämäki, eds, “Yrittäkää edes!”
Prekarisaatio Pohjois-Karjalassa, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2011; Jussi Vähämäki,

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 Women and Borders

Kuhnurien kerho – vanhan työn paheista uuden hyveiksi, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto,

1999; Jussi Vähämäki, “Tehdasasetusten palauttaminen,” in Eeva Jokinen,
Jukka Könönen, Juhana Venäläinen & Jussi Vähämäki, eds, “Yrittäkää edes!”
Prekarisaatio Pohjois-Karjalassa, Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2011, pp. 163–89.
7. Corey Johnson, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz,
Mark Salter and Chris Rumford, “Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’
in border studies,” Political Geography, No. 30, 2011, pp. 61–9. http://www2.
hawaii.edu/~reecej/Johnson%20et%20al%202011%20Political%20Geography.
pdf (accessed on August 5, 2016).
8. See Ilkka Liikanen, “From Post-Modern Visions to Multi-Scale Study of
Bordering: Recent Trends in European Study of Borders and Border Areas,”
Eurasia Border Review, Vol.1, No. 1, 2010, pp. 17–28; Anssi Paasi, “A Border
Theory: An unattainable dream or a realistic aim for border scholars?” in
Doris Wastl-Walter, ed, The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies,
London: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 11–31.
9. See Johnson et al., “Interventions on rethinking ‘the border’” 2011.
10. Sylvia Walby, “Woman and Nation,” in Gopal Balakrishnan, ed, Mapping the
Nation, New York: Verso, 1996, pp. 235–55; Nira Yuval-Davies, Gender and Nation,
London: Sage, 1997; Tuula Gordon, Katri Komulainen and Kirsti Lempiäinen,
eds, Suomineitonen hei! Kansallisuuden sukupuoli, Tampere: Vastapaino, 2002.
11. See Davydova and Pöllänen, “Gender on the Finnish-Russian Border” 2010;
“Border Crossing from the Ethnosexual Perspective,” Davydova and Pöllänen
2011.
12. See Silva Tedre, Hoivan sanattomat sopimukset: tutkimus vanhusten kotipalvelu-
työstä, Joensuu: Joensuun yliopisto, 1999; See also Pirjo Pöllänen, “Arjen käytän-
nöt ja perhesuhteet venäläis-suomalaisissa perheissä” in Eija Sevón and Marianne
Notko, eds, Perhesuhteet puntarissa, Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2008, pp. 153–65.
13. John Bodnar, “Public Memory in an American City: Commemoration in
Cleveland,” in John R. Gillis, ed, Commemorations. The Politics of National
Identity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 74–89; David
McCrone, and Gayle McPherson, “Introduction,” in David McCrone and
Gayle McPherson, eds, National Days: Constructing and Mobilising National
Identity, Palgrave Macmillian, 2012, pp. 1–9; Michael Skey, “‘We Wanna Show
‘em Who We are’. National Events in England,” in David McCrone and Gayle
McPherson, eds, National Days: Constructing and Mobilising National Identity,
Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, pp. 41–56.
14. Stephan Feuchtwang, “Ritual and Memory,” in Susannah Radstone and Bill
Schwarz, eds, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham
University Press, 2010, p. 298.
15. Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, eds, The Transnational Family: New
European Frontiers and Global Networks, Oxford: Berg, 2002; Inderpal Grewal,

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Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2005.
16. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, “Constructing Transnational Studies: An
Overview,” in Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, eds, The Transnational
Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations. London: Routledge, 2008, p. 5.
17. See, e.g., Davydova, Suomalaisena, venäläisenä ja kolmantena 2009; Pöllänen,
Hoivanrajat, 2013.
18. See Pablo Vila (ed.), Ethnography at the border, Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003; Jokinen, Aikuisten arki, 2005; Luisa
Passerini, Dawn Lyon, Enrica Capussotti and Ioanna Lalioutoueds, Women
Migrants from East to West. Gender, mobility and belonging in contem-
porary Europe, New York & Oxford: Bergham Books, 2007; Juraj Buzalka
and Vladimír Benč, “EU Border Monitoring: Slovak – Ukrainian Border
VyšnéNemecké/Uzhgorod and Vel’kéSlemence/Mali Selmenci,” Bratislava
and Prešov: The Slovak Foreign Policy Association, 2007; see also Tedre 1999;
Johanna Uotinen, Merkillinenkone. Informaatioteknologia, kokemus ja kerto-
mus, Joensuu: Joensuun yliopiston humanistisia julkaisujua, 2005.
19. Davydova and Pöllänen, “Gender on the Finnish-Russian Border” 2010.
20. A wife-migrant is a person who has immigrated to Finland through marriage
with a Finnish man. This term is commonly used in the Finnish-language lit-
erature on gendered migration from Russia to Finland.
21. See also Bernice Fisher and Joan Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of
Caring,” in Emily, K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson, eds, Circles of Care: Work
and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany: State University of New York Press,
1990, pp. 35–62.
22. Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” 1990, p. 35.
23. Ibid, p. 36.
24. See e.g. Riitta Jallinoja, Perheenaika, Keuruu: Otava, 2000; Anna Rotkirch,
The Man Question: Loves and Lives in Late 20th Century Russia, Helsinki:
University of Helsinki, Department of Social Policy, 2000; Katja Yesilova,
Ydinperheenpolitiikka, Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2009; Elena Zdravomyslova,
“Problems of Becoming a Housewife,” in Anna Rotkirch and Elina Haavio-
Mannila, eds, Women’s Voices in Russia Today, Dartmouth: Aldershot, 1996,
pp. 33–48.
25. I was the only citizen of the USSR who managed to cross the border that day
from Karelia to Finland. It was so, that only Finns were allowed to go to Finland,
and Russians to Russia. And when I crossed the border with these two trucks,
laden with timber, and we were met by our director, I burst into tears, and I
couldn’t stop. It seemed that I managed to jump out through the last crack, and
the border slammed behind me forever, and I would never see my parents, no
one.

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26. See Zhanna Chernova, “Semeinaia politika sovremennoi Rossii: gendernii

analiz i otsenka effektivnosti,” Zhenshtshina v rossiiskomobshtshestve, No.3,
2011, pp. 44–51. http://womaninrussiansociety.ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/
12/2011_3_chernova.pdf (accessed on 21 November 2015); Pirjo Pöllänen and
Olga Davydova-Minguet, “Welfare, work and migration from a gender per-
spective: back to ‘family settings’?” Nordic Journal of Ethnicity and Migration
Studies. Forthcoming.
27. See Gordon, Komulainen and Lempiäinen, Suomineitonen hei! Kansallisuuden
sukupuoli, 2002.
28. See Outi Fingerroos and Jaana Loipponen, Nykytulkintojen Karjala,
Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, 2007; Pekka Nevalainen and Hannes Sihvo,
eds, Karjala: historia, kansa, kulttuuri, Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden
Seura, 1998.
29. Pekka Hakamies, “New culture on new territory. The Karelian Isthmus and
Ladoga Karelia in post-war years,” in Pekka Hakamies, ed, Moving in the USSR.
Western anomalies and Northern wilderness, Helsinki: Finnish Literature
Society, 2005, pp. 91–109; Antti Laine, “Modernisation in the 1940s and 1950s
in the part of Karelia that was annexed from Finland on 13 March 1940,” in
Pekka Hakamies, ed, Moving in the USSR, Western anomalies and Northern
wilderness, Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2005, pp. 19–41.
30. Markku Kangaspuro, “Venäjä ja Suomi jatkuvassa sodassa?” in Lotta
Lounasmeri, ed., Näin naapurista: median ja kansalaisten Venäjä-kuvat,
Tampere: Vastapaino, 2011, pp. 231–52.
31. Aleksandr Etkind, “Post-Stalinist Russia: Memory and Mourning,” in Shobian
Kattago, ed., The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, Burlington:
Ashgate, 2015, p. 256.
32. See Davydova-Minguet, “Voitonp ä iv ä njuhla Sortavalassa,” 2015.
33. Petri J. Raivo, “Sotahistorialliset matkakohteet Suomessa,” Terra, Vol. 114,
No. 3, 2002, pp. 125–136.
34. See Anne-Mari Souto, Arkipäivän rasismi koulussa. Etnografinen tutkimus
suomalais- ja maahanmuuttajanuorten ryhmäsuhteista.Helsinki: Nuorisotutk
imusverkosto, 2011.
35. Eeva Jokinen, Juhana Venäläinen and Jussi Vähämäki, “Johdatus prekaarien
affektien tutkimukseen,” in Eeva Jokinen and Juhana Venäläinen, eds,
Prekarisaatio ja affekti, Jyväskylä: Nykykulttuuri, 2015, pp. 7–31.

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 9
Gendered Geographical Edges: Border,
Contestation and Women in Kashmir

Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra

Over the decades there are perceptible changes in the functions that bor-
ders perform across the globe. While many of them are becoming per-
meable, many others are becoming rigid, and a few others remain static.
Depending on the history, geography and social-cultural dynamics, bor-
ders provide a unique case study to draw interesting pieces of analysis.
For this research the case study is Indo-Pak border in Kashmir. The cur-
rent land border between India and Pakistan is about 3,323 kilometers, of
which about one-third (1,225 kilometers) runs through Kashmir. Out of
1,225 kilometers, 210 kilometers is International Border (IB), about 150
kilometers is Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL) and the rest (about
788 kilometers) is Line of Control (LoC). India and Pakistan mainly share
two types of border in Kashmir: recognized and unrecognized. The IB
is recognized, while the LoC is unrecognized and instigated multiple
divisions of Kashmir. The LoC follows an undefined geographical route,
cutting across villages and even houses and has always been the bone of
contention between India and Pakistan. This temporary border drawn
and redrawn through wars and agreements is “identifiable by traces of
blood, bullets, watchtowers, and ghost settlements.” The international
border is recognized and well-defined but it too has witnessed bloodshed

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and hostility. The borderland in Kashmir until recently witnessed a hostile

border characterized by unfavorable conditions, including wars, intermit-
tent cross-border firing and shelling with varying intensity, a profusion of
mines in and around habitations, permanent presence of security forces
and rigid controls; making the lives of the borderlands extremely difficult.
The partial opening of the border in 2005 generated hope with some posi-
tive outcomes, including a reunion of divided families scattered all along
the contested LoC. Yet, there are gendered nuances, which are mostly
overlooked.
This chapter scrutinizes the lives, situation and location of the bor-
der women in Kashmir. It engages the gendered experiences at the bor-
der by locating women as part of the larger group of the borderlanders
to probe: what are the ordeals that these women confront? How do they
negotiate survival in a contested space? Has the flexibility at the border
impacted their lives? The chapter challenges the state-centric focus on the
contested border by prioritizing gender in order to widen the border dis-
course and rescue the geographic space that has alienated and tormented
the nearby residents, including women. The chapter argues for an urgency
to reverse the state-oriented approach to the Kashmir conflict by posi-
tioning people at the center of the analysis. For this, it is necessary to
document the ordeals the borderlanders have undergone for more than
six decades. A prioritization of borderlanders and their ordeal will rescue
the contested geographic space from a state-centric encumbrance. It may
also recast the theoretical and policy debate on contested borders and help
engender enabling policies. This urgency to prioritize the borderlanders
and the goal to recast the theoretical and policy debate have guided my
writings on the border.
While select borders in the world such as the US-Mexico and the United
Kingdom-Ireland have drawn significant attention from scholars across dis-
ciplines, the borders in Kashmir has remained under-researched. Despite the
persistence of violence at this border with short-term and long-term impli-
cations for the borderlanders, there is scarce literature focusing on this part
of South Asia. Wilson and Donnan argue “the idea of the border as an image
for cultural juxtaposition has entered wider … discourse,” which “under-
plays the material consequences of state actions on local populations.”1

