Connect with us

New Social Compact

Intersectionality, the Leftist Plague Destroying Western Society -part1

Published

on

There is a new radical theory, which was produced and spread by the academia, a new leftist “golden god” which highly influence contemporary international politics. In fact, it is a new Orwell’s 1984 nightmare language. It is called now intersectionality. It is not a new kind of doubletalk but instead, a twisted and abhorrent talk, creating a pure anarchic situation and a socio-political chaos. Indeed, everything have been gotten crazy, insane, odd, and out of logical order. These days one cannot talk directly and define things openly. One cannot differentiate between right and wrong, truth and false. Soon the days are coming where it will be forbidden to say “the sun rises” or the “sun sets,” because what is, which is, how one refers to the “sun? What gender it is?” why it rises and not sets and vise-versa? Under this craze environment who dares to say Earth is not flat? In fact there is huge sections who insist that Earth is flat. Indeed, with intersectionality the world has deepen its upside down turnovers. Nothing is really what it is and everything is also the opposite. The social riots in the US with anarchic chaotic groups and organizations raging and tearing down everything that represent law and order are exactly what this research seek to expose.

The beginning was modest though revolutionary. It started as a sociological theory describing multiple threats of discrimination when identities overlap with number of minority classes, such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, and the like. This new god has been developed by Kimberle Crenshaw in her 1989 essay, and refined in 1991. In Stanford Law Review. Crenshaw asserts that the anti-discrimination laws, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics failed to address the experiences of black women because of how they each focus on a single factor. For her, these aspects of identity are not “unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather… reciprocally constructing phenomena.” Laws and policies usually only address one form of marginalized identity. The intersections of multiple oppressed identities therefore go overlooked and oppression is cyclically perpetuated. Any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner and harsh situation in which black women are subordinated.

Crenshaw has identified three aspects of intersectionality that affect the visibility of black women: structural intersectionality, political intersectionality, and representational intersectionality. The first deals with how black women experience domestic violence and rape in a manner qualitatively different from the ways that white women experience them. The second examines how feminist and anti-racist laws and policies have paradoxically decreased the visibility of violence against black women. The third, delves into how pop culture portrayals can obscure the actual life experiences of black women.

The term gained prominence by Patricia Hill Collins, arguing that cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society, such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity. She referred to this as “interlocking oppression”. She identified three main branches of study within intersectionality. The first, deals with the background, ideas, issues, conflicts, and debates within intersectionality. The second, seeks to apply intersectionality as an analytical strategy to various social institutions to examine how they might perpetuate social inequality. The third, formulates intersectionality as a critical praxis to determine how social justice initiatives can use intersectionality to bring about social change.

According to Oxford dictionary, intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, intersectionality is the complex cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlapped or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized peoples or groups.

Though intersectionality started out as a theory to explain black woman’s discrimination, humiliation and disadvantages in American society, today it is applied to all possible social and political categories. Moreover, under leftist obsession it has developed to a totalistic religion, yes a religion, an undermining destroying religion, by creating artificial coalitions between social and political groups that have nothing to do with each other except hatred to the other at large, i.e. Western culture and traditions and mainly white people. The “other” are those who are “privileged” being white, male, and heterosexual, and adhering to the national political and social values, including the family at the center. Being an artificial part of a false and unrelated academic research intersectionality maintains stupidities such as that multiple identities intersect to create a common whole that is different from the component identities.

The problem, the main issue is that though originally applied to the ways that sexism and racism combine and overlap, intersectionality has come to include all imagined forms of class, sexuality and abilities. The result, it has metastasized into almost every corner of the non-scientific academic world. Without trying to find out peaceful satisfactory solutions intersectionality has migrated from feminism into a deep revulsion and hatred against white, male and especially Jewish-Christian traditions, with the aim to destroy Western society.

The theory of intersectionality is dogmatic orthodoxy that has nothing to do with reality, rather it has all the negative hallmarks of fundamentalist religion. It is a brand new horrible and extreme version of political correctness. In a nutshell it means that everyone must oppose every form of oppression, whatever adherents of intersectionality call “oppression” and racism. That is, people should never be exposed to contrary point of views, which is one of the basics of scientific research, since it might upset someone else’s identity and/or sensibilities and/or personality’s ambitions. At the same time, by itself, it denies and reject other groups and movements and ideas that do not comfort with their biased politics. The marketplace of ideas used to be free and open has become under intersectionality totally restricted and even closed by those who do not even dare to listen to the other side. This is pure cowardice and evil that goes together with pathological violence and chaos. Now all kinds of order, mainly political order, are rejected and the new demanded regime is pure nihilism and chaos.

