Abstract
The experience of trauma among mothers (to-be) in forced displacement is gender-specific, and it occurs on several levels: trauma-inflicting events at home (including domestic violence prior to the conflict); threats and risks of violence and crimes during the migration (sexual violence, human trafficking); reproductive health-related risks during the migration (unsanitary conditions in camps, lack of contraceptives, sexually transmitted disease, complications with delivering, unnourished/premature children); challenges in providing healthy/safe conditions for newborns and accompanied children (food, shelter, education); and violence in the place of resettlement (structural violence, such as unemployment, domestic violence, racial discrimination) (Niaz & Tariq 2020). (Scarce) clinical treatments, support and information in sexual-reproductive health related trauma (war rape, forced marriage, FGM etc.) within organized or improvised refugee settlements in the countries of European Union, are often driven by the understanding of ‘brown men violence’ (Crawley 2022) inflicted to women migrating to the Western world, and that humanitarian intervention serves as well to empower refugee women to have greater control over their lives and escaping this violence against them. However, culturally ‘sensitive approaches’ might further the symbolic violence and what Sahraoui and Tyszler (2021) call ‘colonial maternalism’, violent intervention into the most intimate dimensions of vulnerable populations like forcefully displaced women to instruct them on Western values and understandings of reproductive health. From theoretical and practical perspective, the paper addresses questions of universal human (reproductive) rights, cultural relativism, transcultural and transnormative mobility, and neocolonial discursive practice surrounding some of the most controversial, culturally relative sexual behaviors, taboos and stigmas, like war rapes, female genital mutilations and child marriages. With this, the author aims to propose humanitarian care service of gender-specific trauma that minimizes neocolonial tendencies while adopting sexual rights and multiculturally inclusive sexual health care.
