The women of ‘fortress Calais’

By Maia De La Baume

Welcome to the New Jungle.

CALAIS, France – Debora Tademe, a graceful 27-year-old Eritrean, has not seen her son since armed Libyan men took him away at the border between Sudan and Libya and put him on a bus with other children.
Resting in the undergrowth near a road leading to the migrant slum outside the French port of Calais known as the “New Jungle,” where she has been living for the past few months with others attempting to make the crossing to Britain, Tademe ripped grass out of the earth absent-mindedly and repeated, “I don’t know where my son is, I don’t know where he is.”

She lived within Eritrea’s capital Asmara until her father’s death and her family’s deepening poverty forced her to attempt the “very hard, very dangerous” journey. She and the 5-year-old had gotten a ride into Sudan on the back of a pick-up truck. Traveling by night for safety, they walked across the Sahara to the Libyan frontier, before the boy was taken.
Tademe moved on alone toward Europe. Half the people on the Mediterranean crossing she was on died after the engine of their boat broke down, including pregnant women, she said. The survivors were taken by helicopter to Italy.
If her trajectory is tragically familiar, the presence of a small but growing number of women camping in precarious conditions outside Calais adds a new dimension to the border crisis being played out on the national lines of two of Europe’s richest nations.
The luckiest live in  heavily-guarded prefabricated shelters, sleeping in beds, washing themselves in showers and charging their phones for free. Others, like Tademe, sleep on the sandy ground under sheets of corrugated iron and try to climb the fence to the Channel tunnel every day. “Dogs are coming,” she said. “We have no chance. Everything is controlled by police here.”

“We treat them like we treat the men” — Ludovic Hochart, Calais police. 

The presence of women in the camps around Calais is not completely new. A handful were among the first migrants to camp here a decade ago, when the Red Cross center in nearby Sangatte was closed. But aid workers say their number has risen to more than 180, of the total estimated 3,000 migrants camping around Calais, and fear that many more are on the way. When local authorities set up a shelter for 100 women inside the camp in March, it was filled to capacity in a few days.
“We have at least 40 women on the waiting list,” said a humanitarian worker, who didn’t want to give her name or that of her organization for fear of compromising the safety of the women she looks after. “We hope that several women will cross the border to reach England so that they can free some beds.”
The migrants are overwhelmingly young, single men who have fled conflict and poverty in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Syria. But non-governmental organizations (NGOs) say more young, single women from eastern Africa are turning up in Calais, many of them from Ethiopia and Eritrea, “where the government forces women to do their national service, and the military often rapes them,” said François Guennoc, who heads the aid group L’Auberge des Migrants.
Like the men, they try to cross the Channel by climbing the electric fences and forcing their way onto Britain-bound trucks and trains. Many hide overnight around the Eurotunnel freight terminal, some with their babies wrapped around their backs.

Bargaining chips

“They are young, in good health, and have the physical capacity to climb fences like men do,” said Ludovic Hochart, a Calais policeman and member of the UNSA police union. “We treat them like we treat the men.”
Senaït Brhane, an 18-year-old Eritrean, left her homeland three months ago with a half-dozen friends and tries to climb the fence in a heavily wooded area near the terminal every day. The last time, she hurt her finger and had it stitched at the clinic in the camp.

“We suspect that the men exploit them sexually” — Isabelle Bruand, Medecins du Monde.

“I don’t like it here, but we know that we don’t have any other choice,” said Brhane, a Pentacostal Christian who said she spent six months in jail in Eritrea after police arrested her and her friends at a religious gathering. “The army asked us to change religion,” she said.
In Calais, women speak out less than men and hide their faces when they see a camera. Many humanitarian workers say some women refuse to talk about how they ended up here, while others tend to overdo it in order to convince local authorities to grant them asylum.
In July, a 23-year-old woman was killed by a car while crossing the highway near the cargo terminal. The accident discouraged many of the women, but they see no alternative than to keep trying to cross into Britain. Besides the risks of the journey, the migrant camp itself is a hostile environment for women, with reports of sexual abuse and women being forced into prostitution.
“The migratory route is extremely violent for women, and they are much more exposed than men,” said Pierre Henry, head of the NGO France Terre d’Asile, adding that women were sometimes used as “bargaining chips.”
Aid workers say the women are reticent about such incidents, though some of the single women are forced to take on male “protectors,” some of whom submit them to sexual abuse.
“We suspect that the men exploit them sexually. We are almost sure that it happens here,” said Isabelle Bruand, who works at the clinic set up by Medecins du Monde in the camp. Many of the roughly 20 women a week who seek treatment in its two white tents are suffering from illnesses like scabies or need stitches for injuries sustained while trying to scale the wire fences, though Bruand smiles as she recalls a young Eritrean who came in asking for moisturizer. Some women ask for contraceptives.
“We had a woman who had been raped and asked us how she could get an abortion,” Bruand said. “When it’s an abortion, we direct them to the hospital.”
After their odyssey across the desert and the perils of the sea crossing, none of these women expected the last few dozen kilometers of their journey through northern Europe to be “such hell. It is the end of their journey but they are now stopped by dogs, policemen and barbed wires. Calais has become a fortress,” said the humanitarian worker.
But in many cases, their determination appears undiminished.
Hani, Lia and Rahela, Eritrean friends aged 19, 22 and 23 who left their homeland together a month ago, strolled around the camp hand-in-hand undeterred by their failure so far to get into the tunnel despite trying “many times a day.”
“We hide and then we climb” said Hani. “Of course, we have hope. We want to start a new life.”