Nowhere has adoption of this paradigm been more pronounced than on the university campuses where, in the name of bizarre slogans like “identity politics,” “gender,” and “solidarity” it has changed the vocabulary and behavior of these groups to divert them into pure “anti” politics. The negative, the chaotic, the anarchist stand, take the lead. Anti, whatever anti is and means is good and must be accepted. If black people are being denied rights, prejudiced and evil-treated, it is a must of all good people to fight for their rights, by depressing the “oppressors,” by bringing them down. “Equality” and “justice” have now received a new form, as they are defined and represented by those groups who support intersectionality. The normal and regular routes to bring the tragic issue of racism and discrimination of blacks are totally denied, and instead a negative nihilistic rebellious approach is being taken. The aim is to motivate and encourage students, the future of political, social and scientific of the country and other social groups to divide everybody up by their race, gender and other categories.

Intersectionality believes that gender, race, social-class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, physical and mental disabilities, sexual orientation, and other forms of identity, can all intersect. However, it is not legitimate at the same time to decide arbitrarily to exclude groups or orientation without giving them the right to defend their position. If this is true, why it is applied to blacks and Muslims and not to Jews and/or whites? Only blacks and Muslims have sensibilities we should keep and follow while white Christians have not? Under these bizarre and twisted perceptions, why the so-called Palestinians are entitled to perform all kinds of horrible acts of violence and terrorism, but Israel is denied even to self-defense?

Intersectionality is also contradictory. Such a theory when applied by people with bias will inevitably be biased itself. All radical movements carry with them biases and justify violence though from different ideological standpoints. Violence is used as a means to an end. Moreover, it assigns these categories by moral merit in which privilege is bad and victimhood is good. All social problems get reduced to this simple framework and that means in fact anarchism, anti-sociability and chaos. This precludes the possibility of running and performing state organs, and in fact leads to the destruction of political order and the basic fabrics of society. This is hell not paradise. This is not justice and equality but chaos elimination.

Everything is scrutinized through this lens. There are so many simplistic slogans which sound good and attract people to reiterate: ‘Make love not war.’ ‘All humans are created equal.’ Even Marxism sounds good, though there has never been a Marxist society that any rational human being would like to live in it willingly. Amazingly even confusingly, there are still those who ideologically adhere by Communism. This is crazy. All they have to do is to look at Venezuela today, how a potentially rich country with huge abilities its people are starving. It is even recommended not to look at the Soviet Union and its satellites and what they have done to the basics of human life and dignity, but to look at the flourishing thriving technologically sophisticated South Korea as compare to the hell example of North Korea. The same people, the same culture exactly prove what the horrible ideologies of Marxism/communism/socialism do to their own peoples. We have ample examples how communism and socialism eradicate the abilities of the people and ruin the basic fabrics society. Marxism-Leninism is an incurable mental disease, a lunatic ideology, an infinite total disaster. Nazism and Islam are exactly of the same kind, and they follow the same directions and orientations.

The 1400 years of Islam clearly prove it is even worse than Communism and Nazism combined. In its pursuit of political religious ideals, Islam has committed the worst crimes against humanity, of genocide and ethnic cleansing, of huge slavery and destroying human nature to pure submission. Nevertheless not only surprisingly but totally amazingly, it is embraced with love and compassion by the intersectionality groups.

How simplistic and infantile is intersectionality is proven by the following axioms: typical of the orthodoxy of intersectionality is the following propositions:

a. All Colonialists and Imperialists were white males, and therefore all white males are evil. However, Islam is the uppermost of colonialism and imperialism, its history is an open card to these, but it is stripped of all these. Indeed, ignorance or evil kill.

b. Slavery was created and practiced by the white imperialist peoples as a means to oppress the colored peoples and to control and weaken their abilities. Therefore revolution against the “white system” is justified. However, they ignore the tragic reality that Muslims were and still are the prominent slave-traders in history; that Muslims captured, tortured, and marched 120 million blacks from Africa into slavery, 30 million for the local Islamic markets (males were castrated!) and 30 million were shipped to the Americas (60 million of the entire blacks were perished in the roads!); and that Islam is racist, anti-feminist and reject gender equality.

