Trafficked women die at sea: females over 5 times more at risk than males

(The corpse of a migrating person is retrieved from rescue ship Cantabria, Salerno, on Sunday. Getty image)

Reports are just coming in that 26 corpses of Nigerian and sub-Saharan women were retrieved from the Mediterranean at the weekend.
Presumably economic migrants seeking entry to Europe, the dead were aged only 14 to 18. Mass murder is suspected.
A “seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags” , said Agence France-Presse, was landed by the Spanish ship Cantabria when it arrived in Salerno, southern Italy, after a rescue operation that brought in 400 people.
The deceased young women had been among the 64 people on the boat travelling to southern Italy from Warshefana, near Tripoli, when rough weather caused the boat to capsize.
Some of those still living were found in the sea, clinging to the sides of a partly-sunk rubber dinghy.

Picture: Survivors land in Salerno.(Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Tuesday, the autopsies were due to begin. The young women were going to be examined to see if they were poisoned and/or raped before they died.




FEMALE ESCAPEES’ DEATH RATE USUALLY 6 TIMES THAT OF MEN

When women are trafficked – not for sex, but just because they want to escape their country – they are five or six times more at risk of dying on their escape boats than are men.
In this case, the dead young women were 40 per cent of those aboard (the total female to male ratio is not yet revealed).

The Guardian reports that Marco Rotunno, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said 90% of migrant women arrive with bruises and other signs of violence.
“It’s very rare to find a woman who hasn’t been abused, only in exceptional cases, maybe when they are travelling with their husband. But also women travelling alone with their children have been abused.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/07/italy-investigating-deaths-of-nigerian-women-thought-to-have-been-murdered

The reasons why women are so additionally mistreated vary a little according to culture and situations. But from my studies of secondary sources explanations would appear to include:
1. women are regarded as lesser and therefore more disposable
2. women usually have less economic power to bribe their way out of trouble
3. women tend to have been socialised to be less assertive about their rights
4. women may also be less physically strong and have had less experience in fighting off male assailants. (Childhood play fights are useful training but are usually only sanctioned between boys, not girls versus boys).
5. mothers are hampered by being with children they are protecting
6. advanced pregnancy – and miscarrying en route – makes women less physically able to withstand attack or hardship, or simple y to fight for a fair share of scarce food and water
7. murder sometimes follows rape, or even after sex as a bribe. It’s a way to ensure silence. Because those with power in the escape progress (such as boat captains) are invariably male, so the rape victims are usually females.

How can this danger at sea, this horrifically gendered aggression, still be allowed to happen?

NIGERIAN REPORT

A report in Monday's Vanguard, the Nigerian newspaper with the motto ‘Towards a better life for the People’, gave the details:
“The bodies of 26 women were unloaded in a procession of black bags on to the dock of Salerno. The deceased women, believed to be Nigerian in origin, were recovered by the Spanish ship Cantabria as part of operation Sophia, an EU anti-trafficking force. Most of the women, aged in large part between 14 and 18, were drowned when the rubber boat carrying 64 sank on Friday while crossing the Mediterranean.
“The other three victims were collected as part of other operations and transferred the Cantabria as it headed to Salerno to turn over the bodies to the Italian authorities. 375 rescued migrants were also brought to Salerno, originating from sub-Saharan Africa, Gambia, Ghana, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Senegal: 90 of them women, eight of them pregnant; and 54, children.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE ON BOARD?

“An investigation into the deaths of the women has been launched by Salerno prosecutors who believe there is a possibility that sexual violence played a role in the death of these women. Public prosecutor Luca Masini has arranged the external examination of the bodies with emphasises on toxicology and evidence of rape.
“The bodies were frozen onboard the Cantabria in order to preserve evidence that may have been lost during the journey to the coast. Full autopsies are expected to be completed at the Salerno morgue within the week.
“Police have detained 7 people for questioning including two men of Libyan and Egyptian origin who are believed to be the captains of the vessel.

SEX SLAVES WOULD BE BETTER PROTECTED

“Salerno’s prefect Salvatore Malfi has expressed doubts that the women were being trafficked into sex slavery, as he said “the sex trafficking routes are different. Loading women onto a boat is too risky. The traffickers would not do it as they could lose all their ‘goods, ‘as they describe them, in one fell swoop.”
“While women are statistically at more risk during this kind of migration, it is far beyond the 5 to 6 death rate of men to women crossing the Mediterranean. Read more at: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/11/26-nigerian-women-die-mediterranean-sea/”

TINY DISTANCE – HUGE PROBLEM

People wanting to cross that telling bridge from Africa to Europe know the shortest distance by sea is across the Straits of Gibraltar from Point Oliveros to Point Cirse: 8.6 miles(14 km). (A road bridge is being planned.)
‘Illegal’ migrants from southern Africa usually travel via Libya, much further east. Italy has 4,000 mile of coastline and the north-east tip of Tunisia to the west of Sicily, Marsala, near Trapani, is only 325 miles ( 284 km) as the crow flies.
But it’s never that simple, because of sea conditions, and lack of easy places for covert embarkation and disembarkation.
‘Bonafide’ people travelling that route may take ferries from Tunis to Palermo, in north west Sicily. The ten-twelve hour voyage on these large and powerful vessels costs 110 euros in the cheapest period (February).
By contrast, travelling illegally in a rubber dinghy with an inboard motor costs whatever the traffickers can get.
Speeds on a dinghy with a 15 horsepower engine vary between 15-20 miles per hour, but being heavily-laden slows them down. With just two or three people aboard such a boat voyage would take at least 16 hours. These people could have been at sea for several days.
Survivors are just starting to give evidence.

