Jane Freedman, Professor, Paris 8 University

A gendered analysis of EU migration externalization policies reveals that the insecurities created by these policies are experienced differently by men, women and LGBTQIA+ people. For women, externalization has meant greater chances of forced immobility, an increase in risks of experiencing SGBV, and of dying at borders. For all those who are hoping to seek asylum in the EU based on gender-based forms of persecution in their countries of origin, the frequent pushbacks and refoulements at EU borders, and the difficulties of the journey, mean that they are regularly denied this right.

Introduction

Externalization has wide ranging impacts both in terms of diversity of effects on people on the move and in the geographical locations of these impacts. As previous research on migration has shown, gender inequalities and gendered structures of power and domination have an impact at all stages of a migration journey: influencing reasons for departure, affecting access to mobility, and creating situations of gendered and racialized vulnerability in countries of transit and destination. Gender should be understood here as part of an intersectional framework, interacting with race, social class, age, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and other axes of social inequality, to create specific forms of violence and situations of vulnerability (as well as opportunities) for people on the move.

Reinforcing Immobility

One clear impact of EU externalization policies has been to reinforce immobility, as those on the move find it harder to undertake their journeys and may find themselves “stuck” at various points. As well as using EU agencies such as Frontex and European border police to reinforce control of European borders, police and security apparatuses in Third Countries have been enrolled to criminalize, sanction, and deport people on the move on their way to the EU. Enforced immobility has clear gendered effects. Women generally have more restrictions on their movement than men for a variety of reasons including gendered inequalities in economic resources, gendered responsibilities for childcare, risks of gender-based violence on the journey. Women are generally informed about the long and dangerous nature of the journey and the probability of experiencing sexual violence which might lead to them being more reluctant to undertake migratory journeys.[1] Thus, women’s international mobility has always been generally more limited than that of men, but externalization policies have exacerbated this difference. Statistics show that a larger proportion of those migrants who cross the Mediterranean are men than women, and research has pointed to the fact that it is telling who makes it that far, and that it is far harder for women to undertake migration journeys than men. Women may also be forced to take longer routes, and it generally takes women longer to cross borders than men, if they make it at all.[2]

Tyszler,[3] for example, shows the impacts of externalization on women attempting to cross the Moroccan-Spanish borders. The camps in the forest where migrants wait to cross are controlled by “chairmen” (usually male) who set the rules for those living there. In some cases, these men blackmail women into having sexual relations with them to be able to attempt to cross the border. And some women are prevented from attempting the crossing because the chairmen want to retain them in the camps to be able to have sexual relations with them. In this situation of constrained mobility, women may also be forced to become pregnant as this makes it “easier” for them to cross borders and more likely to be “saved” by coastguards. On the other hand, women who are menstruating are forbidden from attempting the crossing on zodiacs, because it is believed that menstruating women will attract sharks. The situation of these women can be directly attributed to politics of externalization which have created a “deadlock” situation at the border, a situation where women “face even more constraints than men, even within their own bodies, which they have to control at all costs or lend to male strategizing in order to hope to cross”.[4]

These types of constraints on women and female bodies are also found in other countries where women are immobilized as a result of EU externalisation policies. For example, following the EU-Turkey statement of 2016, many people remained stuck in Turkey, unable to move on to the EU. The Women’s Refugee Commission[5] argues that the consequences of the EU-Turkey agreement have been “nothing short of a protection and legal disaster for refugees, particularly women and girls”.

Limiting Rights

Whilst people on the move remain blocked/immobilized in countries of “transit”, their rights may be severely limited. This includes limited access to health services, education for their children, accommodation or non-exploitative work. For women, there is a specific problem with access to sexual and reproductive health services, which is particularly problematic in the context of widespread sexual violence against women. Women may also have difficulties in finding childcare or putting their children into school. This is a problem for all migrants, but as women are more likely to have responsibility for childcare, this weighs particularly on them. Research on people on the move in Turkey, for example, has pointed to the impacts of externalisation on their rights and on the differential social-legal status created for those from different national origins and with varying migration journeys.[6] And these repressive policies have gendered impacts. Researchers have pointed to the particular precarity of many women migrants in Turkey[7], for example the legal violence faced by Syrian refugee women.[8]

