Left Behind: How the World is Failing Women and Girls on Refugee Family Reunion

Forced displacement due to persecution, violence, natural disasters or other causes brings trauma that the rest of us living in relative safety struggle to imagine. Loved ones are lost and families are torn apart, often ending up far from home and in foreign lands where sometimes kindness is shown, sometimes cruelty. All this impacts differently on men and women, boys and girls in ways that are often poorly understood or addressed. Refugee women and girls face specific threats – including sexual violence and exploitation – and aid efforts often struggle to put in place basic steps for their safety or assistance, such as gender-segregated washing facilities or reproductive health-care.

Yet aid is only part of the picture. If we want to show humanity to the world’s most vulnerable, then refugees also require legal protection. In the aftermath of the Second World War, governments negotiated the UN Refugee Convention to provide a framework to define the protection offered to forcibly displaced people. The legal protections provided, or not provided, to refugees also have gendered implications which are poorly understood and inconsistently addressed. To better understand a women’s rights perspective on these issues, CARE International commissioned a study consisting of field research in Greece and interviews with experts and government officials in other contexts.