c. America is a white-male-dominated imperialist power, and therefore by definition it is evil and must be annihilated whatever the circumstances are. However, since Muslims are against the US ideologically and they fight its “oppression and occupation,” therefore, by definition Islamic operations are supported and justified and Muslims are embraced.

d. The US supports Israel, and Israel oppresses the Palestinians; therefore, without any investigating and without even trying to learn and understand the issues, Jews are by definition imperialists and racists and Israel must be destroyed. The Palestinians on the other hand, being the victims of Israeli oppression and racism, therefore, they are the good side and should be supported by all means.

You see, the world of intersectionality is so simple. One even does not wonder that these horrific destructive slogans spring in the empty-headed Western academia and played positively by the media that for long has neglected responsibility and honesty. This is suicidal, first and foremost in the academia, to the existence of sciences, knowledge, and to the progress of humanity. It means the annihilation of investigation, scientific research, criticism, and it directly leads to censorship and disappearance of human freedoms, let alone abiding by the scientific truth. It is much more than the nightmare of the Orwellian society. It means in fact bringing back fascism, communism, and promoting the Islamic oppressive rule over humanity and depressing its freedoms and civil rights. It means in fact the retreat of human progress to the dark days of Islamic primitive desert.

All the radical groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, advocate preaching intersectionality while feel comfortable and compassion with the ideology of Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, and all other Islamic fanatic anarchist groups. They deliberately advocate these groups being fundamentally racist, totalitarian, and their ideology leads to ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the annihilation of a nation and its religion. Moreover, by restoring Islam’s 7th century religious and cultural ideologies, they advocate setback of knowledge, sciences, and freedoms. The overall result is clear and symbolizes “the rise and fall of Western civilization.”

It was exactly Alan Dershowitz who has coined this situation concerning Israel so succinctly: “when the best are accused to be the worst, you have to look at the accusers.” It reflects now all those who follow the intersectionality monster. It goes even to much lethal directions as Islam is seen as a good moral and justified force, and all the evils and atrocities it has done through 1400 years of its history are forgotten just because it works today against Western values and traditions. Therefore, the amazing paradox of intersectionality is that it is right and justified to go hand by hand with Islam even in its very essence it is against the basics of intersectionality’s perceptions and notions such as discriminating women, killing gays, adhering male superiority, and even that Muslim slave-traders were the main cause of black slavery in the America.

He who subscribes to this pseudo-academic concept of intersectionality, which has become a code word for anti-American, anti-Western, anti-male, anti-whites, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic bigotry must do one thing: to think, to contemplate, to investigate, to ask questions, and to elaborate issues. One must reject this kind of poisonous exclusionary that intersectionality represents. It encourages fanaticism and accumulates all the radical groups to tear apart the basics of law and order of Western society. Instead of helping bring peace and understanding among cultures, of promoting more social equality and justice, and instead of enhancing a balanced politics, it simply forces the different sides to further apart the fabrics of society and leads to retrenchment, conflicts, violence and anarchism. For intersectionality, facts do not matter; reason does not hold, and all it needs is hatred to normality to the rational behavior and to law and order.

According to Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and Professor of ethical leadership, Intersectionality is ambiguous and open-ended term that lacks a clear-cut definition, but at the same time its specific parameters has enabled it to be drawn upon in nearly any context of inquiry. Difficulties arise due to the many complexities involved in making “multidimensional conceptualizations” that explain the way in which socially constructed categories of differentiation interact to create a social hierarchy. First, there is a strong focus on subjective personal narratives. It posits that an oppressed person is the best to judge his experience of oppression according to his own values and feelings. Moreover, intersectionality does not eliminate the hierarchy of identity but inverses it. This creates a paradox in that different groups suffering oppression and not eliminating oppression. Indeed, intersectionality is a totalizing perspective that reduces all social problems to a simple framework that is an oversimplification of reality.

Intersectional feminism primarily draws on far-left ideologies and ultimately ends up excluding women, people of color, and other marginalized people who do not share similar political views. It is in fact a minority ideological Marxist-Leninist view dominated by people from an economically privileged class who have had a university education in the social sciences and/or the necessary leisure time and education to study intersectionality, critical race theory, queer theory and critical analyses of ableism.