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Borders fascinate me in multiple ways. Each time I visit these geographical

edges, I get new insights, come across new encounters and information. My
sustained interest in understanding this contested border is a direct out-
come of my fascination with its uniqueness, which transcends the physical
nature of the border and permeates almost into every aspect of adjoining
life. There is so much to explore and document in the contested borderland
of Kashmir, I wonder how there is so little research on these areas. Perhaps,
the very nature of the border, being a contested one, and the distance from
the mainland, makes this borderland a pariah for all – the mainlanders, the
scholars, the policy makers, and the media.
This chapter is the product of multiple surveys conducted in the
Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir over a decade – from 2005 to 2015.
The visits to various border areas helped fathom deep into a situation,
hitherto less explored. Through qualitative methods of semi-structured
interview, informal interaction and personal observation, my surveys and
writings have attempted to draw attention to the contested Kashmir bor-
der. During my surveys, I have interviewed and interacted more with the
border residents, the common people, than with the leaders, administra-
tors or experts. By spending days and nights in the border villages, wher-
ever permitted by the state authority, I observed life along state edges.
Starting from the border areas of Jammu region, where villages are in the
plains and one does not actually need permission to visit them, to the
villages in the mountains and, at times, difficult terrains, of the Ladakh
region, where one needs permission to visit, the narratives on border
life share many commonalities. Border life is not normal, as it is on the
mainland. It is more so when people are living along an actively contested
border.
Admittedly, the focus of many of my field surveys and writings has not
been gender, except the survey in mid-2007 in the Ladakh region, when
I was a co-investigator for a study of border women and their ordeals.
However, while exploring life along the borders, information on the
intersection of gender and borders becomes a natural derivative. Women
are the center of households in traditional societies, across religious con-
siderations, including Kashmir. Seldom one would come across women
in living rooms where guests frequent. They would occasionally enter

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the room with tea and snacks. One may come across border women
when they are working in the fields, or washing utensils and clothes
outside of their homes and in the market. My interactions with bor-
der women should be partly credited to Seema, my wife and first editor
of this compilation, with whom I conducted many of the field stud-
ies. Her research focus being on gender and mine being on conflict
and border, we often conducted field surveys together looking for the
information that we needed for our individual as well as joint projects.
Through her, I had relatively easy access to the interiors of the border
houses. Also, I spent a lot of time in the border areas of Kashmir in
the years 2014 and 2015 and was invited on many occasions to spend
days and nights at the houses of the borderlanders, with the oppor-
tunity to be part of family dinners. While in some places I was served
food with the male members of the family, there were others houses
where I was treated as a family member, having access to the interiors.
As I encountered myriad border life related narratives, many of them
coming from women, I felt an urge to focus on the gendered nature
of the border. Through an assortment narratives, I provide here an
insight into the uniqueness of gendered life along the contested border
in Kashmir.

Border in Kashmir
Johnson and Graybill argue, “National borders represent the territorial
embodiment of a bundle of ideas that modern states have propagated
and enforced. They tell us that all of the humanity is divided up among
discrete nation-states; that these nations have sovereign powers over
particular territory to the exclusion of other nations; and that, collect-
ively, nations exercise this sovereignty over all the earth.”2 The borders
that demarcate state boundaries also separate the borderlanders who
may share integrated identity and culture. When border conflicts occur,
citizens of the participating countries suffer, yet the communities living
along the border suffer more. The borderlander-centric approach has
emerged as a crucial component of border discourse in recent times.
Scholars have interrogated the traditional notion of security, which

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considers borders sacrosanct and points out the asymmetry of attention

to the states at the cost of the people in border and security discourse. 3
The focus on people is essential to making the concept of security inclu-
sive and relevant to existing realities.4 In consonance with this emer-
ging global discourse, while focusing on the gendered lives of Kashmiri
border women, I argue that border and human security cannot remain
mutually exclusive.
India and Pakistan are locked in a bitter rivalry over Kashmir that led to
the creation of a rigid and tense border. Kashmir enjoyed an integrated life
for centuries before its partition in the late 1940s. The Indo-Pak wars led to
the drawing and redrawing of borders in Kashmir, which continue to remain
contested. The international border, extending from Kathua to Akhnoor, is
recognized and the LoC, extending from Akhnoor to the Siachen Glacier, is a
de facto border. The border remains tense not only during wars or war-scares
but also during times of relative peace. This border is never quiet; violence
continues, only the intensity varies.5 India and Pakistan continue to address
security from a traditional state-sovereignty perspective, perhaps because
the more a state is able to control its territory, more powerful it is considered.
Van Schendel notes, “The state’s pursuit of territoriality – its strategy to exert
complete authority and control over social life in its territory – produces bor-
ders and makes them into crucial markers of the success and limitations of
that strategy.”6 The all-pervasive security apparatus in terms of observation
towers, strict border surveillance, landmines, electrified fencing and inter-
mittent firing and shelling is a testament to the tense border. The secession-
ist movement that surfaced in the late 1980s on the Indian side of Kashmir
led to the swelling in the number of security forces along the border and
permanent laying of mines and electrified fencing to check the cross-border
infiltration.
Two factors contributed to the partial softening of the border in
Kashmir after decades. Arguably, international developments such as
post-Cold War globalization and softening of borders in other parts
of the world impacted the bordering practices in Kashmir. In 2003, a
ceasefire on the border was announced by India and Pakistan. For the
first time, the two states agreed to completely halt hostilities on the bor-
der, including a cessation of firing and shelling. Though the ceasefire

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helped reduce cross-border violence, it could not completely end it. The
contested borderland continued to witness ceasefire violations and conse-
quently, borderlanders continue to suffer. In 2005 the border in Kashmir
partially opened for restricted movement. In 2006 another intra-Kashmir
route was opened. Yet, the cross-border exchanges are not smooth due to
procedural delays, official apathy, corruption and financial constraints.7

Life Along the Border

The borderlanders in Kashmir do not lead a “normal” life.8 They have
to negotiate survival every day amidst landmines, cross-border firing
and shelling, and permanent presence of the security forces. The tem-
porary but recurrent displacement from their homes along the border,
due to augmented firing and shelling, is a reality that these people have
experienced more than six times since the 1940s. Borderlanders further
suffer from the trauma of separation from family members since the
first division of Kashmir in the late 1940s. When the border was drawn
after the Indo-Pak war, men and women who happened to be on either
side of the border were forced to remain there without any recourse to
return to their families and native places. Families were split – wives
lost their husbands, mothers lost their children, and sisters and brothers
were separated from each other almost permanently. Reunion became
a possibility for many with the partial opening of the border but only
temporarily. All these issues notwithstanding, a considerable demog-
raphy in Kashmir lives along these contested edges. The borders are not
sparsely populated, a major reason that the border was drawn amidst
habitation suddenly, overnight. There were no deliberations, no plan,
and no information regarding the possibility of drawing a border. An
arbitrarily state-drawn physical demarcation divided the mainland to
make those living along the newly-drawn line borderlanders. “This was
our ancestral home. Where could we go? Everything changed overnight.
From mainlanders we became borderlanders. This was not our choice.
But, we had nowhere else to go so we continue to juggle with our iden-
tity and fate of being borderlanders,” told a border woman in the Kargil
region in May 2007.9

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The Kashmir borderland was an alienated one until the mid-2000s.10 An

alienated borderland is a populated land near a border with rigidity, con-
trol and militarization being major characteristics, argues Oscar Martinez.
There is no cross-border exchange. The borderland in Kashmir, carved in
a hostile environment, emerged as a circumscribed and alienated habita-
tion characterized by “extremely unfavourable conditions” including “war-
fare, political disputes, intense nationalism, ideological animosity, religious
enmity” and “militarization and establishment of rigid controls”11 As states
attempt to exert total authority and complete control over their side of the
border in pursuit of territoriality,12 the consequences are borne by those
residing close to these markers of state sovereignty. Martinez argues: “As
the peripheries of nations, borderlands are subject to frontier forces and
international influences that mold the unique way of life of borderlanders,
prompting them to confront myriad challenges stemming from the para-
doxical nature of the setting in which they live.”13 Borderlanders confront
multiple problems continually as a tension-filled climate seriously inter-
feres with the efforts to lead normal lives.14 The crystallization of uncer-
tainty along the border severely impacts adjoining life.15
Life at the border is wretched for all those who reside along these
formidable physical markers of state power and sovereignty. Women suf-
fer in multiple ways, with some of the sufferings shared with the larger
group and others being specific to their gender. The military presence is
part of the fortification process and some “sensitive” border areas resem-
ble military cantonments. Heavy militarization ensures that traces of
normalcy are minimal. The mobility of people is restricted and at many
places the residents are under strict surveillance. The permanent pres-
ence of the security forces for the protection of the border curtails mobil-
ity of border women. The greater the security at the border the greater
the human insecurity along these geographical edges. Human security
of demographies along the border remains highly undervalued as power
and national interest dominate the scenario. However, as I have argued
elsewhere,
One crucial point that needs emphasis … is that the suf-
fering of border people does not remain static despite the
sacrosanct nature of the border, as the very border becomes

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subject to the dynamics of interstate relations between India

and Pakistan. Hence, one may witness a relatively tranquil
border at the time of dialogue and a trembled border during
tense atmosphere.16

One may, hence, come across a range of narratives arising out of a curious
mixture of present as well as past developments at the border. Narratives
may change but they are not bereft of the abnormality which is a perman-
ent feature of border life, at least in the context of contested borders.
The presence of women in public places is restricted in traditional soci-
eties. And this becomes further stringent along the heavily guarded bor-
der, where the presence of the “strangers (security forces) with power” is all
pervasive. While the nationalist sentiment is pervasive in most parts of the
border habitations, it is difficult to gauge if this sentiment is imposed or it
comes from within. What is not difficult to assess is that nationalism can-
not completely overshadow the problems that people confront due to the
presence of the security forces. “The security forces are our own people.
They are deployed here to protect the country from external aggression.
But, it is a fact that they are strangers, they are not known to us. They have
the power that comes from a gun. Our mobility is highly restricted. We
are not allowed to venture outside our homes in the evening. Even dur-
ing the day, we go with a male member of our family. My mother is scared
as there is a security camp near our school. She would always send my
younger brother with me to school. He always gets late for his school since
first he has to accompany me to my school. While coming back from his
school he waits for more than one hour outside my school so that we can
go home together. On the days when my brother is not home, I do not go
to school,” said a young girl studying in a government high school in the
Akhnoor area near the border in Jammu.17 The uneasiness that accompan-
ies the sight of gun-wielding security forces is all pervasive especially when
one talks to women. “We take a long detour to our field, to avoid the secur-
ity personnel camp. They do not say anything but we feel awkward. Some
of them may be roaming shirtless, others may be sleeping on the ground
and on the trees their undergarments will be hung for drying. They may be
laughing with each other or singing songs in chorus, but we feel awkward.
They are not known to us and they are not even from our village. They may

