In an email to humanitarian news agency IRIN a spokesperson for the Regional Office of Refugee Affairs in Berlin (LAF) wrote that ‘After countless conversations with shelter managers, I can assure you that there is no unusual occurrence [of sexualised violence] reported from emergency or community shelters.’58 Despite multiple accounts of sexual harassment and abuse they were, they said, ‘confident there is no significant problem’. Similarly, news website BuzzFeed reports that in Europe the possibility that male border guards might trade sex for entry is all but denied.59 And yet a 2017 Guardian report revealed that ‘Sexual violence and abuse was widespread and systematic at crossings and checkpoints. A third of the women and children interviewed said their assailants wore uniforms or appeared to be associated with the military.’60
The LAF substantiated their claim of ‘no significant problem’ by pointing to the ‘very low numbers of police reports’, with only ten cases of ‘crimes against the sexual freedom of a person’ involving women living in refuge shelters registered by Berlin police in the whole of 2016.61 But are police statistics a reliable measure of the problem, or is this yet another gender data gap? When BuzzFeed reporters contacted the national police of the major European transit countries (Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary) for any information they had about gender-based violence, many simply did not respond to ‘repeated requests for information’. The Hungarian national police did reply, but only to say that ‘it does not collect information related to asylum-seekers, including reports of rape or attempted sexual assault’. The Croatians said they ‘could not disaggregate crime reports by victim category’, although in any case they ‘had no reports of asylum-seekers experiencing gender-based violence’. This may of course be true, although not because it’s not happening. Several women’s organisations who work with refugees point out that although many of the women they work with have been groped and harassed at shelters, a mixture of cultural and language barriers mean that a ‘very, very high number of sexually motivated attacks go unreported’.62
The data gap when it comes to sexual abuse is compounded in crisis settings by powerful men who blur the lines between aid and sexual assault, exploiting their position by forcing women to have sex with them in order to receive their food rations.63 The data gaps here are endemic, but the evidence we do have suggests that this is a common scenario in post-disaster environments,64 and one which has recently hit headlines worldwide, as first Oxfam and then various other international aid agencies were rocked by allegations of sexual abuse by their workers, and subsequent cover-ups.65
The irony of ignoring the potential for male violence when it comes to designing systems for female refugees is that male violence is often the reason women are refugees in the first place.66 We tend to think of people being displaced because of war and disaster: this is usually why men flee. But this perception is another example of male-default thinking: while women do seek refuge on this basis, female homelessness is more usually driven by the violence women face from men. Women flee from ‘corrective’ rape (where men rape a lesbian to ‘turn her straight’), from institutionalised rape (as happened in Bosnia), from forced marriage, child marriage and domestic violence. Male violence is often why women flee their homes in low-income countries, and it’s why women flee their homes in the affluent West.
Homelessness has historically been seen as a male phenomenon, but there is reason to doubt the official data on this issue. Joanne Bretherton, research fellow at the University of York’s Centre for Housing Policy, explains that women are actually ‘far more likely to experience homelessness than men’,67 while in Australia the ‘archetypal homeless person’ is now ‘a young women aged 25-34, often with a child, and, increasingly, escaping violence’.68 But this ‘serious social problem’69 has been grossly underestimated – and it’s a gender data gap that is in many ways a product of how researchers define and measure homelessness.70 According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) ‘much of the research on homelessness [. . .] lacks a comprehensive gender-based analysis’.71
Homelessness is usually measured by counting those who use homeless services, but this approach only works if men and women are equally likely to use these services, and they aren’t. Women made homeless as a result of domestic violence are often likely to seek refuge in domestic-violence shelters rather than homeless shelters. In the UK this means that they will not be counted as homeless.72 They are also likely to live in precarious arrangements with other people, ‘without their own front door, privacy and their own living space, and without access to any housing of their own to which they have a legal right’.73 Sometimes, as witnessed by the recent rise in ‘sex for rent’ agreements across the UK, they will, like women in refugee camps, be sexually exploited.74
According to Canadian research, women fall into these precarious arrangements because they don’t feel safe in the official emergency accommodation, especially when it’s mixed sex.75 And these safety issues are not a product of women’s imaginations: the CCPA calls the levels of violence experienced by women in shelters ‘staggering’. Supposedly ‘gender-neutral’ services that are ‘presumed to be equally accessible for men and women’, concludes the CCPA, ‘actually put women at significant risk’.
Female homelessness is therefore not simply a result of violence: it is a lead predictor of a woman experiencing violence.76 Women in the US are choosing to live rough rather than access shelters they perceive as dangerous.77 Katharine Sacks-Jones, director of women-at-risk charity Agenda, explains that in the UK homelessness services are ‘often set up with men in mind’, and that they ‘can be frightening places for vulnerable women who’ve experienced abuse and violence’.78
Gender-sensitive provision is not just about safety, however, it’s also about health. In the UK, homeless shelters can (and do) request free condoms from
