Sarah Giles of Doctors Without Borders spent four months on a search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean. She tells NPR’s Scott Simon that women refugees are commonly the targets of sexual assault. Editor’s note: this conversation discusses the issue of rape.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Sarah Giles spent the last four months on board a search and rescue boat in the Mediterranean. What she saw was often devastating. She and her colleagues rescued refugees, many of whom had left Libya, piled into unsafe and overcrowded boats, looking for a better life in Europe. More than 4,600 people have drowned or gone missing this year trying to make that trip.
Sarah Giles is a physician with Doctors Without Borders. And as part of her work, she rescued women who were pregnant. Some of them had been raped. Sexual abuse has become such a problem for women who make this journey some choose to have long-term contraceptive implants put into their arms before they leave. Sarah Giles has just returned to Ottawa and joins us now.
Dr. Giles, thanks for being with us.
SARAH GILES: My pleasure.
SIMON: Tell us about these women you met.
GILES: I think the first thing everyone has to know is that these are incredibly strong women. They are fleeing terrible circumstances, but by the time I had met them, the things they had gone through defied my belief. And I’m convinced that they’ll go on to be amazing additions to any country they go to that’s lucky enough to have them. But their experience defied belief.
SIMON: Well, help us understand that. What did they tell you?
GILES: These women had all fled their home countries for very good reasons. Sometimes they were being persecuted for their political beliefs. But other times, they told me that their parents had died and that they had been sold into prostitution. I met a 14-year-old who had been forcibly married at the age of 12 and was fleeing continuous rape at home. So just the act of leaving their homes was a brave start. And then they were smuggled across Africa, some of them walking across the Sahara. One woman told me she started in a group of four and that she was the only one who survived. They then had to travel through Libya. And people who are smuggled through Libya are often kidnapped multiple times. So they’re kidnapped, they’re sometimes tortured. They have to pay off their kidnappers somehow. Sometimes that’s through forced prostitution, forced labor.
SIMON: I think anyone hearing this will find this horrifying. What can be done to help?
GILES: I don’t know. The number one thing we need to do is to stop criminalizing the act of seeking refuge. More and more, we see governments building literal walls and physical walls. We see them increasing the military presence in the Mediterranean rather than increasing the search and rescue presence. No one wants to leave home. Home is home. Home is where your family is. No one wants to get into a boat with a 167 other people where you have a 1-in-42 chance of drowning. People only do that if the sea is safer than the land.
SIMON: Dr. Giles, how do you – I’m flummoxed now. I don’t know if you say how do you get rid of rape, how do you handle the consequences of rape? There’s no one or obvious answer, is there?
GILES: No, and on the boat, we spoke a lot with women about rape. I am sure there were men who had also been raped but were not coming forward to talk about it. So it’s become a tool of war, a tool of oppression. And women are obviously more susceptible to it. And there’s some sort of gap in people’s minds that allows them to treat people who are different from them as subhuman. And I don’t know how you prevent that from happening.
SIMON: I gather there were women who asked you for medical help.
GILES: Yes. So some of the women who had been raped asked to know if they were pregnant. One of the most heartbreaking things I would have to do would be to confirm for women that they were, indeed, pregnant as a result of rape. Some of them were requesting testing for sexually transmitted infections, which we couldn’t do on the boat, but we helped to arrange in Italy once we arrived there.
One of the things I say about my Doctors Without Borders work is that I often come across the best of humanity, but I also come across the worst of humanity. And these women, especially, told me of things that had happened to them that it never occurred to me that humans could do that to one another.
SIMON: All right, Dr. Giles, you have at least a few ears in America right now. What do we need to hear?
GILES: People who are searching for a better life are doing exactly what you or I would do if we were in the same place. They just want what’s best for their family. They’re not looking to take away our jobs. They’re not looking to make our lives worse. They’re just desperately trying to get a little piece of a better life that we already enjoy.
SIMON: Dr. Sarah Giles of Doctors Without Borders, thanks so much for being with us.
GILES: Thank you.