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be good people but after all they are men and we are women. We cannot feel
comfortable when strangers are all around and too with guns,” told a respond-
ent from a Poonch village.18 “I know they are doing their duty but after all they
are men and at times the way they see us while we are passing through is really
embarrassing. And, once in a while a person in combat dress may pass a com-
ment on a girl,” informed another respondent from a village in Kargil in 2012.19

I remember an episode when a friend of mine heard some lewd

comments from an on-duty security officer. Her brother who was
accompanying her confronted the person. The security personnel
then hit her brother with the butt of a gun. Her brother suffered
injuries. Following the protests, the man responsible for causing the
injury was suspended. We don’t know what happened to him after
that but my friend stopped going to school since that day. Within
a month she was married though she was not even eighteen years,
(the official age of marriage for a girl in India). I have not seen her
since then. Her paternal family also moved to the mainland.20

The general refrain that “men will be men” or “boys have fun” plays a psycho-
logical role in influencing women to be apprehensive of the motives of men,
particularly strangers. The security forces represents a state and their behavior
at the border contributes to the image of the state. Though this consciousness
may deter the security forces to indulge in criminal activities along the border,
it is not that the forces have not indulged in such activities any time, adding to
the gendered vulnerability along the geographical edges.
The fortification along the Kashmir border not only involves heavy mili-
tarization. The electrified fencing and mining further rigidify the border
and contribute to the alienation of the borderlanders. The violence at the
border is considered normal by the states as well as mainlanders. It rarely
becomes part of major public discourse, though the borderlanders con-
tinue to lose life, get maimed, and incur economic loss. Landmines have
been planted around houses, schools, and land and pastures, to check illegal
movement from across the border. Earlier, during wars, such as in 1965 and
1971, or during war-scares, mines were planted, but with the increase in
militant infiltration from the Pakistan side of the border, the mines have
become a permanent feature of the border fortification. The mines not
only curtail the mobility of the people but kill and maim people and cattle

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and other animals. The mines, along with electrified and barbed fencing
erected all along border add to the losses of the borderlanders. The fence,
erected much inside (at a range of about three to five kilometers) instead of
at the edge of the border, make it difficult for people to cultivate their fertile
land that falls beyond the fencing. “Mines are near our houses, in our farms
and pastures. They are everywhere. So you can well imagine our situation
and loss,” said a borderlander in May 2007.21 Usually, the end of hostilities
lead to the removal of landmines from residential areas, but many mines
remain undetected. I was shown a visible top of a can buried in mud in a
border village in Kargil in 2007 and informed that this is a landmine which
was planted in 1971. Mines may change their place due to rain or the move-
ment of rodents and hence remain undetected. The assessment of the extent
of loss in tangible terms due to landmines is not feasible due to the non-
availability of data. But, one can come across landmine-injured people in
most border villages. Here, the gender-specificity is notable, bearing in
mind the fact that women, while engaging with the border, simultaneously
engage with patriarchy. Patriarchy accompanies border women everywhere.
I met a 15-year-old girl in 2012 who was injured by a landmine blast while
playing. She was nine years-old when the accident occurred, losing one leg.
“Her life is ruined. No one will marry her now. We will take care of her until
we are alive. But who will look after her when we are gone? We are tense
every day thinking about her future. A man despite all problems gets a girl
for marriage, but a woman does not enjoy the same privilege in our society.
God knows what will happen,” sighed the father, with the girl sitting silent
and her mother weeping.22
The borderlanders, living within the distance of 5–7 km of LoC, con-
front frequent firing and shelling from across the border. A small trigger,
for instance, a statement from a political leader may turn the border vio-
lent, with firing and shelling from both sides of the border. Many times,
even without an apparent reason, exchange of fire takes place. “It is regular.
It can happen anytime— morning, afternoon or night, any day of the week
and with any intensity—heavy or light,” informed a borderlander in August
2012.23 The cross-border firing and shelling take place indiscriminately; the
target is not only the security personnel but also houses, schools, people
and cattle. There is no available data as to how many people have been

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killed and injured due to cross-border firing and shelling but the traces
of destruction and stories of death and injuries are common along the
contested border. I came across a woman who had a bullet in her head
from the cross-border firing. The woman was middle-aged and married.
She, however, lived alone with her 19-year-old son who worked as a day-
laborer. The bullet from across the border hit her while she was doing daily
chores in front of her house. Her husband took her to a government hos-
pital and a local NGO took her to a private doctor. The doctor announced
that the bullet could not be taken out. She is now leading a life, which is less
mobile and more painful. “I have a headache all the time. I cannot stand for
a long time. At times my hands and legs become numb, and I am not able
to speak. In short, I am useless now and that is why my husband remarried.
On my request, though, he did not divorce me. Officially, I am married
but I have no help from my husband. Life is always easy for a man. If my
husband would have suffered this problem, I could have never thought of
leaving him. But, if a woman is unable to work she is of no use. A bullet
changed my life forever; it brought not only unbearable physical pain but
also psychological trauma.”24
The borderlands are regions of scarcity, inaccessibility and fear. All
these have gendered implications that are not too difficult to comprehend.
The simultaneous negotiation with a volatile and hostile border and dis-
criminatory social set-up add to the vulnerability of women. Economic
development at the contested geographical edges is minimal. With ter-
ritorial security being a priority, development and basic amenities are
undermined. Education, health services and other essential facilities like
communication and transport are not easily available. Under these cir-
cumstances, women, already being a vulnerable demography owing to a
patriarchal social setup, confront more problems than men. “If there is a
shortage of water or food, who gets less? It is women. If school is expen-
sive then sons will be sent to school, if schools are far and transport is an
issue then daughters will suffer. If health services are expensive or far away,
women will suffer more. This happens everywhere and border regions are
no exception,” lamented a women respondent.25
Scarcity which is a characteristic feature of most borderlands becomes
further acute when the border residents are forced to move to the mainland

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on a temporary basis to escape increased border hostility. Hence, gender-

specific suffering is not only confined to the border but continues even
in the displaced camps. Displacement is a common feature of border life
in Kashmir. Wars, war-scares, heavy firing, shelling and the mobilization
of security forces on the border lead to displacement. The borderlanders
have decamped many times; in 1947–48, 1965, 1971, 1987, 1999, 2001,
2014, 2015 and 2016. The displacement continues for days, sometimes for
months and at times, for years. Hence, border displacement can be termed
temporary but recurring. Displacement is a global reality and the life of the
displaced is well documented. In Kashmir, the temporary relocation saves
the lives of the border residents but they confront another set of problems.
Once they reach the mainland they have to constantly struggle for survival.
Herded together with minimal access to shelter and other basic amenities,
survival is ensured primarily through government aid, which more than
often is insufficient and irregular.26 Problems caused by border displace-
ment range from deprivation of traditional livelihood sources to a decrease
in income; from an adverse impact on socio-cultural life to an increase in
health problems; from lack of educational facilities to that of essential ser-
vices like communication and transport. Border women bear the specific
consequences of living in make-shift camps. The minimal facilities meant
for all camp-dwellers irrespective of gender, such as common toilets and
living spaces with no privacy, are particularly problematic for them. And,
when they return to their native places along the contested border, another
set of problems await them.
The division of families, due to border creation in Kashmir, has specif-
ically impacted border women.27 Kashmir witnessed a fully-fledged India-
Pakistan war in the late 1940s. The fierce war eventually ended following
a United Nations negotiated ceasefire. The ceasefire led to the division
of Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The line of division passed not
only through valleys and mountains but also through villages and even
houses; the consequence being the division of the families along with the
division of Kashmir. There are no reliable statistics regarding how many
families were divided following the division of Kashmir. The pangs of sep-
aration are however scattered across the dividing lines, suggesting that the
number could be running into the thousands. The impromptu creation

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of the border and consequent separation brought immense hardships for

women. The division of families resulted in wide-ranging sufferings for
women, ranging from social and cultural to economic and emotional.
This is more specifically applicable to those who became separated from
their husbands.
Separation from one’s husband in a patriarchal society has economic,
social and emotional implications. Separation pushed these women into
a vulnerable position in the dominant patriarchal setup. Women, who
had never before considered working, had to do odd jobs to look after
their children. Some separated women remained in contact with their
husbands through occasional letters while others were unaware of their
whereabouts. Many of them continue to consider themselves ‘married’
without seeing their husbands in decades. Their hope to reunite with their
husbands did not die. These separated women are enmeshed in a single
trap of forced separation from their beloved, merely as a result of the
drawing of a border through war and violence. Women who raised their
children as single mothers or as the wives of another man reveal stories of
endurance. They may lack the capability to put forward their stories in a
sophisticated manner but their lives are examples of commendable cour-
age and patience.
Most separated husbands remarried but not all separated wives did.
Some women accepted divorce and remarried after waiting for a reunion
for a period that ranged from ten to fifteen years. For many divorced women
their second marriage was represented a compromise for economic and
social security and for their children. “There was no option. Once I real-
ized my husband would not be here again, I had no choice. He divorced me
through a letter and suggested to marry his younger brother for the sake
of our three children. My brother-in-law was a married man and I am his
second wife. My children have a roof over their head and I have a place to
stay until I die. A woman cannot live alone in our society,” told a respond-
ent.28 Many of the divorced women somehow got accustomed to the reality
of remarriage; others like Habiba Khatoon refused a divorce. She died in
November 2007 waiting for her husband. She had been married for four
years and was a mother of two children when Kashmir became partitioned.
Her husband was stranded in Kharmang on the other side of the LoC. Her

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husband proposed divorce after ten years but Habiba did not agree to it.
Instead, she built a window in her house overlooking the Kargil-Skardu
road. She spent most of her free time looking at this road, waiting for the
day her husband would return.
For many border women, the pain of separation runs so deep it is dif-
ficult to discuss it without becoming overwhelmed with emotion. In many
cases, these women are unable to bear the trauma, which has affected
their health and consequently, lifespan. Some separated wives died pre-
maturely, being unable to bear the trauma. “My mother died early. She
was only 35 and I was then only 15. She could not bear the pangs of separ-
ation. It was too much for her. I saw her dying day and night. My maternal
family took care of me. She cried all the time. I am not sure if my father
is still alive but I do hope that they meet again in heaven,” told a respond-
ent.29 “My mother lost her mental balance as soon as she realized that
she may not be able to meet her husband and son again. They both have
gone to market in Skardu for monthly shopping. They could not come
back due to the war. We are since then Indians and they are Pakistanis.
We tried to contact them but have no information if they are even alive.
My mother is now confined to one room. She just keeps repeating the
names of my father and brother. She does not recognize anyone now, not
even her daughter,” told another respondent.30 I then went to the room
where the respondents’ mother had been locked in for decades. A dark
and stinky room with traces of sunlight from a small covered window
has been her abode for decades. She looked at me but did not say any-
thing. She began talking to herself, often murmuring two names Javed and
Rahman. Hasina’s father had gone to visit his ailing sister at Brachel and
found himself stuck once the border was drawn. “My mother died pin-
ing for him but my father could not return even after she died, although
before the partition he made that journey by foot,” she narrated.31 It is dif-
ficult for Rubina to forget the fate of her mother. “I never saw my mother
smiling … She performed all her duties but internally she was completely
ravaged … Even after death, her eyes were open probably looking for her
husband.” she lamented.32
Some women have no confirmed news about their husbands. Sakina’s
husband had gone to Skardu to buy some essential items and was stranded

