Only in recent years has UNHCR begun to focus on the need to address the issue of rape and other forms of sexual assault against refugee women, a group that is at particular risk of sexual violence both during flight and as refugees.55 The sexual assault of refugee women at some stage in their flight or refuge is common, and in some situations rampant. In the country of refuge, women refugees are targeted for rape because they are refugees, because of their actual or perceived political or ethnic affiliations, and because they are women. Yet, UNHCR policies to protect and assist victims of sexual violence are still not being adequately integrated into UNHCR programs and services in the field. Protection efforts that do address the issue of sexual violence, such as the Vulnerable Women and Children's Programme (formerly the Women Victims of Violence Project) in the Somali refugee camps in northeastern Kenya, continue to remain the exception rather than the rule. Concerted and sustained attention on this issue is required for UNHCR to ensure that the initial and commendable steps it has taken are improved, integrated and implemented as a matter of course for all.
Rape and other sexual violence remain among the most serious problems facing women refugees. Often, women in refugee camps close to the site of the conflict that caused the displacement are the object of attacks from factions that enter the camps in order to dominate and punish those refugees perceived to be supporting opposing factions. In other cases, combatants who support or even participate in certain conflicts may mingle with civilian populations within camps. In receiving countries, local residents and even police, military and immigration officials, often view refugee women as targets for assault. Refugee women are often subjected to sexual extortion in return for the granting of passage to safety, refugee status, personal documentation, or relief supplies. Fellow refugees may also target refugee women for sexual abuse. The dislocation and violence experienced by refugee populations often destroys family and social structures, and with them, the norms and taboos that normally would have proscribed sexual violence. In most refugee camps, women and children constitute a majority of the population.
As with some of the other UNHCR policy guidelines discussed above, research by Human Rights Watch in several contexts has found inconsistencies between the policies promulgated by UNHCR and practices in the field. UNHCR has only recently interpreted its protection mandate to go beyond the legal aspects of refoulement and asylum to the physical protection of refugees. If UNHCR fully implements these commitments, such practice would lead to important improvements in refugee protection, particularly for women refugees. An indication of UNHCR's enhanced awareness of the urgent plight of refugee women is reflected in two sets of guidelines issued in the 1990s, which provide for protection measures to address the needs of refugee women. UNHCR's Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women56 issued in July 1991, supplemented by Sexual Violence Against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response issued in March 1995, suggest a range of preventive and remedial measures that can and should be taken to combat sexual violence.57 The existence of the Geneva-based Senior Coordinator for Refugee Women and the recent appointment of regional coordinators on women's issues are also important additions to UNHCR. These developments represent significant steps towards ending the agency's traditional neglect of this issue. However, they have not been followed up with implementation mechanisms in the field to ensure a prompt and automatic response to women refugees at risk.
The Protection Guidelines for Women and the Guidelines Against Sexual Violence are often overlooked or deliberately ignored by UNHCR staff. In some instances, implementation problems stem from the fact that refugee situations tend to be crisis-driven, with relief workers overwhelmed by a seemingly endless refugee flow. In other cases, UNHCR field staff are unaware of the guidelines, or have a poor grasp of them. UNHCR has also acknowledged that its staff may avoid confronting or remedying widespread sexual violence in refugee campsbecause of personal discomfort with addressing the issue or a perception that such acts are a "private matter" or "an inevitable by-product" of the conflict.58 Furthermore, UNHCR has not implemented internal mechanisms to ensure an automatic response by the agency in situations where women are at risk. There is no institutionalized procedure through which reports of sexual violence in a camp trigger a systematic response from the branch and Geneva offices to ensure that trained personnel with expertise in the area immediately address the situation.
