Why Europe’s Migration Crisis is a Feminist Problem

Human trafficking is a $150 billion dollar global industry, but it is not an industry that gets a lot of air time in the media.  Per the International Labor Organization, there are some 4.5 million victims of forced sexual exploitation currently around the world, with girls and women especially at risk. Taking advantage of a disturbingly lucrative industry, traffickers will often target those caught up in civil conflicts, war, and migration.  We are now watching this play out in real time on the world stage with the migration crisis that is currently happening in Europe.

As of 2/2/16, Europol is estimating that 10,000 migrant children who had previously entered Europe and registered with officials have gone missing.  It is feared that the majority of these children have been pulled into sex trafficking or the slave trade.  Because these children were unaccompanied, mainly without papers of any sort, tracking them is nearly impossible.  Many of these children are also stateless, meaning they have no assigned nationality.  This frequently happens in refugee situations,  moreso when refugees are fleeing states that do not have equal nationality laws for women’s rights to pass on their nationality to their children in the absence of the father.

For some background information, there are 27 countries right now that do not have equal laws regarding the passing down of nationality from mother to child.  Syria is one of those states, though they are attempting exceptions in cases of a deceased, missing, or unknown father.  People who are considered stateless cannot travel internationally, they do not have identification, they struggle to gain access to legal work and they do not have much legal recourse should they need it.  The disparate economic and social status of women in many parts of the world leave them and their children extremely susceptible to these issues.

A stateless refugee child (or adult for that matter) will be reluctant in going to authorities for help out of fear of being forced back to where they came from, or worse.  They are now prime targets for traffickers.  What makes women and girls particularly vulnerable here is their reproductive health.  They face STDs, unwanted pregnancies, fistulas, etc without any access to health care.  If they do fall ill, they are often ostracized and left with nothing – no work, no way to pay off their “debt” to their trafficker, no care and no recourse.  It is a horrible cycle and one that deserves way more attention from the public than it gets.

If the status of women and girls was elevated globally, sex trafficking would be much harder to pull off and much less lucrative.  Access to education, fair jobs/wages and holding nationhood are all things that every woman should have and every girl should be able to grow into.  They are also “tools” that could be used to protect them against falling victim to trafficking and the sex trade.  Respecting women and their equality in society is something that needs to be taught and passed down in communities and states.  There’s no other way.

We need to be paying attention to Europe’s migrant crisis.  It’s not just theirs, it’s ours too.

For more information on human trafficking and ways to help, here are some resources:

equalitynow.org

polarisproject.org

catwinternational.org