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when the war broke out in 1965. He remarried there after about ten years.
Sakina did not remarry. In 2004, she received unconfirmed news of her
husband’s death. To quote her, “Since the news is not confirmed, I do not
know whether I should mourn or long for a reunion. If the news is cor-
rect, look at my fate. I have not even mourned the death of my husband
for whom I have been waiting so long. Though I am leading the life of a
half-widow but somewhere in my heart for all these years, I had hoped for
reunion… This news has left me shattered. I am collecting money to send
my son to Pakistan to verify the news. The information, whether good or
bad, is very crucial for me. If he is no more, at least I would mourn. If he is
alive, my hopes of meeting him will get rejuvenated. You must have heard
the song, which is my favorite and aptly define our tragedy: panchhi nadi-
yaan pawan ke jhoke, koi sarhad na inhe roke. Sarhad insaanon ke liye hai,
socho tumne aur maine kya paya insaan hoke (No border stops birds, rivers
and air. Borders are for humans. What have you and I achieved by being
humans).”33
The trauma of losing loved ones impacted the borderlanders cut-
ting across gendered divisions. People innovated several strategies
to reunite, through illegally crossing the border, or to meet at least
through temporarily through applying for a visa and going through cir-
cuitous routes to reach their destinations or meeting in a third coun-
try. Women experience several gendered hurdles in this context. Low
social status, illiteracy and lack of economic resources, are some of the
factors that adversely impacted prospects of reunion or even tempor-
ary meeting. Also, above all, getting the permission from the husband
or extended family is difficult. The flexibility at the border, initiated in
2005, facilitated reunification of some of the divided families, though
on a temporary basis. Family reunion, however, had been largely an
all-male affair. Due to the patriarchal nature of society and also due to
financial restraints, women are at the receiving end. They are not able
to meet their separated relatives even temporarily. Bano was excited
when she heard about the opening of trans-LoC routes. She was sep-
arated from her paternal family when the village in which they were
residing was designated a part of Pakistan. Her husband, an ex-service
man of the Indian army, did not allow her to remain in contact with her

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relatives. The rolling of the Poonch-Rawalakote bus in 2006 reignited

her hope of reunion with her parents and siblings. Some relatives who
visited her from across the LoC brought a DVD that her brothers had
made for her. Through DVD she received the news of the death of her
parents. The DVD provided her information about her siblings. She
could also see photographs of the relatives whom she had never met; sis-
ters-in-law, brothers-in-law and their children. While playing the DVD
for me, Bano even began conversing with her brothers and sisters, as if
they could hear her. Repeatedly she kissed the screen with tears con-
stantly streaming. Bano desperately wished to see her family, but could
not get ‘permission’ from her husband. Her husband revealed that such
kind of contacts can raise suspicion as he is a retired security person.
Bano asked him a moot question while he was explaining his point:
“What if your family members were there?” Her husband did not answer
and Bano said, “This is the price I have to pay for being a woman. Had
I been a man I could have boarded the first bus. I will take this anguish
to my grave.”34

Conclusion
The ordeal of border women needs to be prioritized in the discourse on
border and borderlands. Unlike men, women are not only the victims of
their proximity to the geographical edges, their ordeal is further exacer-
bated due to their very location in a society in which everything, includ-
ing their existence, is viewed through a patriarchal prism. Gendered
narratives are not part of the local discourse in Kashmir. The centrality
of gender needs to be emphasized, to make the discourse inclusive and
gender-sensitive. The intersection of the border and women also makes
a strong case for human security to be accorded due significance in any
discourse on border, security and state. Human security needs to be pri-
oritized over the stubborn politics of territory and state security, guided
by the realist theory according to which national interest and power are
supreme state goals. The traditional notion of borders as means of control
needs to be squarely interrogated, and the border needs to be transformed
into lines of contact, commerce and cooperation. They must become sites

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states not only meet, but also where people engage in productive rela-
tions. The potential for peace in these interactions can be ignored at a
huge cost.
The initiatives along the border such as opening the cross-border roads
for travel and trade, for allowing the divided families to meet through
these roads, can pave the way towards ameliorating sufferings of the bor-
der people, including women. These measures can also help defuse bilat-
eral tensions and ultimately transform the conflict. It may help transform
the LoC, which remains mostly rigid, into a flexible line that allows states
and people to co-mingle and co-share, for a future in which both are equal
stakeholders. Such a development will further soften the rigid positions of
the parties involved and turn their gaze to the issue, not from a hardcore
realism and state security perspective but from the perspective of human
security in which people, including women, matter. The borderland trans-
formation will have its implications for the states, which, touched by the
transformation, may not be motivated by the concern of securing the bor-
der at the cost of jeopardizing the lives of the borderlanders, but may recast
its policies in which the gendered aspects of the border are accorded due
place.

Notes
1. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, “Nation, State and Identity at
International Borders,” in Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds, Border
Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998, pp. 1–30.
2. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds, Bridging national borders
in North America: Transnational and comparative histories, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010, p. 2.
3. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, eds, Borderlands: Ethnographic
approaches to security, power, and identity, Lanham: University Press of
America, 2010; T. Lunden, On the boundary: about humans at the end of terri-
tory, Stockholm: Sodertorns Hogskola, 2004.
4. Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security
Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
5. R Aggarwal, Beyond lines of control: Performance and politics on the disputed
borders of Ladakh, India, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

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 Women and Borders

6. Willem Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in
South Asia, London: Anthem Press, 2005, p. 3.
7. For details see, Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, Making Kashmir Borderless,
New Delhi and Colombo: Manohar and RCSS, 2013.
8. Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, “Negotiating Space in the Conflict Zone
of Kashmir: The Borderlanders’ Perspective,” in Martin Sokefeld, ed., Spaces
of Conflict in Everyday Life: Perspectives across Asia, Bielefeld, Germany:
Transcript, 2015, pp. 163–85.
9. Personal interview, May 4, 2007.
10. Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, “From Alienation to Co-existence and
Beyond: Examining the Evolution of the Borderland in Kashmir,” Journal
of Borderland Studies, published online October 17, 2016 (Print forthcom-
ing). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08865655.2016.1238316
(accessed on October 20, 2016).
11. Oscar J. Martinez, Border People: Life and Society in the US–Mexico Borderlands,
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994, p. 2.
12. Schendel, The Bengal Borderland 2005, p. 3.
13. Martinez, Border People 1994, p. 25.
14. Ibid., p. 6.
15. A. Kabir, “Cartographic irresolution and the Line of Control,” Social Text,
Vol. 27, No. 4, 2009, pp. 45–66.
16. Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, “Positioning of People in the Contested
Borders of Kashmir,” Working Paper 21, CIBR, Queen’s University Belfast,
2011, p. 7.
17. Informal interaction, January 12, 2006.
18. Informal interaction, October 26, 2015.
19. Informal interaction, August 14, 2012.
20. Ibid.
21. Personal interview, May 4, 2007.
22. Informal interaction, August 10, 2012.
23. Personal interview, August 14, 2012.
24. Informal interview, January 23, 2007.
25. Personal interview, May 6, 2007.
26. For details, see, Seema Shekhawat, Conflict and Displacement in Jammu and
Kashmir: The Gender Dimension, Jammu: Saksham Books International, 2006;
Seema Shekhawat and Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra, “Kargil Displaced
of Akhnoor in Jammu and Kashmir: Enduring Ordeal and Bleak Future,”
Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2006.
27. For details see Seema Shekhawat and Debidatta Aurobinda Mahapatra,
Contested border and division of families in Kashmir: Contextualizing the ordeal
of the Kargil women, New Delhi: WISCOMP, 2009.

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 Gendered Geographical Edges

28. Personal interview, 16 August 2012.

29. Personal interview, May 8, 2007.
30. Personal interview, May 6, 2007.
31. Personal interview, May 14, 2007.
32. Informal interview, August 16, 2007.
33. Personal interview, May 11, 2007.
34. Personal interview, April 22, 2007.

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 10
Kakching Gardens: Experiments in
Normalcy in Manipur

Duncan McDuie-Ra

Introduction
Kakching sits in the southern end of the Imphal valley, Manipur, just a
few kilometers off National Highway 39 – also known as Asian Highway
1 – which continues to the international border with Myanmar at Moreh.
As the highway passes through the southern extreme of the Imphal valley,
the flat land narrows and hills rise up from either side of the road mak-
ing the passage a kind of “choke point”; vulnerable and valuable to state,
non-state, and quasi-state actors operating in this part of the borderland.
While Kakching appears booming from cross-border traffic, trade, and a
cluster of schools, colleges and academies, this is by any reckoning a mili-
tarized landscape. On the short stretch of road between Asian Highway 1
and Kakching town is an enormous Assam Rifles barracks complete with
school and hospital behind gigantic walls. On the Kakching side of the high-
way vast tracts of land have been appropriated for military housing built
in rows of multi-storey apartments surrounded by rice fields. Checkpoints
are numerous and pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles are subject to constant
inspection by armed forces personnel. Banks and other public buildings sit

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behind bunkers staffed by members of various Indian paramilitary. And

on the hilltops surrounding this narrow stretch are yet more barracks and
bases for various paramilitary forces monitoring all movement in and out
of the settlements. Yet there is one hilltop that is an exception: Uyok Ching.
At the top of Uyok Ching are Kakching Gardens, a relatively recent devel-
opment funded by a local public-private partnership. Along the hilltop are
beautifully manicured gardens of flowers, trees, mandops (pavilions), satras,
laishang, and other sacred microsites. Kakching Gardens draws crowds of
women, men and children daily to take in the scenery, enjoy tea and snacks
in the recently opened Uyok Hotel, and pose for a staggering number of
photographs taken on mobile phones with “selfie sticks,” and by the pro-
fessional photographers that ply the hilltop. Kakching Gardens is a rare
space in a militarized landscape. This chapter uses spatial ethnography con-
trasting Kakching Gardens to the militarized landscape surrounding it to
explore alternative ways of thinking about gender, conflict and borderlands.
Research on these themes in Manipur tends to slip into a focus on a narrow
cast of actors – Meira Paibis and Irom Sharmila, and only partially concep-
tualizes gender – the focus is usually on women and in most cases women
from a single ethnic community involved in a small collection of organiza-
tions in Imphal – the state capital. Furthermore, scholars tend to rely heavily
on media accounts of protests and/or interviews with key members of these
same organizations to repeat a familiar narrative of violence, protest, and
resistance. While much of this research is worthy, the path is well-trodden
and bypasses some of the more intricate experiences of borders, conflict and
gender in everyday life in different parts of the state. This chapter takes as its
starting point the everyday act of spending time in Kakching Gardens as an
entry point into these intricacies. In doing so, I make two points that both
urge for greater attention to agency and landscape.
Firstly, everyday acts that challenge the militarization of life in the
borderland come in many forms, in the case of Kakching Gardens these
come in the seemingly mundane act of occupying public space away from
the gaze of the armed forces to express femininity, masculinity, and het-
ero-normative procreation. This is not as seductive or easy to categorize as
bold protests in Imphal but reveals a different kind of agency – one that is
more accessible to more people, based on an overlooked use of bodies in

