Single women face sexual violence

Esther was sleeping on the streets of Lagos when a woman approached her and promised to move out of Nigeria to a job and a home in Europe.

She dreamed of a new life, especially in the United Kingdom. She had been kicked out of a violent and abusive foster home, and had little left for her. But when she left Lagos in 2016 and crossed the desert into Libya, she had little idea of ​​the traumatic journey ahead, forced into sex work and years of asylum applications in one country after another.

The majority of irregular migrants and asylum seekers are men – 70% according to the European Asylum Agency – but the number of women like Esther, who have come to Europe to seek asylum is rising.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of women traveling alone, whether on the Mediterranean or via the Balkan routes,” says Irene Kontogiannis of the International Rescue Committee in Italy.

Its 2024 report highlighted a 250% annual increase in the number of single adult women arriving in Italy via the Balkan route, while families grew by 52%.

Migrant routes are known to be treacherous. Last year, the International Organization for Migration recorded 3,419 deaths or disappearances of migrants in Europe, the deadliest year on record.

But for women, there is the added threat of sexual violence and exploitation, which is what happened to Esther after she was betrayed by the woman who promised her a better life.

“She locked me in a room and brought a man in. He forcefully had sex with me. I was still a virgin,” Esther says. “This is what they do…they travel to different villages in Nigeria to select young girls, and bring them to Libya to become sex slaves.”

“Their experiences are different and often more serious,” Oguchi Daniels of the International Organization for Migration told the BBC. “Even women traveling in groups often lack consistent protection, leaving them vulnerable to abuse by smugglers, traffickers or other migrants.”

Many women are aware of the risks but go anyway, packing condoms, or even getting birth control in case they are raped en route.

“All migrants have to pay the smuggler,” says Hermine Gbedou of the Stella Pollari anti-human trafficking network. “But women are often expected to offer sex as part of the payment.”

Ms. Gubedo supports migrant women in Trieste, a port city in northeastern Italy that has long been a crossroads of cultures and serves as a major entry point into the European Union for those crossing from the Balkans. From here they continue on their way to countries such as Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

After four months of exploitation in Libya, Esther escaped and crossed the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber dinghy, where she was rescued by the Italian Coast Guard and taken to the island of Lampedusa.

She requested asylum three times before receiving refugee status.

Asylum seekers from countries considered safe are often rejected. At the time, Italy considered Nigeria unsafe, but changed that assessment two years ago when governments across Europe began tightening their rules in response to the large influx of migrants into Europe in 2015-2016. Demands for further restrictions on asylum applications have grown louder since then.

“It is impossible to sustain mass migration – there is no way,” says Nicola Procaccini, a lawmaker in Georgia Meloni’s right-wing government. “We can guarantee a safe life for those women who are already at risk, but not for all of them.”

“We have to be firm,” warns Rakib Ahsan of the conservative think tank Policy Exchange. “We need to prioritize women and girls who are at immediate risk within conflict-affected areas, where rape is used as a weapon of war.”

He says this doesn’t happen consistently at the moment, and while he sympathizes with the plight of women facing perilous routes to Europe, “the key is controlled empathy.”

However, many women, coming from countries considered safe, claim that the abuse they have suffered because of being a woman means that life in their home countries has become impossible.

This was the case for Nina, a 28-year-old from Kosovo.

“People think that everything is fine in Kosovo, but that is not true,” she says. “Things are terrible for women.”

Nina says she and her sister were sexually assaulted by their friends who forced them into sex work.

A 2019 OSCE report indicated that 54% of women in Kosovo had experienced psychological, physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner since the age of 15.

Women facing persecution on the grounds of gender-based violence are entitled to asylum under the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, which was backed by a landmark ruling by the EU’s highest court last year. The convention details gender-based violence as psychological, physical and sexual – and includes female genital mutilation.

However, its terms have not yet been applied consistently, according to the charities.

“Many of the asylum officers in the field are men who are not adequately trained to deal with such a sensitive issue [as female genital mutilation] – Both medically and psychologically,” says Marianne Ngwena Kana, Director of the European Network for the Elimination of FGM.

She says many women’s asylum claims are rejected on the false assumption that, because they have already undergone FGM, they face no further risk.

“We had judges say, ‘You’ve already been mutilated, so it’s not dangerous for you to go back to your country, because there’s no way they can do that to you again,’” Ngwena Kana says.

When it comes to sexual violence, Carenza Arnold of the British charity Women for Refugees says it is often difficult to prove, because it does not leave the same scars that physical torture does – and taboos and cultural sensitivities for women make the process more difficult.

“Women are often rushed through this process and may not disclose the sexual violence they have experienced to the immigration officer they have just met,” Arnold explains.

The International Organization for Migration told the BBC that most of the violence women face occurs during their journey.

“Women often survive sexual violence from their partners in their country of origin, and then experience the same thing again during the journey,” says Oguchi-Daniels.

This was the case for Nina and her sister on their journey away from their abusive partners in Kosovo to a new life in Italy. They traveled with other women, traveling through the forests of Eastern Europe in an attempt to avoid the authorities. There, they said they were attacked by male migrants and smugglers.

“Even though we were in the mountains, in the dark, you could hear the screaming,” Nina recalls. “Men would come to us with a torch, light it in our faces, choose who they wanted, and take them into the forest.

“At night, I could hear my sister crying and asking for help.”

Nina and her sister told Italian authorities that if they returned home they would be killed by their former boyfriends. In the end, they were granted asylum.

Esther’s fight for refugee status took much longer.

She first sought asylum in Italy in 2016, but after a long wait there, she moved to France and then to Germany, where her asylum claims were rejected because under the EU’s Dublin rules, an asylum seeker is normally expected to apply for asylum in the first EU country they enter.

She finally obtained refugee status in Italy in 2019.

Nearly a decade after leaving Nigeria, she wonders whether her current presence in Italy was worth the pain she endured to get there: “I don’t even know why I came to this place.”