Italian Cooperation in Southeast Asia has always placed combating sexual and gender-based violence among its main objectives, funding several projects in Myanmar and Bangladesh. In the latter country, where AICS has been playing its role in supporting humanitarian interventions in the Cox’s Bazar area since 2018, the Italian Cooperation has committed itself alongside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), funding – over the period 2021-2023 – two grants worth €1 million each for the protection of the Rohingya refugee population.
There are approximately 940.000 Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar district, more than half of whom are women, spread across 33 highly congested camps and experiencing dire living conditions that make women particularly vulnerable to abuses such as sexual violence. Indeed, the rate of recorded abuse in the proximity of the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar is considerably high, and the numerical figure of recorded violence is undoubtedly much lower than the actual figure. This is because the context of absolute fragility experienced by refugee women, who lack recognized legal status, disincentivizes in most cases the reporting of the violence they have suffered, thus
making reliable data collection on the phenomenon very difficult.
In this context, the Committee of the International Red Cross (ICRC) has been implementing – also thanks to the aforementioned AICS grants – a program to address the emergency, with a strong emphasis on the need to protect the Rohingya women population through actions of legal advice and Protection, training for the benefit of medical, prison and security personnel, as well as widespread medical and health interventions and important prevention initiatives.
Following a community-based approach, ICRC has set up face-to-face opportunities to attempt to engage each community component in the journey to address gender-based violence, with the aim of gaining a better understanding of the needs of survivors and avoiding their stigmatization. In order to make psychological, psychosocial and other related health support facilities available to victims of violence, in 2022 ICRC has also invested in
equipping two medical centres, renovating their infrastructure and providing financial support and technical training to the staff.