UNHCR's neglect of this issue is all the more unfortunate given the fact that thoughtful protection programs for women at risk of sexual violence have been shown to make a difference. However, at the moment UNHCR generally responds to reports of widespread sexual violence only in situations where widespread media publicity has put a spotlight on the situation. For example, following publicity in 1993 of widespread rape in the Somali refugee camps in Kenya, UNHCR instituted a Women Victims of Violence program. In a visit to the camps in 1993, Human Rights Watch documented testimonies of rape survivors and the inadequate response of the Kenyan government and UNHCR to provide protection and security for the refugee population located in an insecure area close to the Somali border. Many of those interviewed had been gang raped at gunpoint, some by as many as seven men. In the vast majority of cases, rape victims were also robbed, severely beaten, knifed or shot. Most refugee women were at risk of rape from Somali-Kenyan bandits joined by former Somali soldiers or other fighters from Somalia who crossed the Kenya-Somali border to launch raids. A small portion of the rapes were committed by Kenyan police officers and other refugees. Most of the rapes were clearly ethnically motivated, aimed at demoralizing and destroying the social fabric of the refugee settlements. The Human Rights Watch report also documented the lack of adequate investigation and prosecution of rape which contributed to the situation of lawlessness and impunity.59
Following publicity on the situation, UNHCR and the Kenyan government made extensive efforts to improve the situation for women refugees. Follow-up visits by Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project to the Somali camps in Kenya in 1994 and 1996 found important changes in UNHCR's response to the incidence of sexual violence since 1993, and significant achievements in protection of the women refugees. Among other things, UNHCR organized a program for Somali refugees to plant "live" fences (several rows of thick thorn bushes around the camps) around the refugee camps to discourage incursions into the camps by bandits. Other measures were also taken that conferred greater responsibility on the refugees, including refugee women, for establishing security in their camps and addressing the issue of sexual violence. For example, UNHCR in conjunction with CARE trained refugees, including some men, to be counselors in situations of sexual violence to the survivors, their families and their community. UNHCR has also continued to offer human rights training to Kenyan police officers and taken other steps to offer material support for Kenyan law enforcement, including the construction of a police post near the refugee camps, and advocated for the protection of refugees with the Kenyan government. Counseling, medical and legal services have been instituted for rape survivors, and procedures have been put into place to ensure that medical and police reports are filed as a matter of routine practice.
The result has been a significant decline in the incidence of rape, a number of successful prosecution of rapists, and improved protection provided by Kenyan police officers. The number of reported rapes of refugee women and children has virtually halved from over 200 cases in 1993 to seventy six in 1994 and seventy in 1995. While these figures still cannot be deemed to reflect the actual incidence of rape because of the ever present factor of under reporting, they do indicate a comparative decline in incidence of rape. In addition, women interviewed by Human Rights Watch/Africa spoke of improved confidence in the security of their camps.
Certainly problems persist to date. First, rapes continue to occur when women and girls leave the relative security of the camp in order to tend livestock and find firewood. It is also most frequently young girls who engage in these tasks, and since late 1994, they have constituted a higher percentage of rape victims than ever before. UNHCR has yet to take steps to lessen the need for women and girls to leave the camps. Second, justice continues to elude most rape survivors, since impunity for rapists remains the norm rather than the exception. Even with legal counsel, the odds of convicting the perpetrator are distressingly slim. Third, long distances to the nearest court, coupled with an overburdened court calendar, has caused long delays in prosecution. Lastly, there are no women police officers posted in the area, despite assurances from the Kenyan government that it would assign policewomen to the area once housing was built by UNHCR. Regardless of the completion of the housing, not a single woman officer is protecting the refugee population made up largely of women and children.
While rape has by no means been eradicated in the Somali refugee camps in northeastern Kenya, the improvements in the situation indicate that decisive action on the part of UNHCR can improve the lives of refugee women. When UNHCR first began addressing the issue of rape in the Somali refugee camps, its initial efforts concentrated only services for a woman after she had been raped. As a result, such measures failed to prevent new occurrences of rape. In one such measure in response to sexual violence, for example, UNHCR transferred some of the refugee women to camps in Kenya along the coast. This effort, while ostensibly offering protection to women who had already suffered sexual violence did nothing to prevent new incidents of violence from occurring. Indeed, incidents of sexual violence continued at the camps in North-Eastern province. Even the measure of protection offered by this transfer system was greatly diluted by poorly developed logistics. In some cases, women had to wait so long for their camp transfers that they actually suffered from repeated incidents of rape before they were able to move to a safer camp. It was only after UNHCR began to put into place preventive protection measures that genuine improvements could be perceived.
