Female combatants in the Syrian Conflict, in the fight against or with the IS, and in the Peace Process.

In 2016 for the first time women and children have outnumbered adult men, constituting around 60 per cent of the refugees and migrants crossing the borders to reach the European Union. According to the latest UNHCR statistics, there are have been 2.856 persons dead or missing in the Mediterranean in the first half of 2016 1 , of which a third were women and children. This shows the high level of risk to which women are exposed in their journey to Europe in particular via the sea routes. Although female migration is not a new phenomenon, the last few years present new elements: migration flows are mixed, involving refugees and economic migrants, as well as migrants running away from droughts and other; migrant and refugee women travel alone with children, travel when they are pregnant, when they are adolescents, or elderly. The vulnerability is present in different stages (according to the different phases of their journey) and in various forms (for instance the violence women suffered in the country of origin and the violence they become the victim of during their journey, when they are trafficked). Crossing the borders does not imply that the women and their children are safe. When women cross the borders, their vulnerability emerges more, because they loose their points of orientation, because they lack know how, because they can become the object of blackmailing to have access to resources (even when they are entitled to them in terms of protection), because in some cases they are sexually abused and other. Amnesty International reports that refugee women from Syria and Iraq face sexual harassment, violence, assault, discrimination “at every stage of their journey, including on European soil”. 2 According to the interviews and documentation that is the results of the long field researches of the A. amongst Syrian refugees 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, the movement of people appears as gendered, because the experiences of men and women present differences. These differences are strongly related to gender, because each group (men, women) is strongly characterized by different types of vulnerabilities, especially when people travel alone, thus lacking a protection that can be somehow granted by travelling in group. The problem is that it is the vulnerability itself that acts as a criminogenic factor. It becomes even more traumatizing for the victim when the crossing of the border from a condition of extreme vulnerability renders the person brave enough to take the route to find a better life and instead has to face abuses. The most traumatic experience derives from being abused by those who were expected to be the saviors. The reason why abuses occur is due to various variables, including the lack of training and awareness of humanitarian organization personnel or local administrations of EU border countries on gender based issues in migrations, lack of facilities to protect vulnerable groups (dividing women from men who are not members of their families in centers), lack of research and attention to these issues as regards this category of crimes, scarce control on guards in refugee reception/transit centers, lack of access to justice for victims of gendered crimes, lack of counseling and other. Many women interviewed by the A. describe the centers of identification in which they have been put in Turkey and Greece once captured at the border as “prisons”. The issue of “dignity” emerges as the most fundamental in the experience of crossing the border. The need to be recognized as “women” and the denial of such need is strongly felt as most humiliating. 1 UNHCR Portal, “Refugees/Migrants Emergency Response – Mediterranean”, 2016, http://data.unhcr.org/mediterranean/regional.php (accessed: May 2016) 2 Amnesty International, “Female refugees face physical assault, exploitation and sexual harassment on their journey through Europe”, 16th January 2016, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/01/female-refugees- face-physical- assault-exploitation- and-sexual- harassment-on- their-journey- through-europe/ (accessed: May 2016) The experience of crossing a geographical border is in fact a traumatic as well as a ‘totalizing’ event that affects all aspects of the life of a woman, transversally investing her identity and all her roles as an individual and as a group member (family, ethnic-religious- geographical community). The metaphor of “crossing the border” is appropriate when defining the individual journey of women who have had to change their everyday life and have had to face unpredictably difficult living conditions, in which the abilities and responsibilities related to their social role have been diminished or humiliated. Femininity, motherhood, sisterhood, being member of a community, carry on everyday family activity like taking care of the kids and the husband, being a student, having friend, washing regularly, being denied privacy, living in new communities united by practices and by the common interest of surviving, undergo a huge process of redefinition. Yet, women become entrepreneurs of themselves when they decide to cross the borders alone or with their children, because they have to organize their journey, also at economic level, making agreements with the passeurs, developing skills and know how as regards departure points and arrivals, keeping in contact with relatives in Europe, deciding whether to make the family travel together or divide in different groups increasing the chance that at least one member of the family can succeeds. These elements – risk and opportunity – are parallel in the migratory experience. Women are challenged by the border crossing: they manifest a clear sense of what the border determines at symbolic – yet dramatically concrete – level: “Once I crossed the border and was navigating on a little boat in the Mediterranean, to reach the shores of Greece, I knew I could not look back” said Deema, a Yazidi woman whose family has been persecuted by ISIS, who has lost all her belongings on the way, was captured by the Turkish police and sent back to Iraq, while her thirteen years old son with an adult relative that she put on another boat to take a chance, has safely arrived in Italy and then has moved to Austria to join some relatives. Despite the awareness of the risks and the horrifying stories of the deaths in the Mediterranean, women believe that their story is unique, and that unless they experience the journey themselves, they will not know what their destiny will be. Yet the border is not an indefinite concept: the border remains in the life of the refugees and migrants as an oppressive presence, also because it is a “living creature”: it is at times open or closed, it can be controlled by friendly or enemy forces, it is easy to cross for the geographical morphology of the territory or it is very harsh, it requires a lot of money to use as a bribe, it is a risk for young men who can be recruited by one army in the transit countries or by the criminality in transit or destination countries, it is a risk for women who can be abused, for children who can die or be kidnapped. The border is omnipresent in everyday conversations. Women are fundamental in the decision process when one or more members of the family decide to cross the border because for them the border is as heavy as concrete given what consequences crossing it implies. Border’s functionality lies in the construction of the new social space and the shaping of categories and roles –gender, patriarchy, modernity, tradition, globalization - the new dimension of time and immanence, with the negation of imagining a future at long term while still feeling unstable, precarious in one place with the head and soul in another. Refugee women redefine the border in a “bi-directional process of gendering” by which they take possession of the border as a concrete life boundary and at the same time undergo a process of emancipation started by the border crossing, having had to make experiences out of the ordinary that make them strong enough and eligible for a stronger position in life, which is explicitated in their shape-shifted narratives that really move the border further away. The European Union is also facing a strong re-definition of the concept of borders, in which refugee and migrant women play an important role, especially because they enhance aspects of the movement of people that contest the politically driven image of migrants as single, male, and unskilled and dangerous. Although the public opinion is only occasionally moved by a sense of compassion for the women and children shown by the media in unbearable conditions, the presence of vulnerable groups amongst the refugees and migrants has forces 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 the issue. The Istanbul Convention of the Council of Europe that came into force in 2014 3 , entitled “Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence expressly provides for the protection of refugee women against violence”, requires that the parties to the Convention provide the legislative framework to recognize gender-based violence as a form of persecution in line with the UN Refugee Convention. The interesting element of the Convention, is that it focuses in particular on the reception procedures and support for asylum seekers. While many countries have signed, ratified and enforces the convention, there are some, including countries that are at the moment on the frontline of the recent flows of migrants and refugees as transit countries such as Hungary, that have signed but not ratified the convention. There is a movement of thought regarding the fact that when talking about gendered violence the sexual violence against men and boys should also be included, and criticizes the fact that the Istanbul convention does not seem to contemplate this issue that is equally serious and painful. This is also relevant for the analysis proposed by the A. on the process of gendering the European Union Borders by female refugees and migrants, as it raises 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 the borders for different motivations have become a political instrument and have obliged the European Union to an introspection on its core values and functions, female refugees and migrants have become a catalyzer between contrasting views and reactions. A huge responsibility for them, that should be shared also by the women – and men - on the other side of the border.