Altered social trajectories and risks of violence among young Syrian women seeking refuge in Turkey: a qualitative study

The study was conducted in August 2016 in the Basmane neighbourhood of Izmir, Turkey where two non-governmental organisations Women and Health Alliance International and Relief Society of Syrian Refugees collaboratively managed a community centre for Syrian refugees that offered Turkish language and cultural classes, psychological support, social services, referrals for legal services and women only “safe spaces”.

Izmir is the third most populous city in Turkey after Istanbul and Ankara. The coastline of Izmir is located eight kilometers from Greece, making it one of the largest transit points for refugees crossing over to Europe. Approximately 850,000 refugees, of whom around half were Syrian, transited through Izmir in 2015 [17]. At the time of the study, approximately 150,000 Syrian refugees were living in Izmir, with the majority unregistered and living in informal settlements [18]. Living conditions for Syrian refugees in Izmir are often cramped with several families typically residing together in rented accommodation in the poorest areas of the city’s suburbs. Syrian refugees in Izmir face widespread lack of access to social services including health and education beyond those provided by non-government organisations and formal employment opportunities are rare, leading to limited monthly disposable incomes [18].

We conducted five sex-specific focus group discussions with young men and young women aged 15–25 years old and two with adult participants (mixed sex) aged 18 years and older. Women and men aged 15 years and older, of Syrian origin, and residing in Izmir for at least six months were eligible to participate in the study. Eligible participants were purposively sampled from those attending the community centre on fieldwork days, as well as through the refugee community networks of the organisations who were running the centre, to ensure a mix of ages, and marital statuses across both sexes (Table 1). Sampled participants were given information about the study and invited to participate in the discussion group that corresponded to their age and sex, held at the community centre on the same day. There were no refusals to participate among those invited.

Following verbal informed consent, trained facilitators who were not previously known to participants, led discussions in Arabic. The sex and age of the facilitators matched the groups. Focus group discussions lasted approximately 60–90 min and were audio-recorded with the permission of the participants. The sessions included a vignette, a qualitative research tool in the form of a short story about a hypothetical person which can promote dialogue about sensitive topics or issues [19]. The facilitator read the vignette out loud, recounting a short story about a Syrian adolescent girl in Turkey whose family is experiencing financial difficulties (Table 2). The facilitator then asked for participants’ views about the scenario and how the family might respond to these challenges, using their responses to prompt further discussion of the issues facing young Syrian women in Turkey, and how these were influenced by their displacement. The discussion also covered risks, types and causes of violence in the community for Syrian women and girls, whether these had changed following their departure from Syria and existing support services. Additional topic areas for the focus group discussion with adults included their views on marriage and relationships, safety and security for women and girls, and mechanisms to protect themselves and their family from violence.

Audio-recorded discussions were transcribed verbatim and translated into English. A thematic analysis was conducted whereby the transcripts and notes were first coded using an inductive approach to build up a coding framework. Codes were then reviewed to identify emerging themes and explore the relationships between them, drawing on feminist perspectives on the role of underlying structural and social drivers of violence [5, 10]. Data from the groups with young women, young men and adult community members were analysed separately in order to capture different perspectives on risks of violence in the lives of young Syrian women in this context.

Verbal informed consent was obtained given the varied literacy levels of the participants, and to minimize the risks associated with having a document that could link individuals to their participation in the study. For participants aged 15 years old, parental consent was not obtained due to the high rate of child marriage under age 18 and acknowledging that many families may have been separated as a result of displacement [9, 20, 21]. Non-requirement of parental consent in humanitarian contexts, including in cases of family separation, is increasingly accepted as an ethically appropriate practice in order to ensure broad representation in research [22]. All discussions were conducted in private rooms within the community centre. Psychosocial support was available on site for study participants if needed. All study procedures, including those related to verbal consent, were approved by the ethics committees at Izmir University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (#11547) and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School (#2016P-000202).

Many young women lamented the limited educational opportunities in the new setting, recalling their schooling in Syria, while others expressed hope that they would be able to continue to study in the future. Many were conscious that schooling was being replaced by earlier marriage in their new location, with this seen as a strategy for coping with the financial burden that was faced by families and which had been triggered by displacement:

No, when we were in Syria it wasn’t like this, everyone stayed in school. It was only when we came here and they saw the situation in Syria they started marrying off their daughters just so that they have less expenses. (Group #2).

Marriage of Syrian adolescents and young women was not only seen as a practical means to reduce day-to-day expenses, but also as a way to secure access to a new source of income, if the future husband was wealthy:

The offers that a young girl receives will be accepted by the parents if it could correspond to their financial needs. They do not care about the age or about the man himself, as long as he is wealthy. (Group #6).