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a militarized environment. Secondly, borders are not simply materialized

at the designated site – at zero-point – but manifest across the landscape
in barracks, checkpoints, and a raft of spatial controls and interdepend-
encies between the armed forces and civilians. All of which have deeply
gendered implications for the lives of women and men living in this land-
scape and moving through it. Despite the imaginary of connectivity, the
borderland still remains a militarized frontier and spaces like Kakching
Gardens are rare – and important – exceptions. Evident too is the juxtapo-
sition between a relative lack of development, often articulated as a chaotic
built environment and dysfunctional infrastructure, in civilian space and
the orderliness, technology, and functional infrastructure of military space
occupying adjacent tracts of land in and around Kakching.
These arguments are explored through four sections. The first intro-
duces Manipur and Kakching in the context of conflict, militarism, and
extraordinary laws. Using the concept of “sensitive space” developed by
Dunn and Cons, Kakching is proposed as a space where people are sub-
ject to multiple ‘interwoven projects, logics, goals and anxieties of rule
operating at once.’1 The second section situates Kakching Gardens in the
surrounding landscape and contrasts the intention to create a landmark
of social and cultural importance with the militarization of life all around.
I argue that one of the drivers to further develop Kakching Gardens into
an ordered space is the common lament at Manipur’s lack of develop-
ment, a lament usually referring to deficiencies in infrastructure and the
lack of ‘sites’ where tourism revenue can be generated. Yet the relative
underdevelopment and unevenness of civilian space when compared to
military space is also apparent and reveals the ways sensitive space can
manifest in material form. The third section focuses on the use of the
gardens themselves by women and men, mostly young, for enacting and
challenging proscribed gender roles. These everyday acts of socializing,
posing, and recording time spent in the gardens alter conventional por-
trayals of suffering, victimhood, and death. The final section offers con-
cluding thoughts on landscape, agency, and gender under conditions of
aleatory sovereignty.
Research for this paper was undertaken using walking ethnography of
space in Kakching in 2015–16. It is also informed by several years (2011–14)

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of ethnographic work in nearby Imphal Manipur’s state capital.2 Walking

ethnography seeks to capture the flows of everyday life as experienced by
urban dwellers; residents, sojourners and itinerants. And to identify the
spaces, objects, and built landscapes that produce and reflect everyday life.
As Edensor argues, walking reveals rhythms, rhythms that intersect, “add-
ing to the complex polyrhythmy of place.”3 A mobile sense of place can be
produced (and identified) “through longer immersion by the walking body
across a more extended space.”4 In their introduction to a collection on
walking ethnography, Ingold and Vergunst argue, “It is along the ground,
and not in some ethereal realm of discursively constructed significance,
over and above the material world, that lives are paced out in their mutual
relations.”5 As Yi’En notes, the practice of walking itself is a “mobile and
embodied practice” and “inherently a rhythmic experience and potentially
offer[s] insights to the multiple splices of time-space narratives.”6 Thus
walking brings relational moments of ethnographic practice to the fore in
ways that are difficult to obtain using other forms of mobility – such as
driving in vehicles to interviews with pre-identified respondents; a com-
mon approach to work on militarisation in Manipur. Yi’En stresses the
importance of objects encountered and discovered during walking and
their power to “disrupt the rhythm of walking, their power to affect our
spatial orientations, as well as capture our attentiveness to their weighty
existence.”7 For this chapter, walking ethnography also involved walking
within Kakching Gardens encountering visitors, attendants, and staff mov-
ing through the space. Sharing space with others in the gardens helped to
create a sense of what the place means to visitors and how they utilize it. I
took photographs, posed for photographs, and spent time sitting, drinking,
eating and talking to visitors. I also visited with friends from the surround-
ing district and took part in their interactions with one another and with
other visitors. Walking is also important in placing Kakching Gardens in
the town and district. Walking between the gardens and other spaces; the
bazar, neighborhoods, and the peri-urban fringe – particularly small busi-
nesses and settlements along the highway and the nearby town of Pallel
are all acts that help to situate the gardens and Kakching within a broader
landscape; a militarized landscape. Walking ethnography is emerging as
a growing approach to fieldwork in various landscapes, yet it remains an

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approach open to experimentation. It will not produce the same mater-

ial as conventional situated ethnography or interview based research and
readers should bear this in mind in the sections that follow.

Manipur; Sensitive Space

Manipur is part of the subnational region known as Northeast India, an
administrative term of the Indian Government applied to diverse geo-
graphic region consisting of eight federal states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam,
Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura as well as
a number of autonomous territories. With the exception of Sikkim all of
these states have had at least some of their territory declared a “disturbed
area” in the last six decades. A disturbed area is any designated territory
within the current (though disputed) borders of India where extraordinary
laws can be enacted. Only the Ministry of Home Affairs or the Governor of
the respective state can declare an area disturbed. Designating an area “dis-
turbed” must be reviewed every six months – yet there is no limit on the
renewal of disturbed status, and some areas of the borderland have been
declared disturbed continuously for decades. Once declared, the designa-
tion is not open to judicial review and state and local governments can do
little to challenge its imposition.
Disturbed status produces a disturbing reality. It enables the Armed
Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 (AFSPA) to operate. The AFSPA permits
any member of the Indian Armed Forces and Paramilitary (armed forces
hereafter) to fire “even to the causing of death” upon individuals acting in
contravention of any law or order, carrying weapons (or anything capable
of being used as a weapon) or assembling in a group of five or more people.
Under the AFSPA, suspected persons can be detained for 24 hours, with
unlimited extensions/renewals, and members of the armed forces are per-
mitted to enter any premises without a warrant; collapsing the distinction
between public and private space. Most significantly, the AFSPA provides
legal protection (in the form of both de facto and de jure impunity) for
members of the armed forces operating in a disturbed area.8
Parts of Manipur have been declared disturbed since 1958 (and earlier
under various colonial ordinances). Thoubal, the district where Kakching

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was located until 2016, has been declared disturbed since 1980.9 Yet
Kakching’s proximity to the nearby hills – the choke point – mean that
even prior to being declared disturbed there has been a presence of armed
forces personnel moving through the landscape and occupying parts of it
with headquarters and housing. Further, displaced persons fleeing conflict
have settled in the town and surrounds for decades, bringing the trauma of
disturbed status to the area before the official designation. Disturbed status
was lifted from the Imphal valley, including Imphal city, in 2004 following
mass protests after the rape and murder of a Manipuri woman, Thangjam
Manorama Devi, by members of the Assam Rifles paramilitary, including
a bold nude protest by members of the Meira Paibis women’s association.10
This received a great deal of attention at the time, Kakching’s disturbed
status remains in place. Further, although the Manipur Government has
its own police forces that are not legally bound by the AFSPA they operate
within the same culture of impunity and are responsible for much of the
contemporary violence in Manipur. As an indication of the scale of rights
abuses under AFSPA, 1528 cases of “fake encounter,” the term used for
the murder of a civilian by the military that is then justified by branding
the deceased an insurgent, were currently awaiting hearing in the Supreme
Court as of June 2015.11 A staggering number for a population of 2.6 mil-
lion and keeping in mind that this figure represents only fake encounters,
not rape, murder without fake encounter, and disappearances. This num-
ber only represents the incidents that have been filed as cases. Many rela-
tives of those killed do not take cases forward over fear that they will face
retribution, that other family members will be investigated, or because
they simply have no faith that it will do any good.
The activities of various underground groups operating in Manipur
further produce the disturbing reality of everyday life. Some groups are
organized armed groups fighting for secession from India, for changes to
existing federal state boundaries, for territorial autonomy within Manipur,
and for changes to ethnically determined affirmative action categories.
Many of these groups have “above ground” political parties, media out-
lets, and affiliated NGOs that engage with the government and the military
on various issues – usually outside formal politics. Some are distant off-
shoots or loose affiliates of these organized groups or have no relationship

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to them. Some are closer to organized crime networks that engage in illegal
activities like smuggling, trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion but also in
the murky world of infrastructure development, contracting, racketeering,
and, increasingly, social services.
The territorial politics of the three main ethnic groups in Manipur,
vestiges of colonial anthropology and systems of rule: the valley-dwelling
Meitei and hill-dwelling Naga and Kuki tribal communities exacerbate ten-
sions. Violent encounters between Naga and Kuki communities ruptured
life in the hill areas through the 1990s leading many of those affected, or
simply scared, to flee to the valley including in and around Kakching. In
the 2000s tensions between the Meitei community and both hill communi-
ties heightened the hostility of interethnic tensions, culminating in epochal
moments of crisis in 2001, 2010 and 2011.12
Disturbed status and its attendant extraordinary laws raise the ques-
tion of how such conditions can exist in the world’s largest democracy.
Agamben’s “state of exception”13 has proved very attractive to scholars seek-
ing to understand the existence and persistence of extraordinary laws in
Manipur and other parts of the borderland.14 Authors utilizing Agamben to
frame politics in Manipur and the rest of the Northeast – even in passing –
argue that extraordinary laws have been able to function in the region for
so long because the region itself is an exceptional zone, disloyal, unstable,
and violent; where the exception to the law initially created under condi-
tions of crisis has become the norm.15 This appears to perfectly describe
disturbed areas and the persistence of AFSPA. For example, writing specif-
ically about life under AFSPA, Vajpeyi urges us to think of Manipur as “a
zone of exception, but [also] as a contradiction so extreme that it undoes
the totality in which it is embedded, and breaks it down into distinct
and mutually opposed regimes: a democracy and a non-democracy; two
nations: India and not-India.”16 She goes on to argue “if the AFSPA is the
ban under which the sovereign power of the Indian state has placed all of
the Northeast, then the exception to the rule of law that is spatialized in the
Northeast should be thought of as a camp.” The camp being what Agamben
calls “the fundamental bio-political paradigm of the West,” and where
subject populations are stripped of their rights and agency.17 Agamben’s
concept of “bare life” is also used to refer to people living under AFSPA;

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a population in a permanent state of exception without political or legal

rights, or even subjectivity, at the whim of sovereign power.
While seductive and certainly evocative, the popularity of Agamben for
understanding the borderland, particularly Manipur, is not only becoming
formulaic, it is redirecting scholarly enquiry away from the multiple forms
of sovereign power that operate, the agency of different actors and individ-
uals in the region, and the complex and ambiguous nature of citizenship in
the borderland. Manipur is not a camp. This is not to say sovereign power
cannot take away life with little or no consequences; this is true. And while
evoking exceptionalism marks the gravity of abuses of sovereign power by
state and quasi-state actors, their power is not absolute, they are highly
sensitive of how they are portrayed, and they are engaged in contentious
struggles to control the borderland – some struggles they end up losing.
As Baishya argues with regard to the burgeoning use of Agamben in
works on the Northeast borderland:

By privileging the postcolonial state as the singular topos

of sovereignty, and correspondingly, the overarching entity
that spatialises the state of exception, commentators … often
downplay the fractured nature with which governmentality is
wielded and its effects experienced or endured in the region …
[and] leads to a restricted vocabulary for understanding modes
of sovereign governmentality, states of dispossession and its
aftermaths.18

The state of exception gives an interesting starting point but reveals

little of what constitutes social and political life within borderland. Given
the power of state, quasi-state, and non-state actors in controlling space in
Manipur it is crucial to move beyond its limitations. It is here that the con-
cept of “sensitive space” developed by Dunn and Cons serves as a useful
starting point for understanding power in Manipur. Sensitive spaces are
notable “for the multiple forms of power that abound, compete and over-
lap there and the forms of anxiety that they provoke for both those who are
governed and those who seek to govern.”19 Anxiety is certainly characteris-
tic of Kakching, where the desire for control by certain actors is often more
identifiable than actual control of space.