What about the delicate sensibilities of those of us who find censoring offensive? Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning? Is it not true that anyone should be able to criticize or question just about anyone? Should we not care or even know what minority group, if any, someone belongs to? Why it is racism? Why we should not call a sped, a sped? There are whites, and blacks, and yellow, and other color races, so what? There are different cultures in the world, so what? There are differences in development and upbringing education of peoples and sectors in society that should find common grounds and promotion. We should not use the terms “good” and “bad” to relate to them, but we can mention them without prejudice, why not? The question is not are there all this differences, but how do we accommodate with them and bring them to work together equally and without prejudices? To counter back, to wreck and havoc, and to tear up society is not the answer to cure social malaise and world differences. It leads to disaster. 

Moreover, if we use other artificial non-direct terms, does it mean we paint a different world? What about pluralism and differences of opinions? How can science proceed without thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or without arguing and debating? Where would our culture be without the freedom to questioning, the ability to criticize, of being creative or even fighting for ideas? Do we wish to restore the dark days of Galileo Galilei and his trial by the Inquisition in Rome? What about the sensibilities of those of us who find censorship offensive? Where are the “safe spaces” for those who would ban banning? What about those who support freedom of speech, the precious diamond of society?

What is the difference between the Inquisition, the horrible terrorist acts of the Islamic Caliphate State, and the cowardice self-censorship of the Orwellian language today promoted by the academia and the media? The staff of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo slaughtered by ICS (Islamic Caliphate state) terrorists for mocking Muhammad, yet “two years ago we were all Charlie Hebdo. Now our willingness to defend freedom of expression has been crushed.” the magazine is now banned in some British universities, because some students might find it offensive. This is crazy. It means that we succumb to the evil and subjugate to the murderous and fanatics.  

There are horrific stories of censorship and restrictions on expression at universities in the US, the UK and Europe. The world indeed has turned upside down. Even the social media, like Twitter and Facebook ban and censor those who criticize Islam scientifically, even from its religious sources. Isn’t it an infantile approach and treatment the nature of political discourse in the academia has become? The student union of City University in London, renowned for its journalism school, now have voted for campus ban on the newspapers, Sun, Mail, and Express in an ‘opposing fascism’ motion. How is that the academia, the center of open-minded free thinking, bans Israel and calls for its destruction as a state and a nation in the name of Anti-Semite murderous slogans? This is crazy. This is totally anti-scientific, anti-logic and it is opposite to the basics of the academia’s values.

It is the equivalent of the “newspeak” about which Orwell has warned us: “Ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda.” If the newspapers are such bad publications, why not allow students to read them and make up their own minds? To suggest that university students cannot contend with a dissenting argument is debilitating and much more: it brings science back to the Middle-Ages, or to the communist fascist era, or worst, to the Islamic rule where there is no science but religious oppression. This is not a democracy; it is full-fledged totalitarianism, a full-scale censorship. This is not modernism but absolutely regression of science and to ignorance. This is evil and wickedness. 

Continue Reading
Comments

New Social Compact

Robotization and the Future of Humanity

Avatar photo

Published

on

Robotization is the final form of capitalist degeneration of humanity. Capitalism does not transform robots into humans, but humans into robots. Instead of human evolution having a historical character, it takes on a technocratic character. Capitalism destroys man’s personality and reduces him to a functional component of technical processes through which capitalism destroys the human and living world. Marx’s concept of “reification” (Verdinglichung) points to the prevailing tendency of world development. Capitalism abolishes man as a human and natural being and turns him into technical means for the development of capitalism.

     Robots are a projection of the capitalistically degenerated humanity. Capitalism abolishes interpersonal relationships and, in doing so, abolishes man as social being. Society becomes a crowd of atomized individuals reduced to a labor-consumer mass. People lose the need for human connection. Man no longer seeks humanity in another man, but in virtual worlds, pets and technological devices. Robots become a substitute for human beings.

     Measured by capitalist criteria, one of the most significant advantages of robots over humans is that robots, as technical “beings,” can constantly be improved based on the productivist efficiency that has a profitable character. The rate of capital turnover is the driving force behind the robotization of humans and the technization of the world. In the end, the process of robotization comes down to the development of capitalism, which involves the increasingly intensive destruction of man as a human and life-creating being. Robotization indicates that there are no limits to the capitalist future.