Refugee women catheterise themselves on ship: victims or problem-solvers?

Sometimes people ask me – somewhat rhetorically - what difference gender makes on ship, especially in these modern times. Surely none?

But no, women do have it harder. Especially if racial issues are part of the equation. Stories of some refugees leaving Libya on ship indicate that enduring and silly myths about pregnant women’s ‘impurity’ continue and have a role at sea. And some women continue to not challenge men about this. It comes at a cost to their health and comfort, and at a time of already appalling difficulty on fraught voyages.

Today Dada Aladelokun writes in The Nation online about 32-year-old expectant mother, Nigerian Madeline Adebisi . She and her husband had been living in Libya. http://www.thenationonlineng.net/2011/index.php/news/10270-32-year-old-expectant-nigerian-turns-refugee-camp-tenant-in-europe.html

In a rather heightened article (‘her heart harbours a killing tempest: She may not see her beloved husband again, dead or alive!’) it’s reported that Madeline Adebisi is one of the 45,000 migrants who made their ways to a refugee camp in Lampedusa, Sicily, in the last five months. The moves follow NATO bombardments and Gaddafi’s strategic decision ‘unleash an unprecedented wave of illegal immigration’ on Europe.

Aladelokun’s article quotes Barbie Latza Nadeau's June 12 report in Newsweek. It reports that Mrs Adebisi was pushed onto a ship at midnight, with hundreds of others, on an emergency trip to “nowhere in particular” against her wishes. The voyage “takes about four days and conditions on the ship are often horrific. There is little food and there are no toilets on board.

“Expectant women are often forced to insert catheters before boarding so that their urine won’t ‘poison’ the superstitious men.” She was about five months pregnant.

Only last week I happen to have witnessed someone being connected by small latex tube from urethra to disposal bag by a small tube – in sterile conditions. An A&E Sister catheterised my elderly mother, who hated the intrusion.

The nurse told me that actually it feels a bit like putting in a tampon, only easier because the tube is so small. It’s less than half a centimetre in diameter and even more pliable than a rubber band. The distress is caused by it being inserted into a place that has usually never been so penetrated.

So the issue is not that these pregnant passengers endured pain, but that they did something invasive under duress. And they did so in a stressful and potentially harmful conditions.

(Usually the area round the urethra is cleaned with a 0.9% sodium chloride solution, to avoid urinary tract infection. And there is risk of trauma to the urethra if the correct procedure isn't used.)

And there’s the indignity of catheterising yourself without privacy in a crowded situation. And then what happens? You are presumably encumbered by a 17oz/500ml drainage bag strapped to your leg in a cramped melee, where lavatories are rare and overloaded.

Fleeing at midnight is hard enough. Being pregnant is hard enough. These women should not have to concede to men's ignorance and bigotry in this way as well.

On the other hand, as there were no lavatories at all on her ship, this woman may have made a very creative decision. It enabled her to avoid the problem of urinating in public. This usually involves hanging over the side of the ship, which might have especially awkward for heavily pregnant women in bulky clothes.

(The situation is akin to cross-dressed women seafarers historically resorting to a silver or horn urinating instrument - at bit like today's plastic Shewee. The difference is that they did it disguise their sex.)

Madeline Adebisi, who is now about to give birth, was on a ship that lost its rudder off Lampedusa’s shore. “Unable to steer, its captain abandoned the wheel and the ship smashed onto the rocks, a stone’s throw to the Door to Europe, a statue erected as a memorial for immigrants who died at sea while trying to reach the continent.”

“‘They just kept screaming and screaming, calling desperately for help. I was so worried we would lose some of those babies,’ Lt. Marco Persi of Italy’s military police reportedly recalled.”

Mrs Adebisi said “‘I thought I was dead that night when the boat crashed… I was sure my life was over.’… The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has estimated that in the past two months, at least 1,600 people have died at sea while fleeing their countries for European shores.” They include pregnant women.

For me the interesting side-point is that Madeline Adebisi and her shipmates already had catheters with them. They were former hospital workers so they were in a position to prepare.

But a refugee information network must have alerted them to the idea that catheters were needed in such a situation. Or were catheters simply part of some extensive medical equipment the women had cannily appropriated from the hospital when they lost their jobs - not least in revenge?

Is this story actually not about women's victimisation, but about their creative - and angry - finding of solutions in a crisis? The key to it probably lies in the word 'forced.' Does it mean women felt impelled by circumstances to make this choice? Or that men bullied women into doing it?