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The concept identifies multiple forms of power in contested spaces and

the ways people navigate and challenge these in their everyday lives.20 And
in doing so people are

are forced to navigate among multiple forms of power, and as

they are constantly forced to transgress the bounds of projects,
they erode specific sovereign projects – the techniques of sov-
ereign power – and the claims to sovereign authority that they
mark.21

This constant erosion produces anxiety for actors seeking to govern sensi-
tive space as it exposes their tenuous hold on territories they claim. Thus,
agency is not just about resistance, or even about simply getting by, but the
ways agency (in various forms and with various intentions) can expose
the limits of control; especially when control emanates from multiple,
often overlapping and/or competing sources. This in turn leads to newer
attempts to control. In this kind of space ruled by chance, aleatory sover-
eignty, typifies power in a constantly shifting landscape.
This chapter asks, what of other acts? What of acts by those who do not
have the voice or volition to directly challenge state power, underground
groups, or AFSPA? I am concerned with the ways in which everyday acts,
in this case spending time in Kakching Gardens, can be read as a way of
eroding the sovereign project of securing India’s unruly eastern frontier.
This is not always, and likely rarely, a conscious act of rebellion against
AFSPA, the armed forces, or underground groups. By focusing on every-
day acts, simply living “ordinary life” as it were, in Kakching Gardens, I am
not advocating a position that “everything is resistance,” rather I urge for
attention to the intricate forms agency takes in conditions of aleatory sov-
ereignty; conditions that also shape the landscape upon which Kakching
Gardens is built.

Kakching Gardens: Beautifying the Militarized

Landscape
Kakching is closely associated with the Loi community. Lois are consid-
ered “low-caste” among the Vaishnavite Hindu Meitei community which

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dominates the settlements of the Imphal valley discussed already. The town
also draws members of tribal communities from surrounding areas, as well
as Pangal Muslims, making for an openly cosmopolitan town where the
inter-ethnic politics of Imphal are toned down and many of the mores that
punctuate inter-ethnic tensions are transgressed with ease and frequency.
The hills-plains divide that preoccupies popular and scholarly accounts of
Manipur22 is far less divisive in Kakching; or at least are narrated as such by
residents. Like many towns along or close to this route, Kakching appears
to be booming from cross-border traffic of licit and illicit goods. Shops
teem with plastic goods, textiles, garments, shoes, electronics, and build-
ing materials from across the border, delivered on heavily laden-vehicles
that traverse the highway. The flow of goods, people, and capital does not
just come from across the international border but from mainland India as
well: outward connectivity to other parts of Asia and inward connectivity
to the rest of India. The Indian state has increased its presence in the bor-
derland for the last five decades. The presence of the military and paramili-
tary, facilitated by categories like disturbed is the most prominent example.
There are others too; federal state units and attendant bureaucracies –
made up of persons indigenous to the borderland and migrants from other
parts of India, national political parties, and objects that mark the land-
scape as Indian territory – statues of Gandhi, State Bank of India branches,
Assam Oil and Bharat Petroleum fuel pumps, and distance markers from
the Border Roads Association. In recent years, new layers of “India” have
been added to the landscape of the borderland; though this is not the “old”
India of the military and the bureaucracy, but the “new” India of the mar-
ket; telecommunications providers, local outlets of national retail chains,
private banks, etc. The arrival of new India is even more fascinating in
Manipur where “old” India never took hold and has been strongly resisted
for decades.
Despite the seductive imaginary of a new future fuelled by trans-
national connectivity, this is by any definition a highly militarized land-
scape. It remains a sensitive space. On the Kakching side of the highway
vast tracts of land have been appropriated for military housing built in
rows of multi-storey apartments surrounded by rice fields. Checkpoints
are numerous and pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles are subject to constant

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inspection by armed forces personnel. Banks and other public buildings

sit behind bunkers staffed by members of various Indian paramilitary.
Even some of the ATM in the area are inside barracks forcing customers
to enter the masculine and militarized spaces (from within which friends
and relatives have often experienced extreme violence and in some cases
never returned) just to access cash. This landscape shapes mobility for
women and men in different ways. It presents challenges for everyday life,
yet it also reveals interdependencies between the military and civilian
populations that are difficult to unravel. For instance, the armed forces
provide housing materials for newer settlements displaced by violence in
the hills and these villages often sport matching roofing materials with the
initial of the relevant paramilitary stamped conspicuously on the surface.
And on the hilltops surrounding this narrow stretch are yet more barracks
and bases for various paramilitary forces monitoring all movement in and
out of the settlements. Yet there is one hilltop that is an exception: Uyok
Ching.
At the top of Uyok Ching are Kakching Gardens, a relatively recent
development funded by a local public-private partnership and contri-
butions from local associations (2007–11). Prior to the development of
Kakching Gardens in its present form, there was an existing garden and
recreation area on the hilltop with a temple and mandop (pavilion). The
site was already place for pilgrimage, especially during Sajibu Cheiraoba,
the lunar New Year celebration of the indigenous Sanamahi faith, also cel-
ebrated across faith communities. Uyok Ching is also steeped in legend
and folklore. It is alleged as the birthplace of the crow, the site of where the
legendary Haoreibi Shampubi – a local woman from the hills turned tor-
tured spirit – was killed while arranging to meet her lover, and is regarded
as an incarnation of Panthoibi, the goddess of death, and as a bringer of
fertility.23 The construction of the gardens was also aligned with a number
of other projects taking place to re-order Kakching as modern and clean,
including the so-called “model town” initiative to develop tourist sites and
a beautification drive led by emigrants from the town living in Europe and
Korea – the latter consisting of hanging flower pots in the main market
area. The beautification drive intended to bring “a positive attitude on the
mindset of Manipuris disturbed by conflicts, stress and killings.”24 There is

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a clear equation of beautification, peace, and modernity as a counter to vio-

lence and militarism. As the President of European Manipuri Association
Okram Bishorjit noted at the flowerpot hanging, “We, the sons of this soil
living in European countries, have experienced the comforts of developed
countries. However, we can’t spend our life comfortably there while our
people in Manipur are living amidst dust.”25 Lamenting a lack of develop-
ment, usually imagined as infrastructure, and Manipur’s fractured mod-
ernity is a common preoccupation in public life and particularly of those
who have moved away from the state and return periodically to witness its
poverty and dysfunction. Yet there is also deep irony in this lament. While
it can be easy to decry the condition of everyday life in Manipur, military
infrastructure, housing, technology, surveillance, and weaponry provides
a hyper-modern contrast to civilian life. It is not only bases and barracks
that provide this contrast, rows of military housing in tall apartment blocks
occupies land between Kakching and the highway. The neat and ordered
multi-storey blocks are a stark contrast to housing in towns and cities in
Manipur, including Kakching, many of which have steel rods shooting
towards the sky at all four corners in the hope of adding yet another floor
when finances, permits, or favors allow, evoking Forty’s description of the
“near-permanent state of incompletion”26 common in settlements affected
by poverty and rapid urban growth – growth exacerbated by displacement
from armed conflict and migration to towns and cities for work and (rela-
tive) safety. As Herscher has written in the context of Kosovo, culture and
violence is inscribed in architecture, its destruction and construction.27 In
other words, violence is not only evident in what has been lost, broken, or
bulldozed, but in what is built in its place.
In a borderland characterized by aleatory sovereignty where various
actors take on state like quality and agency, the urban landscape reflects
these shifting – and overlapping – nodes of power. Corruption and illicit
activity enrich a segment of the population, who plough their wealth
almost exclusively into enormous houses and large cars. Dual connectiv-
ity is also useful for conceptualizing the flows of resources into Kakching
and other towns; from the west come the vast transfers of funds from the
Indian Government as part of their twin development and counter-insur-
gency strategy along with remittances from Manipuris working outside

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the state, and from the east the wealth gained through smuggling, tax-
ing, and trafficking of goods from across the border. The houses of those
successful in these ways of making-do, stand out starkly in their respect-
ive neighborhoods but also contribute to the patchwork and unfinished
nature of the built environment, a telling contrast to the military housing
which seems more “developed” and resembles the diagrams of idealized
housing complexes for sale in Guwahati and other cities marketed on bill-
boards in Kakching, Imphal and other parts of the state.
The ease with which this military modernity is excluded from accounts
of development in Manipur is testament to the separate spheres of life spa-
tialized in military and civilian territories. Though these overlap from time
to time the overlap is uneven – the military enters civilian space but rarely
does the reverse take place, except in the performance of certain daily tasks
such as visiting ATMs. Kakching Gardens can be considered as the coun-
terpoint to the militarized landscape, a development project that seeks to
alleviate lived insecurity by simply providing public space amongst bar-
racks, bases, and check posts.
Along the hilltop at Uyok Ching are beautifully manicured gardens of
flowers, trees, mandops, satras, laishang, and other sacred sites. Kakching
Gardens draws crowds of women, men and children daily to take in the
scenery, enjoy tea and snacks in the recently opened Uyok Hotel, and pose
for a staggering number of photographs taken on mobile phones, with
“selfie sticks,” and by the professional photographers that ply the hilltop.
Kakching Gardens is a rare space in the militarized landscape around it.
Utilized in different ways by different visitors, what is striking and perhaps
most challenging to the ways in which gender and borderlands are often
conceived, is the use of the gardens as sites to express femininity, masculin-
ity, and successful procreation.