      This is especially significant when it comes to the “conquest of space.” The technocratic approach to space and to the cosmic future of humanity is conditioned by a dehumanized technocratic mind. Man is abolished as a historical being, and thereby as a unique and irreplaceable cosmic being. Rather than endeavoring to create a humane cosmos, man is instead, through technical means, abolished as a human and natural being and reduced to cosmic processes that have an energetic and mechanical character.

      Robots are an organic part of the technical world, and their characteristics are conditioned by the nature of capitalism. They are mass-produced and, as such, disposable commodities. Robots are not social or historical beings; they lack emotions, mind, libertarian dignity, cultural and national self-awareness, moral criteria, rights, they don’t get sick, they work 24 hours a day as programmed, they are replaceable, and can be instantly turned off and destroyed…

      Capitalists do not strive to create robots that are increasingly similar to humans in their qualities but rather humans who are increasingly similar to robots. Humans are not the role models for robots; robots are the role models for humans. Through the spectacular model of robots, capitalist propaganda machinery imposes on people the image of the capitalist man of the future. In reality, robots are surrogates of humans turned by capitalism into ideal slaves.

      Sport is an area where the robotization of humans in the existing world has reached its highest level. The human body has become a technical means to achieve records, and the “quest for records” is based on a productivistic fanaticism with a technical and destructive character. This is what defines the personality of an athlete, as well as their relation to the world and the future.

      Considering that capitalism is increasingly destroying the living conditions in which man as a natural and human being can survive, the distinctive ability of robots to function in environments that are deadly to humans becomes of paramount importance. The destruction of the living environment devalues man as a human and natural being and further encourages the process of robotization.

      Robotization suggests that capitalism can survive without humans. In the capitalistically degenerated world, humanity is not just superfluous; it has become an impediment to “progress.” With the development of consumer society, which means capitalism’s becoming a totalitarian order of destruction, capitalism has come to the final reckoning with the living world and with man as a human and natural being. Man has become an “obsolete being” that is to conclude his cosmic odyssey in the capitalist landfill.

Continue Reading

New Social Compact

Talking tolerance in polarised societies

Avatar photo

Published

on

hijab

EU research projects provide fresh insights into what it takes for communities to accept different religious and world views.

By ALISON JONES

Ann Trappers harnessed a shock in her native Belgium to help heal social wounds across Europe. 

After Islamic terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016 left 35 people – including three suicide bombers – dead and more than 300 injured, Trappers and her colleagues at a non-governmental organisation called Foyer sought to rebuild community trust and cohesion. 

No taboos

They used the NGO’s long-established youth centre in the religiously and ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Molenbeek. Their experience fed into a research initiative that received EU funding to explore and foster religious tolerance in eight European countries. 

‘One of the ways in which we worked to counter radicalisation was to ensure it didn’t become a taboo subject,’ said Trappers, programme coordinator at Foyer. ‘We wanted young people to be able to talk about it freely and safely in the setting of the youth centre.’

Concerns about growing polarisation in Europe have pushed the issue up the EU political agenda. 

The portfolio of a vice-president of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, includes dialogue with churches as well as religious associations and communities. The portfolio is called “Promoting our European Way of Life”. 

The EU is also putting its weight behind various initiatives – including the Radicalisation Awareness Network – aimed at helping communities in Europe live harmoniously together. 

The EU project in which Trappers was involved ran from May 2018 through October 2022 and was called RETOPEA. It brought together academic organisations from Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Poland and Spain as well as non-EU countries North Macedonia and the UK. 

The project explored ways in which religion is regarded in the educational, professional and social realms. It also examined how peaceful religious coexistence has been established over history. 

Past and present

The idea was to use insights gained from the past to inform thinking about religious tolerance today. 

‘It’s not often you get the opportunity as a historian to make your work relevant,’ said Patrick Pasture, who coordinated RETOPEA and is a professor of modernity and society at Catholic University Leuven in Belgium. 

The project delved into more than 400 primary source extracts from historical peace treaties, contemporary news reports and cultural snippets. 

Based on these materials, teenagers from Foyer and other youth associations in each of the participating countries joined workshops to create their own video blog – or “vlog” – about religious tolerance and coexistence. 

The vlogs, available on the RETOPEA website, include interviews with passersby, drawings and other creative work.

