The complexity of the current refugee crisis is enormous; while wars are raging in many parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa it is impossible to predict what the outcome will be for Europe or for the refugees who are struggling to reach here. It is made even more complicated by factors such as the rapid globalisation of the economy and the inequality between the north and south; soon too we can expect to see refugees from climate change. It all seems incomprehensible, but we need to try to understand more.
Karin Kneissl ( 9 March ) engages with this situation by focusing on the large numbers of young male refugees, ‘angry young men’ whom she describes as being ‘in no way personally endangered in their homelands’. Rather than focus on countries where this might be the case, she makes a whole number of sweeping generalisations about migration that takes us back as far as the Crusades. More humbly, I shall limit my response to just two of her themes – the predominance of young men among the people fleeing into Europe and the question of sexual behaviour in their countries of origin.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that 75% of the refugees coming to Europe are men; Dr Kneissl states, without giving any source, that the figure is 80% and, presumably in an attempt to make it look more authentic, she surrounds it with inverted commas and refers to it as the ‘80%’. There are plenty of reasons why there might be such a predominance of men. Men are most likely to be conscripted into the armies of their countries of origin whether that is Iraq or Syria or Eritrea or Afghanistan and are, therefore, most likely to be killed. At least a quarter of a million people have been killed since 2011 in Syria and these young men will be in real fear for their lives. Some of them are likely to be at risk from both the tyranny of the Assad government and the jihadist Daesh. Men from Syria, in particular, are at great risk of being ‘personally endangered’. Crossing the Mediterranean in an overcrowded dinghy might be a more hopeful choice than submitting to Assad or Daesh but it would not, in any other circumstance, be deemed an easy option.
The UNHCR also states that 75% of the refugees in countries in the Middle Eastern region are women and children; many of these will be in refugee camps. Many of the unaccompanied men in Europe are the fathers and sons and brothers and husbands of people in the camps; their hope is that their families will join them once they have got settled somewhere. In such situations of conflict, families often use their savings to send their young, able-bodied, articulate members to places which seem to be safe. Many of the refugees from Nazism arrived here in that way; few of these people or their families could have envisaged anything so brutal as the Holocaust; the young men and a smaller number of young women came here looking for paid employment to enable them to build a new life for themselves and then their families.
George Weidenfeld, who went on to become a multi-millionaire publisher and philanthropist, arrived in this way as a 19-year-old refugee from nazi Austria in 1938. Young men who are sufficiently willing to take the risk to make the journey to countries where they may not even speak the language may also be sufficiently willing to take the risk to start new careers and set up new businesses for themselves. Many of the young male refugees whom I encountered when I was doing research in North London were willing to take risks and some would be described as driven; I did not encounter any who came to Britain in search of an ‘easy life’ on benefits.
Many of the middle-aged people, both male and female, in refugee camps are likely to have had professions in their own country. One of the reasons why they have not undertaken journeys to Europe is because they may be suffering from the health effects of losing the status of being a valued professional member of society. Michael Marmot’s longtitudinal studies have shown that status anxiety and the loss of control associated with it are likely to lead to stress and other negative health experiences. Several of the refugees with whom I worked in North London were unlikely ever to return to the status they had enjoyed in their country of origin because of a combination of having incompatible qualifications, finding it difficult to learn a new language in middle-age and suffering the mental health consequences of the loss of status which they had once had.
Some of them did, however, succeed in building new careers for themselves in the UK and I recall a conversation with a man from a war-ravaged central African country who had been able to find reasonably-paid employment here; he was delighted to tell me that he had saved enough money to enable him buy shares in BT and, although the word ‘status’ was never used in the conversation, he clearly felt proud of the fact that he had improved his status in his new society.
I would suggest that the Syrian man, about whose remarks Dr Kneissl is so disparaging, might well have been lamenting the loss of status which he had once enjoyed rather than expressing any sense of entitlement about a home and a car. Many of the middle-aged refugees never regain their lost status and often become dependent on their younger male family members whose presence so infuriates Ms Kneissl.
The other point where I would take issue with Dr Kneissl is when she suggests, again without sources, that group rape is a form of expression of sexual desire for unmarried men in some of the countries which are generating large numbers of refugees. In some poverty-stricken war-torn societies, rape and the sale of young girls into marriage are commonplace; I am not denying that group rape occurs but when it does it is far more likely to be about power than about sexual drive. Group rapes have traditionally been carried out by victorious armies against the women and children of the defeated nations; group rapes also occur in cities as gangs seek to mark the boundaries of the territory they control; group rapes can also be expressions of competitive masculinity within gangs or other all male groupings.
If Dr Kneissl is interested in the sexual behaviour of men in the societies from where refugees emerge (and she gives the impression of being more interested in generating fear among women in the host societies), I would suggest that she undertakes research into the formal and informal patterns of prostitution in societies where pre-marital sex between men and women is not deemed respectable.
She might also wish to consider research into patterns of same-sex activity between men in the societies about which she has written. A hierarchical, age-related system of same-sex relationships exists among men in Afghanistan. Less well-known patterns of sexual activity between men occur in most societies. Community leaders always assert that this is not so in the societies to which they belong but statistics about transmission of HIV and venereal diseases tell a different story. Bisexual patterns of behaviour among men in societies where women are denied full access to public life may well be unacknowledged and stigmatised but they are relatively common.
After doing research for this article, I noticed that Donald Trump was also making similar points about numbers of male refugees to those made by Dr Kneissl. Far be it from me to draw any comparisons between her worldview and that of the irresponsibly loud-mouthed American megalomaniac.
There are no easy answers to the issues that I have tried to address here about motivations for seeking refugee status, about well-being and loss of status or about patterns of sexual activity in those countries which are currently war-torn. What I can say is that reference to fairy-stories about the crusaders or the wild west are unlikely to be illuminating. Data gathering on the topics I have highlighted will be difficult but good policy is dependent on reliably-obtained evidence. Evidence is key to any solution about the refugee crisis.
By Bob Cant | 23 March – 5 April 2016