Women, Men, Selfies

For women in particular, the everyday realities of life lived amidst violence
and impunity are immensely challenging. The impact on women have been
horrific. Murder, rape, and torture by the armed forces and by militant
groups impute a deep sense of fear and insecurity in everyday life. Goswami

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et al. identify six “categories” of women affected by life in militarized envir-

onments: women relatives of armed activists, women relatives of state armed
forces, women militants or combatants, women as shelter providers, women
as victims of sexual and physical abuse, woman as peace negotiators, women
as rights activists.28 It is also conceivable that many women fulfill multiple
categories in their varied roles inside and outside the household. While these
categories are certainly valid and evident empirically, if we return to the con-
cept of sensitive space we are able to explore further the everyday transgres-
sions of sovereign rule in seemingly mundane acts.
For women in Kakching and throughout the borderland, everyday
decisions about mobility – when to venture out of the house, with whom,
and which route to take to avoid encounters with armed personnel (state
or non-state), trust, friendships and relationships, care, for self and family,
and work, related to the same questions of mobility and risk, are bound-up
in insecurity and the constant threat of violence experienced personally or
by a family member. The capacity to contend with these limitations varies
dramatically and appears to be both socio-economic and temporal. For
instance, access to a private vehicle, especially a car, may make mobility
through the militarized landscape easier than walking on foot or traveling
on a motorcycle or rickshaw/auto-rickshaw, yet if there is a blockade of the
highway or a heightened security alert, even traveling in a car produces
risks and anxieties. All of this curtails opportunities to socialize, consume,
earn a living, and to express and project desire.
For many women in the area (and beyond), Kakching Gardens is a place
where they can dress-up, wear make-up, and occupy public space without
being under the constant gaze of the military, paramilitary and state police.
It is a place to socialize, roam around, flirt, and display new outfits, make-
up, and express individual and gendered identities away from the charged
sites of ethno-nationalist politics; a common arena for the mobilization
of women throughout Manipur.29 It is also an important place to capture
these moments in photographs to be shared with friends and on social
media. During good weather, women can be seen standing in groups or
alone, especially young women and teenage girls, posing for photographs.
The “selfie” now easily spotted with the use of the “selfie stick” is a com-
mon way of capturing an image using an extendable “arm” that allows for

230
 Kakching Gardens

more distance between the camera, usually on a mobile phone, and the
subject of the photograph, usually also the photographer. It also has the
additional benefit of allowing the subject of the photograph to also capture
it, meaning time can be taken to look into the reflected image and ensure
the pose, light, and look is perfect before taking the picture. Even if the first
is not right, the second, third, or fifteenth might be. Like “selfie” artisans
everywhere, the photographer/subject can be found scrolling through the
captured images, showing friends physically present at the gardens leading
to laughter, chatter, and sometimes the decision to take more photos, and
also, if the telecommunications winds are favorable, posting the pictures to
social media.
For men too the gardens provide a place to be free, albeit for a relatively
short period of time, from harassment and suspicion. Research on mascu-
linity in militarized environments, including borderlands, tends to focus
on the role of men in armed conflict as members of either the armed forces
or underground groups; as bodies in uniform or dead bodies laid out for
media capture. Indeed, research on gender in borderlands has tended to
give men and masculinity a wide berth, missing out on opportunities to
explore the complex and contradictory ways of ‘being a man’ in a milita-
rized environment; in sensitive space. Young men are racially profiled as
insurgents by the military and are the targets of recruitment by insurgents.
Movement, employment, education, and social networks are all jeopard-
ized in this environment. Young men who move in groups attract high
levels of suspicion and harassment, yet young men who move around on
their own are far more vulnerable. The psychological impact militariza-
tion has on young men is rarely examined beyond being a catalyst to join
militant groups or the armed forces. Attention is mostly given to combat-
ants, with little attention given to the impacts of militarization on noncom-
batants, particularly the long-term psychological impact of living in this
environment. Rehabilitation of former militants is almost entirely focused
on vocational training and cash incentives, with no resources or consider-
ation of psychological support. This has a major impact on men of different
ages and backgrounds. Narcotic use is very high in the Northeast and par-
ticularly high in Manipur. As Kermode et al. have shown, introduction to
intravenous drug use is often framed as a rite of passage among young men

231
 Women and Borders

in the region; proof of their masculinity. As they argue, “young men engage
in drug use in order to fill a social vacuum created by limited opportunities
to meaningfully engage in adult roles within the community.”30
At Kakching Gardens men socialize, pose, preen, and seek the atten-
tion of women. Some of the men clearly go to great pains with their
appearance. They stand looking at their reflection, adjusting their jeans,
asking their friends to help fix their hair. Some brush dust off their sneak-
ers to keep them looking clean and new. Others play music from their
mobile phones and stand against railings watching the other visitors pass.
Dress has long been central to etic and emic constructions of masculinity
in the borderland, of both tradition and modernity, and remains a crucial
signifier of difference between men in the region and other communities
in India, and, most crucially in the everyday encounters in the borderland,
between men in uniform and men wearing plain clothes. In recent years,
men from Manipur and the rest of the Northeast have gained a reputation
for fashion and style, especially as their presence in metropolitan India
has grown.31 Grooming has integrated more and more influences from
outside the region and, crucially, outside India. Of note is the influence
of popular fashion from East Asia, especially Korea, and counter cultural
styles influenced by heavy metal music, hip-hop, and sports. However,
formal dress based almost entirely on mid-twentieth century British fash-
ion remains the dress style of choice for those involved in formal politics,
state employment, and religious or community organizations, and men,
mostly older, dressed in this way can also be found at Kakching, though
they are more likely to be found talking to one another on benches in
the shade or taking tea in the Hotel rather than strutting along the path-
ways. The groups of young men posing in Kakching Gardens next to flow-
ers, hedges, and scenic views of nearby hills provides a stark contrast to
images of the violent or dead male from Manipur common in the press.
The gardens witness a lot of new introductions, courting, and flirting –
usually under the watchful eye of older locals who frequent the gardens
throughout the day, chatting under the shelter of the mandops or in the
Uyok Hotel, and engaging in some casual moral policing. The gardens are
also a place to bring children. One of the more dramatic transformations
to childhood in Manipur has been the reduction in children’s mobility and

232
 Kakching Gardens

autonomy driven by concerns over safety, the lack of public space, and the
shift away from local schooling.32 By contrast, children are also actively
involved in protests around political issues, from demands for the instate-
ment of the Inner Line Permit system to territorial demands. The involve-
ment of children in protests, often in school uniform, raises questions about
agency, childhood, and is at the fore of debates about manipulation versus
ways of knowing politics unique to children.33 However, sustained treat-
ment of these questions is beyond the scope of the present chapter.
At the gardens children play along the pathways, weave in and out of
trees, and stand in the viewing area pointing out landmarks in the distance –
often over a Limca drink or plate of bora. Parents frantically usher boys
and girls in their best clothes into poses to be photographed. Families pose
together for photographs that are found in living rooms and in glass-fronted
cabinets all over the state. Not everyone at Kakching Gardens has a device
to capture photographs. Some visitors approach strangers asking them to
take a photograph for them and send it on with their phones or emails.
On some days there is a professional photographer (or two) who approach
visitors asking if they would like a portrait; these are then printed and sold.
When displayed these photographs include the unmistakable landscape of
Kakching Gardens visible in the background, giving the landscape a dif-
ferent meaning to the militarization that is otherwise so striking. A trip to
Kakching gardens needs to be memorialized. It is a landmark: a “place” to be
and to have been and to circulate the imagery online and in material form.

Conclusion
Kakching Gardens exhibits many of the elements of “place.” In sensitive
space, competing nodes of sovereign power provide little of the social fab-
ric necessary for everyday life, places like Kakching Gardens are where
people come together and “the daily rituals of life are performed.”34 This
may seem trivial, yet with so much focus on the overt political acts that
stand out in borderlands, the lived experience of militarization tends to get
lost. So too do small acts; acts that are about claiming normalcy rather than
spectacle; acts that can, returning to Dunn and Cons, expose the limits of
control by state, non-state, and quasi-state actors. As Oinam discusses in

233
 Women and Borders

her study of the writings of Manipuri poet Thangjam Ibopishak, subjectivi-

ties and identities in Manipur are diffuse, and people live lives between dif-
ferent sovereign forces; army, paramilitary, state, underground groups. She
writes, “The question, therefore, is how to develop new theories in order to
understand subjectivities caught in such situations.”35 Grappling with life
in this environment takes multiple forms: protest, faith, associational life,
migration, humor and, in this case, getting dressed-up in your best clothes
and posing for photos in a garden on a hilltop in a landscape marked by
military infrastructure spanning out in all directions below. And these
acts are gendered in that they are ways of expressing gendered subjectivi-
ties (predominantly heteronormative) and challenging the ways in which
militarization impacts men and women in different and similar ways. And
like other sites in the borderland, such as Loktak Lake to the west, enter-
ing the gardens requires passage through military checkpoints. It is forti-
fied. Yet this is not Agamben’s camp. These are not bodies without agency,
though agency is harder to see and its impacts harder to register in singular
responses or in brief lapses of time.
Kakching Gardens is an experiment in normalcy. It is an enabler of
everyday life, of place, of belonging. It is a place to dress-up, socialize, and
record the moment despite the violence surrounding it. Yet it is not simply
the existence of the space itself that brings people; it is the aesthetics on dis-
play. Kakching Gardens is a place to experience development as beautifi-
cation; paved pathways, open space, manicured lawns and flora. It seeks to
bring visitors in contact with the modern, the natural, and the sacral: a sce-
nic spot of cultural authority but one that resonates with the public none-
theless.36 The order of the gardens is juxtaposed with the disorder of urban
life in the borderland, while the peace and tranquillity is juxtaposed with
the militarized landscape all around. It reflects aspirations to live and visit a
pretty place, a developed place, a place to be proud of, a place that defies the
dominant imagery of Manipur as violent and unruly. It is a place to prod-
uce images of self and body that alter conventional portrayals of suffering,
victimhood, and death. And this place sits above a militarized landscape
marked with the trappings of the adjacent infrastructure and accelerated
development trajectory of the military, making it an exceptional space of a
different sort, a patch of normalcy in a terrain of violence and dysfunction.

234
 Kakching Gardens

Notes
1. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Jason Cons, “Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of
Sensitive Spaces,” Antipode, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2014, p. 102.
2. Duncan McDuie-Ra, Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016.
3. Tim Edensor, “Walking in Rhythms: Place, Regulation, Style and the Flow of
Experience,” Visual Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2010, p. 69.
4. Ibid., 70.
5. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, “Introduction,” in Tim Ingold and Jo Lee
Vergunst, eds, Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, Abingdon:
Routledge, 2008, 3.
6. Cheng Yi’En, “Telling Stories of the City: Walking Ethnography, Affective
Materialities, and Mobile Encounters,” Space and Culture, Vol.17, No. 3, 2014,
p. 212.
7. Ibid., 214.
8. Shubh Mathur, “Life and Death in the Borderlands: Indian Sovereignty and
Military Impunity,” Race & Class, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2012, pp. 33–49.
9. The new Kakching District was created in December 2016 out of Thoubal.
Kakching is now a district headquarters.
10. Deepti Misri, “‘Are You a Man?’: Performing Naked Protest in India,” Signs,
Vol. 36, No. 3, 2011, pp. 603–25.
11. Imphal Free Press, “Apex Court to Start Final Hearing on Fake Encounters
within 4 Months,” Imphal Free Press, May 5, 2014.
12. Nehginpao Kipgen, “Politics of Ethnic Conflict in Manipur,” South Asia
Research, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2013, pp. 21–38; Pradip Phanjoubam, “The Homeland
and the State: The Meiteis and the Nagas in Manipur,” Economic and Political
Weekly, Vol. 45, No. 26/7, 2010, pp. 10–13.
13. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.
14. Paromita Chakravarti, “Reading Women’s Protest in Manipur: A Different Voice?,”
Journal of Peacebuilding & Development, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2010, pp. 47–60; Namrata
Gaikwad, “Revolting Bodies, Hysterical State: Women Protesting the Armed Forces
Special Powers Act (1958),” Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2009, pp. 299–
311; Jogendro Kshetrimayum, “Shooting the Sun: A Study of Death and Protest in
Manipur,” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 44, No. 40, 2009, pp. 48–54.
15. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 166.
16. Ananya Vajpeyi, “Resenting the Indian State: For a New Political Practice in
the Northeast,” in Sanjib Baruah, ed., Beyond Counterinsurgency: Breaking the
Impasse in Northeast India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 36.
17. Agemben, State of Exception, 2005, p. 181.