None of the young women approved of early marriage, and most adult women participants were equally resistant to the idea, sometimes citing it as a shameful act, although it was often acknowledged to be a viable option as a last resort. In contrast, most young men thought that it was acceptable for girls to get married at a young age in order to support the family financially or relieve some of the family’s financial burdens. Some young men went further by suggesting that young women should actively contribute to efforts to reduce a family’s financial burden by getting married:

Someone needs to support the family financially. Even if her brother and father worked in Izmir I don’t think that it will be enough for the expenses. (Group #5).

Entering the workforce was seen as an alternative means to secure income in the new setting, with several participants mentioning undertaking domestic or factory work. For many young women, finding employment to address their family’s financial concerns was more acceptable than marriage, as one young female participant reflected:

Leaving school to [work to] help her parents is better than her getting married. (Group #2).

Most participants felt that adolescent girls and young women were far safer prior to their displacement, and that they were now exposed to new risks of violence, the most pervasive being verbal, sexual and physical street harassment when they were outside their homes. Young women described feelings of anxiety resulting from the generalized menacing environment with men on the streets, on corners, and in alleys drinking, smoking cannabis, and buying or taking pills and making threatening gestures, such as with knife blades. As one young woman described:

Some guys hit blades on their wrists. The girl becomes spooked and traumatised from small things, as she doesn’t have a lot of strength. (Group #2).

Although perpetrators of street harassment were reportedly from both the host and refugee community, some young women described how they were exposed to such behaviours for the first time, indicating that they found them contrary to the customs and norms in Syria. As one participant reported:

Because they [young men] came here…and they learned different things and forgot the old. Half of them forgot how they were raised in Syria and they changed once they came here. (Group #2).

Changed social trajectories resulting from displacement also exposed adolescent girls and young women to risks of violence. In the context of pervasive street harassment, travelling to a workplace alone was seen to incur a high risk of being verbally or physically aggressed, with one young woman reporting a kidnapping attempt:

One time I was walking in the morning to work and a guy in his car yelled for me..…I told him [I’m] Syrian and he grabbed me and pulled me by the hand and was going to take me in his car. (Group #2).

As a result of the risk of being harassed in the street, many women resorted to being accompanied by a male relative when they were outside the home, or travelling to work. One young woman explained the pervasive feeling of danger, except when accompanied by her father:

There is no safety [here], we only feel safe when we are with our parents. If we are alone … someone will harass us on the street. Even with our mother we don’t feel safe and only feel safe with our father because he is a man. If they see a man with us they do not harass us, but if we were all women there is no safety at all. (Group #2).

Although some young men expressed concern over the significant risks of street harassment that were involved with girls going to work in their new environment, they also suggested that it was a necessary sacrifice in light of the economic hardship associated with displacement. Adult women had additional concerns that working in private residences could expose adolescent girls and young women to abuse and sexual harassment from men in their employers’ houses. One woman stated:

When the girl starts working, she will be prone to physical abuse, violence of course, sexual harassment, and many other things. No one knows what’s inside a home; it has secrets. (Group #3).

Adolescent girls and young women reported that fewer educational opportunities resulted in spending more time at home, particularly for those who did not enter the workforce and did not get married. Even participants who supported the idea that young women should be economically productive suggested that the safest place for girls was at home. Some men explained how they sometimes restricted their daughters from going outside due to the worry that they would be exposed to street harassment:

I am constantly worried about them, to be honest. I don’t allow them to go play outside the house. They play inside. (Group #5).

However, being at home was seen to incur other risks, with both men and women referring to experiencing the “usual” sort of violence, perpetrated by parents, as a means to control the behavior of their daughters under certain circumstances:

Man: I could beat my daughter if she is making mistakes, in order to put her back on the right track. (Group # 6).

Woman: Nobody beats for no reason. You could try to speak with her once, twice or even three times but after that it is done. You see that this human being is not willing to understand and the only way to make this stop is by violence. (Group #6).

Although many participants referred to the financial benefits of marrying their daughters, marriage was also acknowledged to incur risks of intimate partner violence, which were exacerbated when girls got married whilst they were still “emotionally immature”. Furthermore, intimate partner violence was more likely to be condoned in the context of displacement, due to the changes in many families’ circumstances:

Before, in Syria, if the husband beat his wife and she talked about it to her parents they would decide to bring her back home. But when you arrive to Turkey… your financial needs became different. The father of the girl turned out to be like: “Be patient dear, all men beat!” stuff like that…Beating women has become more acceptable… I mean you used to be scandalised by news concerning women being hit by their husbands…now...some people think that you have come to accept these things…because you are unstable and an immigrant. (Group #6).

However, these concerns were sometimes balanced by the sense that marriage could protect adolescent girls and young women from being exposed to the risks of violence associated with working, or to more liberal attitudes towards having sexual relationships, or even getting drawn into prostitution:

…and she could be helping out her family and drift to a different road (prostitution). This is very common at this age because they know how important money is. I know some very young girls who think of it this way: instead of working for 20 or 30 Lira per day, if they went down that bad road they could get 70 Lira in an hour or two. Then they tell themselves: why not? (Group #6).