Countering Domestic Violence in Refugee Camps
By Lane HartillChantal led a good life in Darfur, palling around with her six sisters, eating fruit at expensive restaurants, spritzing herself with sweet-smelling perfume. The sunbaked poverty of the countryside—the image most of the world has of Darfur—was remote and foreign to her. She lived in a large town, and her father had money. She was going to be a nurse, and Muhammad, the boy she liked, was going to be a doctor. They would practice together. That was the plan.
Nourene Djohara, right, works at Milé, a 17,000-person refugee camp in eastern Chad. Djohara talks with Chantal, whose husband used to beat her. Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS
But when she turned 14, her father had other ideas. You're going to the village and you will marry a man there, he told her. Refusing isn't an option. You will marry him, or I will never again recognize you as my daughter; you will, he said, no longer be part of the family.
"I went crazy, I went mental," Chantal says. She knew she didn't have a choice. Terrified, she set out to start her new life.
What happened next isn't easy for her to talk about. Her husband was a relative of her father's and several years older than her. He was domineering. She pulled water and pounded millet. Calluses grew on her soft hands. She tried to escape, but he caught her.
He tied her wrists together and tethered her to a pillar in the house. He beat her backside, neck and shoulders with a lanyard.
She was slender—she still is—and had very little cushion to soften the blows.
Then came the conflict that tore apart Darfur. They left their village and arrived in Chad in 2004. It was a reprieve, of sorts. In the refugee camp, Chantal could study Arabic. She worked for an international nongovernmental organization for a while. She also taught Arabic to girls. The proximity of other educated women eased the tension of her home life.
Abuse Continued
But the abuse didn't stop. For three years, she says, her husband beat her a few times a month.
One night, she stopped by to greet her husband's sister. When she got home, the accusations started.
"Where have you been?"
"I went and visited your sister."
"You went to sleep with another man!" he thundered.
Chantal says her husband called his two brothers, and they took her to a secluded spot outside the camp where they beat her bloody.
She pulls back her scarf to reveal, just below the hairline, an inch-long scar that looks like a shiny black spider. That's where he opened her scalp with the blows.
Chantal stops telling me her story. She lifts up her shawl to her glistening eyes. The light blue of the shawl starts to darken. This 26-year-old, who has to submit to this man at will, who is on pins and needles when he's around, constantly wondering when he'll blow, takes a moment to compose herself. She doesn't have a chance to talk about this very often. It helps, she says, to get it out.
Countering Ingrained Violence
"[Our men] treat their wives like animals," says Chantal. "They don't consider us human."
That's why Nourene Djohara is so important. She is a Chadian social worker in charge of a project that protects women from violence at Milé camp, home to 17,000 refugees. She works for CRS' partner Secours Catholique et Développement (SECADEV), which manages three of Chad's 12 Darfur refugee camps. Each of Milé camp's 11 zones has a refugee volunteer who lives among the refugees. At night, they hear the slurred shouts and the high-pitched screams. They also hear the women gossip about their husbands when they are filling buckets at the well in the morning.
The workers report incidents of domestic abuse and other violence back to Nourene. Then the hard work starts: convincing the men to stop beating their wives.
Outreach workers in the camp say that domestic violence is deeply ingrained in some refugee men, and it's hard to stop. Anything from dinner not being ready on time to refusing sexual relations can incite abuse.
One outreach worker adds that previously there were no consequences for such abuse. Now there are. This February the Détachment Intégré de Sécurité (DIS) got involved. Trained by the United Nations, the DIS is in charge of the security around the camp. Those in the camp who commit crimes are turned over to the force, a report is filed, and the suspect is taken to the tribunal in the nearby town of Guéréda.
"The refugees are afraid of the DIS," says Nourene. Since the DIS started arresting men who beat their wives, the number of domestic violence cases has dropped.
Still, the outreach workers don't have it easy. "Some men say: 'Why are you lecturing me in my house? You are creating problems with my wife. Who is married here, me or you?' " Nourene says. "There are men who understand [our message]," says Nourene, "and there are men who don't."
One man who got the message was Abdullah Mohammad.
Fewer Abuse Incidents
Abdullah admits that he was violent with his wives. Like most men in these camps, he is polygamous. "I've learned a lot since I've been in the refugee camp," he says. "I used to hit [women] to keep them in line. But here, without hitting them, everything is okay with my wives."
The picture Abdullah paints may not be the Ozzie and Harriet marriage many in the West imagine as the ideal, but it is a start. And it illustrates the numerous obstacles Nourene and her team face. Nevertheless, the lectures and the counseling are working. The number of incidents of abuse has greatly decreased over the last few years. The CRS-supported violence prevention network is so successful, other Darfur refugee camps in Chad want to replicate it.
The program has helped Chantal. Nourene says she talked to Chantal's husband many times about the rights of women, about how his wife isn't a child or an animal. The messages seem to have gotten through. The beatings have stopped. For now.
But they left more scars on Chantal than the one on her forehead. She knows that Muhammad, the boy she liked, did go on to be a doctor, in Khartoum. They have been in touch. He is still unmarried. Life there, she imagines, would be so much better than her tension-filled household here in Chad.
"One day, God may let us separate," she says of her husband. "If I had wings, I would fly to Khartoum."
It is just a dream, but it helps Chantal get through the day.
Lane Hartill is the West Africa regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services. He is based in Dakar, Senegal.