Detention

Forced immobility of people on the move has been compounded by arrest and detention in various Third Countries as a direct result of EU externalization policies which lead to criminalization of migration, and funding of police and military efforts to stop migration. In Libya, much of this funding goes to militias, with no control over the conditions of detention of people on the move. There have been many reports of the widespread use of rape and sexual violence in detention centres in Libya. Sexual violence is particularly targeted at migrant women. Amnesty International states that migrant women “expect to be raped and … are constantly at risk of sexual violence at the hands of smugglers, traffickers, armed groups or in immigration detention centres”.[9] The UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya (IFFM) reports that “Migrants were routinely raped, with one male witness describing how, ‘during the nights, the guards [of Bani Walid] come in the dark with the torch and approach the ladies, pick any and rape her. They order us to sleep and cover ourselves with the mattress as they take the lady away’”.[10] And another report found that women detained in the Shara’ al-Zawiya detention centre were coerced by the centre staff into having sex with them in exchange for their release or for better living conditions in detention.[11] Although sexual violence against men is less documented, reports have emerged that this is also widespread in Libyan detention centres. Another report by Italian NGO Associazione per gli Studi Giuridici sull’Immigrazione (ASGI) highlights the sexual violence and forced prostitution experienced by migrant women who pass through Libya, showing the links between detention centres and traffickers sexually exploiting women. One Nigerian woman for example, was forced into prostitution in Tripoli. She eventually escaped and managed to get on a boat to cross the Mediterranean to Italy:

“However, her boat was intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard, who took her to the Janzour detention centre. Here she was detained for three months, until she was bought by a person who forced her into prostitution in a ‘connection house’ in Tripoli, to pay the price for her liberation. For three months she was sexually abused in the ‘connection house’, where some 200 girls were held in a situation of de facto slavery. Following a raid by the Libyan police on the ‘connection house’, she was arrested and taken to a detention centre in Tripoli. Here she was beaten, forced to do hard labour, abused”.[12]

UNHCR[13] has reported on pregnant women being forced to give birth in detention centres in Libya, because their captors refuse to bring them to a hospital. This is also reported by the UN IFFM who report that ‘pregnancies are a commonplace outcome of rape, and migrants reported having seen women give birth in detention without professional medical support’.[14] Lack of medical treatment and difficult birthing conditions have led to some women dying in childbirth. For survivors of rape and sexual violence, there is little or no access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services. Survivors face “insurmountable challenges in accessing safe and adequate sexual and reproductive health services and assistance programmes that could offer them protection and address the harm inflicted and consequential pregnancies and births. Since the irregular entry and stay of migrants is criminalized in Libya, migrant survivors risk prosecution and punishment if they approach Libyan authorities and medical facilities”.[15]

Sexual and Gendered Violence at Borders

Externalisation policies have led to increasing militarization of borders in states which are on migratory routes towards the EU. And this militarization and closure of borders has increased violence against those trying to cross. This includes pushbacks/refoulement at the borders which infringe the right of those who wish to make an asylum claim in an EU country. Many reports show that EU Member States are using illegal pushbacks at borders as a de facto means of preventing people on the move arriving in the EU and making an asylum claim.[16] These pushbacks deny those on the move the right to enter an EU Member State to claim asylum. Those who might wish to make an asylum claim based on gender-related forms of persecution are thus denied this right.