235
 Women and Borders

18. Amit Baishya, “The Act of Watching with One’s Own Eyes: ‘Strange
Recognitions’ in an Outline of the Republic,” Interventions, Vol. 17, No. 4,
2015, pp. 606–607.
19. Dunn and Cons, “Aleatory Sovereignty” 2014, p. 95.
20. Ibid., pp. 100–1.
21. Ibid., p.102.
22. Cf. Yengkhom Jilangamba, “Beyond the Ethno–Territorial Binary: Evidencing
the Hill and Valley Peoples in Manipur,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian
Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2015, pp. 276–89.
23. The legends around Haoreima Sambubi are numerous. I am grateful to
Thingnam Anjulika for explaining some of these to me.
24. Sangai Express, “Green, Beautification Drive Reaches Kakching Keithel,” July
23, 2013.
25. Ibid.
26. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion
Books, 2013, p. 29.
27. Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo
Conflict, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, p. 4.
28. Roshmi Goswami et al., Women in Armed Conflict Situations, Guwahati: North
East Network, 2005, p. 19.
29. Cf. Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Borders, Territory, and Ethnicity: Women and the
Naga Peace Process,” in Nancy Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, eds,
Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization, New
York: NYU Press, 2014.
30. Michelle Kermode et al., “Killing Time with Enjoyment: A Qualitative Study
of Initiation into Injecting Drug use in North-East India,” Substance use &
Misuse, Vol. 44, No. 8, 2009, p. 1085.
31. Duncan McDuie-Ra, Northeast Migrants in Delhi: Race, Refuge and Retail,
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
32. McDuie-Ra, Borderland City in New India, 2016, pp.163–73.
33. Duncan McDuie-Ra, “Children and Civil Society in South Asia: Subject,
Participants and Political Agents,” in Bina D’Costa, Children and Violence: Politics
of Conflict in South Asia, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
34. John Friedmann, “Reflections on Place and Place‐making in the Cities of
China,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 31, No. 2,
2007, p. 272.
35. Loiya Leima Oinam, “Expressions of a Manipuri Identity: Militarisation and
Victim Subjectivities in the Poetry of Thangjam Ibopishak,” South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2016, p. 476.
36. Cf. Pal Nyirí, Scenic Spots. Chinese Tourism, the State, and Cultural Authority,
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.

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 Index
Actual Ground Position Line
(AGPL), 197
Aegean Sea, 43, 50, 51, 54
Afghanistan, 10, 28, 52
Africa, 13–14, 26, 28, 32–3, 36–7,
55, 58, 66–7, 72, 75–6, 78, 81–2,
108, 114, 118–19, 120–21, 125,
129, 136
African Charter on Human and
Peoples’ Rights, 119
African Charter on the Rights and
Welfare of the Child, 119
African Union Women’s Rights
Framework, 119
Amnesty International, 10, 27, 37,
84, 152, 166
Andalusia, 66, 69, 75
asylum, 10, 24, 31–5, 38, 40, 43, 49,
52, 54, 56–7, 61, 67–71, 75–6,
83–4, 95, 121, 128, 240
Athens, 19, 57, 69, 76, 241
Austria, 23–4, 26, 33, 36, 38,
54, 57
Balkans, 23, 33, 35, 63
Berlin Wall, 3
Bethlehem, 31
Boko Haram, 114
Border Hunters, 33, 38
245
borderless world, 4–5, 15–16, 19,
132, 142, 178, 240
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 33, 110
Bulgaria, 33
Central America, 61, 120, 152, 158,
160–1, 163–5
Centre for the Temporary Stay of
Immigrants (CETI), 76, 68, 74
Ceuta, 66–7, 75, 82, 84
Chihuahua, 157–8, 171
Cold War, 2–3, 19–20, 201, 213, 237
Collateral Repair Project (CRP),
90, 99, 100–3, 105–7
Commission on the Status of
Women (CSW), 91, 93, 110
Convention Against Transnational
Organized Crime, 119
Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against
Women (CEDAW), 91, 119
Council of Europe, 10, 31, 35, 38,
115, 124
Croatia, 33, 37, 54, 110
Cyprus, 33
Daily Mail, 23
Damascus, 44, 46, 60, 238
Dawns Here are Quiet, The, 189
 Index
Declaration on the Elimination
of Violence Against Women
(DEVAW), 91, 111
diaspora, 26, 36, 194, 238
displacement, 10, 20, 60, 87–90,
106–8, 202, 208, 214, 228, 240
Domiz camp, 23, 37
El Salvador, 160, 166, 170
Europe, 5, 9–10, 16, 19–20, 27,
29–30, 40, 42–3, 49–50, 54–8, 61,
63–6, 69–72, 75–6, 78–85, 114–
25, 127–9, 136, 139, 175, 187–8,
194–5, 227–8, 237, 239–40
Europe’s Gate monument, 72
European Commissioner for
Human Rights, 114
European Union (EU), 12, 22–7,
29–30, 32–5, 37–8, 54, 63–6, 70–1,
76, 80–3, 175, 178, 184, 192, 195
Finland, 16, 175–8, 181–191, 195–6
Fourth World Conference on
Women, 92, 111
gender based violence (GBV),
87–90, 96–8, 100, 102–5, 108–9
Ghana, 26
Greece, 10, 12, 23, 27, 33, 35, 50,
52–4, 64, 69–71, 76–7, 80, 83–4
Guatemala, 154, 160, 166, 168, 170
Guwahati, 229, 236
Hashemi Shamali, 12, 98
Honduras, 160–1, 166, 170, 172
246
human security, 3, 7, 201, 212–13
humanitarian corridors, 25
humanitarian relief, 75
Hungary, 23, 32–3, 38, 53
hyper-patriarchal, 6
Idomeni camp, 54, 56
immigration, 33, 38, 64, 133,
156–7, 160, 162, 165, 167, 171,
173, 185
Imphal, 217–18, 220, 222, 226,
229, 235
India, 14–15, 17, 20, 110, 131–4,
137–41, 144–50, 197, 199, 201,
204–5, 208, 210–11, 213, 218,
221–3, 225–8, 232, 235–7,
239, 241
Interagency Standing Committee
(IASC), 33, 38, 64, 133, 156–7,
160, 162, 165, 167, 171, 173, 185
international border, 11, 14, 46, 80,
87–8, 131–3, 135–7, 142, 197,
201, 217, 226
International Conference on
Population and Development
(ICPD), 92, 111
International Organization for
Migration (IOM), 116–17, 121,
123, 125, 128, 161
Iraq, 10, 13, 23, 25, 27–8, 37, 44,
55, 62, 99, 102–3
Ireland, 33, 82, 198
Istanbul Convention, 31
Italy, 12–14, 27, 32, 33, 36, 38,
64, 72, 81, 84, 113–25, 127–30
 Index
Jordan, 10–13, 27–8, 60, 90, 98,
102, 105, 108, 112
Kakching Gardens, 17–18, 217–21,
223, 225, 227, 229–35
Korea, 227, 232
Kosovo, 33, 228, 236, 238
Ladakh, 199, 213, 237
Lampedusa, 27, 33, 37, 66, 72–4,
77–81, 85, 113
Lebanon, 30, 37, 39, 43–4, 46–9,
60, 62, 108–9
Lesvos, 54, 57, 70, 80
Libya, 27, 32, 52, 72, 78, 116–17,
120, 125, 213
Line of Control (LoC), 197–8, 201,
206, 209, 211–13
Macedonia, 33, 53–4
Madrid, 67
Manipur, 17, 217–18, 230–4, 236
Maputo Protocol, 119
Mediterranean, 10, 13–14, 22,
26–33, 35–7, 50, 60, 63, 66, 72,
79, 113–14, 125, 129, 238
Melilla, 66–8, 74–5, 80–2, 84
Merkel, 25, 36
Mexico, 5, 8, 20, 31, 35, 61, 110,
152–5, 158–60, 163–73, 198,
214, 239, 240–1
Middle East, 37, 40, 50, 62, 108, 178
militarization, 5–6, 11, 17–18,
81, 155, 203, 205, 218–19, 231,
233–4
247
Ministry of Equal Opportunities,
124
misogynistic, 6
mobilization, 50, 102, 208, 230
National Latina Institute for
Reproductive Health, 157, 170
necropolitics, 51
neoliberalization, 46
Nepal, 14–15, 131–4, 137–50
NGO(s), 54–56, 65, 68, 69, 70–1,
75, 89–90, 99, 117, 121–4,
127–8, 207, 222
Nigeria, 13–14, 24, 78–9, 113–23,
125–9
Niirala-Värtsilä, 16, 175–6,
181, 193
objectification/objectified, 15, 142,
151, 155–6, 159, 190
Orthodox church, 189
Pakistan, 17, 55, 138, 197, 201,
204–5, 208, 210–11
Palermo Protocol, 119
patriarchy, 7, 17, 31, 40, 206
Piemonte, 124
Polykastro, 53–4
Protocol to the African Charter
on Human and Peoples’
Rights and the Rights of
Women, 119
Realist school, 2
Red Cross, 68, 75, 108, 110
 Index
refugees, 3, 5–7, 9–10, 12, 22,
24–8, 30–7, 40–1, 43, 46, 48,
50, 52–6, 58–60, 70, 71, 74, 77,
87, 88–90, 98–103, 106–8, 112,
114, 136
Republic of Karelia, 16, 176, 178,
186, 189
Romania, 33
Russia, 16, 175–9, 182–93, 195–6
Salzburg, 24
Schengen Agreement, 32, 38
Siachen Glacier, 201
Sicily, 72–3, 121, 124, 128
Sonoran desert, 50
Spain, 12, 32, 64, 66–8, 82
Spanish Ministry of Employment, 67
state security, 3–4, 134, 148,
212–13
Syria, 10–12, 21, 23–5, 27–9,
34–6, 40–52, 55–8, 60–2, 69, 99,
102–3, 108, 112
Trafficking in Persons Protocol,
115
Turkey, 10, 25, 27, 29, 33, 35, 48–9,
52, 55, 60, 70–1, 76, 81, 83
Ukraine, 184–5, 187
United Nations, 20, 90–1, 96, 111,
114–15, 124, 135–6, 138,
149–50, 208, 240
248
United Nations International
Children’s Emergency Fund
(UNICEF), 14, 114, 128
United Nations Office on Drugs
and Crime (UNODC), 115–16,
128–9, 149
United States, 5, 20, 31, 50, 61,
108, 152, 154–6, 160, 163–4, 167,
172, 239
Uyok Ching, 18, 218, 227, 229
violence, 1, 3, 5–10, 12–15, 17–18,
24, 27, 31, 34, 38, 43, 46, 50, 60,
61, 64–5, 77–81, 83, 87, 89–102,
104, 106–14, 117–18, 122,
125–6, 132, 134, 142, 144, 151–4,
156, 158–9, 162, 164–8, 170–1,
198, 201–2, 205, 209, 218, 222,
227–30, 234, 236, 238, 240–1
vulnerability, 10–11, 20, 22, 24–5,
27–9, 35, 76–7, 79, 126, 128,
137–8, 148, 193, 205, 207, 240
Winter War, 186, 190
Women Trafficking and Child
Labour Eradication Foundation
(WOTCLEF), 118
Women’s Refugee Commission
(WRC), 88
World Health Organization, 153, 167
Za’atari Refugee Camp, 12, 98