Pasture said the act of working together took the focus away from the participants’ differences.

‘The most important thing will always be that people have to learn to talk – to refrain from immediately judging,’ he said. 

Spreading the word

Pasture was struck by the number of students who were unaware of the religious beliefs of classmates and by how open they were to talking about the issue. 

He said most participants were upset about the divisiveness of contemporary discussions of religion and ‘hated’ the rise of polarisation.

Around a year after RETOPEA wrapped up, the results and materials collected are informing actions by interfaith organisations, governmental bodies and European teacher associations. 

The project team is regularly invited to make presentations at teaching workshops and seminars in the EU and beyond – places ranging from Austria and Italy to Jordan and Wales. 

And the European Association of History Educators – established in 1992 to build educational bridges on the continent following the collapse of communism in eastern Europe – includes the RETOPEA materials on its website. 

Middle ground

Another EU-funded research project looked specifically at the notion of tolerance – how it feels for people to push themselves to accept “others” and what it feels like to be “tolerated.” The research relied mainly on questionnaires and online experiments. 

‘People have their own opinions and their own beliefs and we can’t just expect them to give them up and consider everything of equal value,’ said Maykel Verkuyten, who led the initiative and is a professor in interdisciplinary social science at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. 

Called InTo for Intergroup Toleration, the project ran for five years through September 2022.

In conducting studies in the Netherlands and Germany, Verkuyten and his team were pleasantly surprised to find that a clear majority of people regarded tolerance as an important societal value. 

He said that most respondents agreed with, for example, the following two presented statements: “I accept it when other people do things that I wholeheartedly disapprove of” and “Everyone is allowed to live as he or she wants, even if it is at odds with what I think is good and right”.

On a cautionary note, the team also found that it’s far easier to move people towards greater intolerance than it is to make them more tolerant. 

Verkuyten is driven by an interest in the middle ground of the whole subject – where space exists for differing views without any desire either to crush or to celebrate them. 

He said this zone must be promoted through civics courses, human-rights lessons and other educational initiatives to help ensure the health of democracies and multicultural societies. 

‘There is something in between being very negative, discriminatory, and fully embracing all diversity,’ Verkuyten said. ‘That’s essential for a functioning liberal democracy and indispensable for a culturally diverse society.’

Research in this article was funded by the EU via the European Research Council (ERC). This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.

Continue Reading

New Social Compact

Women’s Health Security: Threats for Women in Refugee Camps

Avatar photo

Published

on

A young Rohingya girl holds her brother outside a youth club in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. © UNHCR/Vincent Tremeau

Women’s Health Issues

Natural disasters and socio-political conflicts in a country are events that can disrupt people’s lives and encourage the flow of refugees. Refugees are people who have to leave their home areas for their safety or survival. A refugee’s home area can be a country, state, or territory. most refugee law is based on a 1951 United Nations document, the Convention, relating to the status of refugees. The 1951 Convention was created to deal with the large number of people displaced by World War II. (National Geographic, 2023).

In these situations, women and girls do not have access to basic materials, such as pads, clothes, and underwear, needed to regulate monthly blood flow. As the number of refugee women  increases,  health  problems  are  prevalent  due  to  the  lack  of  access  to women’s production health services throughout the refugee camps, even though women need a private space to change clothes, breastfeed, or rest. This high refugee population requires more than just basic care, including antenatal care, postnatal care, hygiene care, and care during menstruation, which is a widespread problem for women around the world. In the case of Rohingya refugee women, they mostly use natural materials such as mud, leaves, dung, or animal skins to regulate their menstrual flow. In addition, lack of access to water and private latrines and increased open defecation put women and children at greater risk of disease. therefore, this paper aims to discuss the constraints on vital hygiene practices that pose a health threat to women in refugee camps (Kashfi Pandit, 2022).

Syrian refugees often report high rates of gynecological problems, including menstrual irregularities,  reproductive  tract  infections,  severe  pelvic  pain,  and dysmenorrhea. Married Syrian  refugee  women  living  outside  refugee  camps  particularly  suffer  from micronutrient deficiencies, sexually transmitted infections, and mental health symptoms. In addition to the impact on physical health, women also have a significant impact on mental health due to the pressures of living as refugees, such as the lack of opportunities to earn a living, substandard living conditions, lack of access to food and transportation, the possibility of having to adapt significantly in bearing additional social burdens to ensure the care of their children (SAMS Foundation, 2019).