The violence of border control can be seen to be gendered with men and women experiencing different forms of violence as they attempt to cross. Whilst men frequently talk about physical violence and beatings, women are more likely to report sexual harassment and sexual violence,[17] although women also suffer beatings even when pregnant. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports for example that during one pushback in Greece, one pregnant woman reported that the police officers had stamped on her stomach.[18]

MSF reports the story of one woman’s experience of violence at the Algeria-Libya border, showing the gendered nature of violence: “At the Libyan border, during the night, the people who were guiding us raped us. We were also shot at, we scattered, we got lost and we found ourselves with two children who did not speak French, without their mothers, who had disappeared… We spent three days looking for their mothers before leaving the children on their own. Who can take care of unknown children?”.[19]

Border violence increasingly takes the form of illegal pushbacks and here again, gender-based forms of violence are evident. There are various reports of humiliating and invasive body searches by border guards and police which are particularly aimed at women. MSF reports the testimony of several women who endured these types of searches by the Greek coastguard: “One woman, Asma, had travelled through five different countries before reaching Greece. “I wear the hijab, but on the boat, they undressed me. I was in my underwear. They touched me and searched me,” she told MSF. Asma had been pushed back a total of six times, three times each at sea and from land … Another woman, Adele, was traveling with an infant. After one man searched her body by inserting his fingers inside her vagina and anus, he cut her bra to touch her breasts. He searched her hair, pulling at her braids one by one. Adele had pleaded with the man, saying that she was breastfeeding. He then proceeded to search her infant. Then he undressed the baby. He tore his diaper apart and was searching it. For what? For money? They searched his entire small body…”.[20]

Fear of pushbacks leads people to try and hide from police and border guards, which often places them in dangerous situations without access to services or healthcare. This can have dangerous impacts on pregnant women for example. MSF reports on one situation where they came across a group in Greece hiding in the mountains: “In another emergency response, an MSF team assisted a group with several pregnant women; one had given birth that night in the mountains and another was in active labour. The group had been in hiding in the mountains for two days without food or water”.[21] This type of situation clearly puts both the pregnant woman and her unborn baby at risk.

Death at Sea

Externalization has forced people on the move to take more dangerous routes, leading to greater risks of death at sea.  It is impossible to have accurate figures of the number of deaths, but it is clear that the numbers, and the proportion of those who die trying to cross, are growing.[22] This is directly due to the fact that externalization policies are forcing people to take the more dangerous Central Mediterranean route, rather than the still dangerous, but slightly less so, Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece, as well as the EU’s policies to criminalize search and rescue efforts in the Mediterranean. And it is estimated that at least double the numbers of people on the move die in the desert as die in the sea, but there are no figures kept on these deaths.[23]

Although there is a lack of data, the evidence that does exist suggests that amongst those migrants who die at EU borders, a greater proportion of women than men die by drowning.[24] This may be because women and children are placed below deck on boats during the crossing, making it harder to escape in the case of a shipwreck. Gerard and Pickering[25] also found that women they interviewed were more likely to be placed in the most vulnerable positions on boats. Or because women are less likely to be good swimmers because of gender inequalities in access to swimming lessons. Wearing heavier or more unwieldy clothing, being pregnant or travelling with children might also make it less likely that they will survive a shipwreck. Dehydration on board is a particular danger for pregnant women. Gerard and Pickering quote a law enforcement officer in Malta who explains that his most terrible memory is of “two women arriving dead on the boat and both were pregnant. The autopsies said they dehydrated”.[26]

Internal Externalization

The concept of internal externalisation has been used to describe how the EU mobilizes the logic of externalization within the EU itself by forcing Southern European countries to take on more responsibilities than others in terms of migration control, turning these countries – principally Spain, Italy and Greece – into de facto internal areas of migration containment.[27] This process of internal externalization can be argued to have been reinforced with the hotspot approach launched by the European Commission in 2015.[28] In Greece, movements of migrants outside of the hotspots have been severely limited, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic.[29] A report by the Diotima NGO which focuses on Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) reported that survivors of SGBV remained trapped on Lesvos and had extremely limited protection which was further limited by the Covid-19 restrictions. They give an example of a case where a woman from the camp wished to report domestic violence to the police but was prevented from doing so because “this was not considered a sufficient reason for travel”.[30]

Various studies have also described the poor conditions within the hotspots, including overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, with little medical, legal or social support. These conditions render women vulnerable to sexual and gender-based violence, and provide them with extremely limited recourse to social, medical or legal support if they have experienced such violence.[31]

