Nearly 12 years since the beginning of the Syrian civil war crisis, more than 6.7 million people continue to be internally displaced, and more than 5.4 million Syrian refugees are registered as refugees in neighboring countries. The compounding crises of recent years and months – from the COVID-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine to the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria – have further situated displaced Syrian women at the intersection of multiple precarities, often rendering them invisible in the global narrative and even more vulnerable to various forms of gender-based discrimination and violence. Twelve years on, an imperative looms large over this protracted crisis: Syrian women must be more effectively centered in humanitarian and policy design.
The views and lived experiences of Syrian refugee women are rarely incorporated in research, service provision, and policy design – a situation that has remained largely unchanged since early in the crisis. Missing from much of the global response over the past twelve years has been the focused application of meaningful gender analysis to the crisis. While the 1990 UNHCR Policy on Refugee Women called for “integrating the resources and needs of refugee women into all aspects of programming so as to assure equitable protection and assistance activities,” these guidelines are seldom put into effect and the collected sex- and age-disaggregated data lacks representational strength. In both 2015 and 2017, the Women’s Refugee Commission noted that “there was little evidence that [sex- and age-disaggregated] data was being used to inform the design and implementation of programs that address the real needs of women, men, girls and boys” and that, with “regards to women, children and youth with disabilities, no publications were identified that considered their resilience.”
The statistical invisibility of displaced Syrian women makes it difficult, if not impossible, to develop gender-responsive political and humanitarian policies that center their experiences and realities. This gender erasure is largely the result of a hierarchical approach to displaced Syrian women, one that often relies on antiquated and, at times, stereotypical cultural representations. Too often, humanitarian organizations, NGOs, academics, and politicians portray Arab and North American refugee women as little more than victims of both the crisis and of their own culture. These portrayals engage in poverty and crisis tourism that further disempowers an already struggling population. Women activists, heads of households, and unaccompanied minors are all but erased from the conversation. Not only do their needs go unmet, but their victimization is compounded – first by war, then by natural and health disasters, then finally by the systems of political and humanitarian response that inflict structural violence upon them.
The refugee crisis is, of course, a symptom of wider political crises, and finding effective and durable solutions for displaced Syrian populations is, as Maha Yahya, Director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center has noted, primarily a political imperative. The unrelenting focus on the crisis as a security issue on both regional and global scales, though, has met with limited measurable success on the humanitarian front. In fact, it has highlighted the limitations of emergency response strategies that ignore or disregard the voices of the displaced and the marginalized, who are instead categorized and treated as passive victims or as burdens on national and international resources. These limitations become especially clear when viewed alongside recent global health crises and natural disasters.
The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdown and mitigation efforts in Syria and neighboring countries created significant additional barriers for displaced Syrian refugee women, exacerbating existing inequalities and post-migration vulnerabilities. In a recent study of the gendered impacts of the pandemic on Syrian refugee women in Jordan, Cevdet Acu found that “the structural imbalances in gender roles made Syrian women more vulnerable compared to their male counterparts” in terms of economic security, access to health resources, and the increased risk of domestic violence. And in the winter of 2022, as much of the world was shrugging off COVID-19 restrictions, the situation for Syrian refugee women was worsening due to rising inflation and the continued lack of resources and humanitarian infrastructure. This was especially true for women-headed households in Syria, for example, where the price of basic foods jumped by 800 percent in just two years. Into this reality, with many aid agencies stretched thin as the war in Ukraine displaced millions more people, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and multiple severe aftershocks hit Turkey and northwest Syria, creating an even more complex humanitarian emergency. In a policy brief from February 2023, the Women’s Refugee Commission notes that of the “5.3 million people in northwest Syria in need of emergency assistance and humanitarian relief, most . . . are women and children.”
The scale of these ongoing challenges requires courageous thinking and ingenuity on national, regional, and global levels. Humanitarian organizations must commit to robust gender analysis that aims to understand the differential and intersectional impacts of these crises on women in all their diversities, and must ensure that this data informs both decision-making and response. Furthermore, these organizations must create communication and advocacy initiatives that are gender responsive and, in so doing, promote the leadership of local women’s organizations and NGOs, both in Syria and in neighboring countries like Jordan and Lebanon, which can then work closely with international players to platform refugee women’s voices. By amplifying and scaling up support for women-led, local organizations, we may succeed in shifting from emergency relief to building resilience and creating positive, long-term solutions for displaced Syrian women. Enhancing women’s meaningful participation in these ways, at all levels of humanitarian policy and programming, would finally return displaced Syrian women to the center of their own story.
Dr. Rima Abunasser is Assistant Professor in the Department of Language, Culture, and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University. Her research focuses on global and transnational women’s writing and activism, specifically on how Arab and North African women writers, both at home and in the diaspora, articulate nation, freedom and home. Her work has appeared in such venues as the Journal of North African Studies, Women and Resistance in the Maghreb: Remembering Kahina (Routledge, 2021), and the European Institute of the Mediterranean’s IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook.