In 2017, Rohingya refugees also caught the attention of the public in large numbers, with more than 700,000 Rohingya people entering Bangladesh. With this influx of refugees, the condition of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is greatly affected. SRH issues in Rohingya women and girls include increased risk of morbidity, mortality, and gender-based sexual violence, higher risk  of sexually transmitted diseases causing unwanted pregnancies, and the potential for unsafe abortion and its complications. The rape of women in refugee camps violates the sexual and reproductive health rights of adolescents, the non-use of contraceptives can increase their population and allow the transmission of HIV among them, but the absence of a good sanitation system and hygienic environment causes women to suffer (Semonti Jannat, 2022).

Similar to Syrian refugees, Rohingya refugee women and girls also urgently need sexual and reproductive  health  services,  including  antenatal  care,  delivery assistance, postnatal care, family planning services, menstrual health, safe abortion, and prevention and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. As many as 85 percent of refugees still do not have access to latrines, which can lead to outbreaks of communicable diseases among refugees (Karin et al., 2020). The lack of gender-segregated latrines and hygiene means that women in refugee camps must walk to the forest in the dark, leaving them vulnerable to harassment, violence, and even attacks from wild animals. (Semonti Jannat, 2022).

Health Security

Health security is a state of freedom from disease and infection. Health is an essential component of human development and individual well-being and is recognized at the global level as a basic need if people are to achieve an optimal quality of life. Basically, human development and individual well-being cannot be achieved if the person is not adequately protected from threats and does not feel safe. Therefore, health security and human security are closely interconnected (WHO, 2002). In the case study of women’s health in refugee camps, it is clear that women and girls feel unsafe and have their health compromised. Thus, international assistance is needed to address women’s health issues in refugee camps because these refugees have difficulty getting adequate health facilities, causing insecurity to increase, and people find it difficult to take the initiative to protect themselves.

Contribution of International Organizations

In the case of Syrian refugees, there is a government organization called the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which is a global medical aid organization that is at the forefront of crisis relief in Syria and surrounding areas to save lives for every patient in need. In 2016, SAMS supported 66 Syrian reproductive health centers, helping deliver nearly 40,000 babies and providing a quarter of a million reproductive health services. In 2017, SAMS also provided 457,043  reproductive health services in Syria and provided reproductive health training to communities. In Lebanon, the organization supports women’s health services through a specialized  Obgyn  mission,  as  well  as  opening  mental  health  and  psychosocial  services focused on helping mothers and supporting healthy parenting practices, treating anxiety disorders and speech disorders in children, and addressing the psychological wounds of conflict victims. SAMS reaches out to several countries, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Kurdistan (Society et al., 2023).

In the case of Rohingya refugees, there are also non-governmental organizations that address similar  issues,  namely  the  Bangladesh  American  Society  of  Muslim  Aid  for  Humanity (BASMAH), an organization based in the United States dedicated to providing assistance to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. BASMAH has established health clinics to serve Rohingya refugees located in Bangladesh due to the lack of hygienic and sanitary quality of their living quarters, which are highly susceptible to diseases. Every day, hundreds of Rohingya patients, consisting of women, girls, the elderly, and men, also receive free services, free medicines, emergency  services,  and other health consultations. About 1.3 million Rohingya refugees, consisting of 75% women and children in a day there, are 300 patients receiving health services from doctors under BASMAH. Since 2017, BASMAH has been working directly in the camp and creating programs to help refugees. These programs include clean water, a learning center, an education project, medical care, empowering women, orphans & helpless children, dental care service, winter project, Qurbani, zakat / sadaqah, Ramadan iftar, feed the hungry, home for the homeless, rohingnya refugee support, skill development center, urgent earthquake relief, eid gifts for children (BASMAH, 2023).

However, women’s health problems in refugee camps still occur, and these organizations have not reached all refugees in the world. They only serve Syria, Bangladesh, and surrounding areas. But, in Africa it has not been equally assisted. The World Health Organization (WHO) has verified that there were 46 attacks on health workers that killed eight people, and health facilities were also looted and used by armed forces. The incident caused refugees in the African region to not get help. Thus, the issue of women’s health is still a problem and has not been resolved until now (Renewal, 2023).

Continue Reading

Trending