Greece has introduced mandatory reception and identification procedures in mainland Greece, Crete and Rhodes, since September 2022, which have resulted in people being detained and denied access to basic asylum rights. Under the new procedure for applying for international protection, applicants who cannot prove their identity with a document issued by a Greek public authority must undergo reception and identification procedures within one of two screening facilities on the Greek mainland, located close to Athens and Thessaloniki. The screening procedure is mandatory for most people wishing to apply for asylum in Greece, and involves a police interview, medical check, vulnerability assessment and the registration of the asylum claim. During this procedure applicants’ movement is restricted to the screening facility, for an initial period of five days which may be extended up to 25 days.[32] Initial reports show that the system has left people without access to legal support and information, and unable to exercise their rights. There is no effective system in place for recognizing vulnerability, as the following testimony shows:

“In one case, a 29-year-old single mother from Afghanistan awaited screening and registration for two months. It was only under legal pressure that she was able to flag her vulnerabilities to the authorities and leave the centre. She said: ‘It was a very insecure place for me, I never felt safe. If I stayed there without any support or my lawyer, I would have suffered every day. My mental health issues would have worsened, and I would have thought: This is the end of it’.” [33]

Conclusion

Externalization policies have been shown to have deeply negative impacts on the rights of people on the move, preventing them from leaving a country of departure, placing innumerable barriers on their journeys, and preventing them from arriving in a desired destination country to make an asylum claim. These policies have frequently led to violence, injury and death as the chapter has shown. And yet, there is a strong argument to be made that these policies are in fact useless in serving their primary aim – that of preventing migrants from arriving in a destination country. Despite all the EU’s attempts to prevent people on the move arriving in a Member State, the numbers of arrivals have not significantly diminished, proving once again that EU migration and asylum policies are doomed to “fail”.[34] In fact, all that the EU’s migration externalization policies have accomplished is to make the journeys of racialized people on the move to Europe more difficult, dangerous and expensive.

A gendered analysis of these policies reveals that the insecurities faced are experienced differently by men, women and LGBTQIA+ people. For women, externalization has meant greater chances of forced immobility, an increase in risks of experiencing SGBV, and of dying at borders. For all those who are hoping to seek asylum in the EU based on gender-based forms of persecution in their countries of origin, the frequent pushbacks and refoulements at EU borders, and the difficulties of the journey, mean that they are regularly denied this right.  And although the EU claims to take gender issues into consideration in its migration and asylum policies, particularly through the definition of “vulnerable” groups who should be entitled to special protection measures, in practice a label of vulnerability does not lead to any real increased protection. In fact, this vulnerability labelling merely reinforces gendered and racialized stereotypes concerning people on the move, and may mean that young racialized men, who are perceived as a “threat”, may receive even worse treatment than they have done previously.

Footnotes

[1] Freedman, J., Sahraoui, N., & Tastsoglou, E. (Eds.). (2022). Gender-based Violence in Migration: Interdisciplinary, Feminist and Intersectional Approaches. Springer Nature;

Freedman, J., Latouche, A., Miranda, A., Sahraoui, N., de Andrade, G. S., & Tyszler, E. (Eds.). (2023). The Gender of Borders: Embodied Narratives of Migration, Violence and Agency. Taylor & Francis; Krause, U. (2015). A continuum of violence? Linking sexual and gender-based violence during conflict, flight, and encampment. Refugee Survey Quarterly, 34(4), 1-19.

[2] Migreurop (2018). Women at the External Borders of the European Union. Available at: http://migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/note_8_en.pdf

[3] Tyszler, E. (2019). From controlling mobilities to control over women’s bodies: Gendered effects of EU border externalisation in Morocco. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 1-20.

[4] Tyszler 2019, Op cit.

[5] Women’s Refugee Commission (2019), “More Than One Million Pains”: Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys on the Central Mediterranean Route to Italy.

[6] Üstübici, A. (2019). The impact of externalized migration governance on Turkey: technocratic migration governance and the production of differentiated legal status. Comparative Migration Studies, 7(1), 1-18.

