The Italian Cooperation in Southeast Asia has always placed the fight against sexual and gender violence among the main objectives of its action, financing various projects in Myanmar and Bangladesh. In the latter country, which has seen AICS be the protagonist of humanitarian interventions in the Cox’s Bazar area since 2018, the Italian Cooperation has committed itself alongside the International Committee of the Red Cross (CIRC), financing – in the period 2021-2023 – two donation contributions worth one million euros each for the protection of the Rohingya refugee population.
There are approximately 940,000 Rohingya refugees present in the Cox’s Bazar district, more than half of whom are women, divided into 33 highly congested camps and in conditions of extreme poverty which contributes to making sexual violence widespread. The rate of abuse recorded in the vicinity of the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps is in fact considerably high, and the numerical data of recorded violence is undoubtedly much lower than the real one. This is because the context of absolute fragility experienced by refugee women, without even a recognized legal status on Bangladeshi territory, in most cases discourages reporting the violence they have suffered, thus making it very difficult to collect reliable data on the phenomenon.
In this context, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) carries out – with the support, among others, of the AICS contributions for the three-year period 2021/2023 – a program aimed at dealing with the emergency, placing a strong emphasis on the need to protect the Rohingya female population, through actions of consultancy and legal protection, of training for the benefit of medical, prison and security personnel, as well as widespread medical-health interventions and important prevention initiatives.
Following a community-based approach, the ICRC has established opportunities for discussion to attempt to involve every community component in the process of combating gender violence, with the aim of better understanding the needs of survivors of sexual and sexual violence. avoid stigmatisation. In order to make psychological, psychosocial support facilities and other related health services available to victims of violence, the ICRC has also invested in the equipment of two medical facilities, renewing their infrastructure and providing financial support and technical training to staff.