The protection measures employed by UNHCR in the Kenyan refugee camps should be used as a basis for incorporating a standardized protection strategy for refugee women into the practices of the agency. The UNHCR Protection Guidelines for Women offers specific suggestions for appropriate responses to sexual violence against women. Such measures include: physical location and organization of camps to ensure greater protection60 and identifying and promoting alternatives to camps where possible.61 The guidelines also emphasize that "prevention of attacks of refugee women in refugee camps" is a "key" issue in the protection of refugee women.62 Significantly, the Protection Guidelines for Women also make a clear distinction between recommended responses to individual cases of abuse and responses to a pattern of protection problems, with the latter offering more emphasis on prevention.63
Human Rights Watch calls on UNHCR to put into place an internal procedure through which reports of sexual violence can trigger an automatic response as soon as the problem is identified which institutes preventive measures such as those undertaken in the Kenyan example. Moreover, considering the pervasive under reporting of rape in all cultures, even the absence of reports of rape can hardly be taken for the absence of the need for such measures. Human Rights Watch commends the Kenyan government and the UNHCR staff for the efforts made to protect women refugees in Kenya, and encourages UNHCR and the Kenyan government to address the outstanding problems. It further urges UNHCR first to integrate such protection measures into the overall refugee protection strategy, and then to replicate such measures as a matter of course in all refugee situations. UNHCR's ExecutiveCommittee and donor governments should ensure that receiving governments cooperate with UNHCR to institute protection programs to prevent and remedy sexual violence. UNHCR should ensure that refugees are invited to suggest measures that they believe would increase their security and to ensure, as in Kenya, that refugee women are integrally involved in the creation of programs and policies to prevent rape.
55 See Africa Watch and Women's Rights Project, "Seeking Refuge, Finding Terror: The Widespread Rape of Somali Women Refugees in North Eastern Kenya," A Human Rights Watch Short Report, vol. 5, no. 13, (October 1993 and Human Right Watch/Women's Rights Project, Human Rights Watch Global Report on Women's Human Rights, (NY: August 1995), pp. 100-139 (hereinafter The Global Report).
56 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women, (Geneva: 1991) (hereinafter, Protection Guidelines for Women). The Protection Guidelines for Women prescribe measures that "can" or "may" be taken to counter physical and sexual attacks and abuse of women during flight and in their countries of asylum. They call for, among other things: (1) changing the physical design and location of refugee camps to provide greater physical security; (2) using security patrols; (3) reducing the use of closed facilities or detention centers; (4) training staff regarding the particular problems faced by refugee women and employing female staff to work with women refugees to identify their concerns; (5) establishing mechanisms for law enforcement within the refugee camps; (6) educating refugee women about their rights; (7) giving priority to assessing the protection needs of unaccompanied refugee women; and (8) ensuring women's direct access to food and other services, including whatever process is used to determine eligibility for assistance.
57 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Sexual Violence Against Refugees: Guidelines on Prevention and Response (hereinafter Guidelines Against Sexual Violence). The Sexual Violence Guidelines prescribe preventive measures that can and should be taken to prevent sexual violence including (1) ensuring that the physical design and location of the refugee camps enhance physical security; (2) providing frequent security patrols by law enforcement authorities and by the refugees themselves; (3) installing fencing around the camps; (4) identifying and promoting alternatives to refugee camps where possible; (5) organizing inter-agency meetings between UNHCR, other relief organizations and relevant government officials, as well as the refugees themselves, to develop a plan of action to prevent sexual violence; and (6) assigning to the camps a greater number of female protection officers, field interpreters, doctors, health workers and counselors.
58 Human Rights Watch/Women's Rights Project, The Global Report, p. 106, citing Guidelines Against Sexual Violence, p. 7.
59 Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project, "Seeking Refuge, Finding Terror: The Widespread Rape of Somali Women Refugees in North Eastern Kenya," A Human Rights Watch Short Report, vol. 5, no. 13, October 1993.
60 UNHCR, Protection Guidelines for Women, para. 49.