[7] Şenses, N. (2020). Gender, women and precarity: Examples from Turkey. Women, Migration and Asylum in Turkey: Developing Gender-Sensitivity in Migration Research, Policy and Practice, 49-67.

[8] Kivilcim, Z. (2016). Legal violence against Syrian female refugees in Turkey. Feminist Legal Studies, 24(2), 193-214.

[9] Amnesty International (2022). Libya Report. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/libya/report-libya/

[10] https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G23/043/04/PDF/G2304304.pdf?OpenElement

[11] ECCHR, FIDH and LFLJ (2021). No Way out: Migrants and Refugees Trapped in Libya Face Crimes Against Humanity

[12] ASGI (2021). Le conseguenze dell’esternalizzazione sui diritti delle donne.

[13] UNHCR (2018). Desperate and Dangerous: Report on the Human Rights Situation of Migrants and Refugees in Libya. Geneva: UNHCR.

[14] https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G23/043/04/PDF/G2304304.pdf?OpenElement

[15] https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G23/043/04/PDF/G2304304.pdf?OpenElement

[16] https://pro.drc.ngo/media/cxihgutp/prab-report-january-to-december-2022.pdf

[17] Freedman, J. (2016). Sexual and gender-based violence against refugee women: a hidden aspect of the refugee” crisis”. Reproductive health matters, 24(47), 18-26.

[18] MSF (2023). In plain sight: the human cost of migration policies and violent practices at Greek sea borders. Available at: https://www.msf.org/plain-sight-migration-policies-greek-sea-borders

[19] MSF (2023). Tales of Women at Sea. Available at: https://www.msf.org/tales-women-sea

[20] MSF (2023). In plain sight: the human cost of migration policies and violent practices at Greek sea borders. Available at: https://www.msf.org/plain-sight-migration-policies-greek-sea-borders

[21] MSF, Op cit.

[22] Akkerman, M. (2018). Expanding the fortress: The policies, the profiteers and the people shaped by EU’s border externalisation programme. The Transnational Institute, 11, 34; Lloyd-Damnjanovic, I. (2020). Criminalization of Search-and-Rescue Operations in the Mediterranean Has Been Accompanied by Rising Migrant Death Rate. Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/criminalization-rescue-operations-mediterranean-rising-deaths

[23] Akkerman, Op cit.

[24] Dearden, K., Sánchez Dionis, M., Black, J. and Laczko, F. (2020). Calculating “Death Rates” in the Context of Migration Journeys: Focus on the Central Mediterranean. Berlin: International Organization for Migration, Global Migration Data Analysis Centre

[25] Gerard, A., & Pickering, S. (2014). Gender, securitization and transit: Refugee women and the journey to the EU. Journal of Refugee Studies, 27(3), 338-359.

[26] Gerard and Pickering, Op cit.

[27] Barbero, I., & Donadio, G. (2019). The internal externalisation of borders for migration control in the EU. Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, 122, 137-162.

[28] Tazzioli 2018

[29] Danish Refugee Council (2017). Fundamental Rights and the EU Hotspot Approach. https://pro.drc.ngo/media/setlbts5/drc_fundamental-rights-and-the-eu-hotspot-approach_october-2017.pdf; Freedman, J. (2021). Immigration, Refugees and responses. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 59, 92-102.

[30] DIOTIMA (2020) Unprotected Victims of Domestic Violence in Moria. Available in Greek at: https://diotima.org.gr/deltio-typoy-aprostateyta-ta-thimata-endooikogeneiakis-vias-sth-moria/

[31] Freedman, 2016 Op cit; Tastsoglou, E., Petrinioti, X., & Karagiannopoulou, C. (2021). The gender-based violence and precarity nexus: Asylum-seeking women in the Eastern Mediterranean. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 3, 660682.

[32] https://www.mobileinfoteam.org/ric

[33] https://www.mobileinfoteam.org/ric

[34] Andersson, R. (2016). Europe’s failed ‘fight’against irregular migration: ethnographic notes on a counterproductive industry. Journal of ethnic and migration studies, 42(7), 1055-1075.