The radically simple way to make female refugees safer from sexual assault: gender-segregated bathrooms, by Miriam Berger.
For the tens of thousands of refugee women trapped in Greece, daily life is made that much more treacherous by a very basic problem: unsafe bathrooms.
Refugee camps tend to have too few bathrooms, which are often mixed and unprotected, making them hotspots for sexual attacks on women and girls.
At Idomeni, Greece’s largest informal refugee camp … there were just 193 bathrooms and 84 showers for over 12,000 people ….. Women there told me they wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone, and not at all at night.
The solution?
But not far from Moria there is an example of how to do it right. In Kara Tepe, an open facility for nearly 1,000 vulnerable people who have been moved from Moria, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has built a washing area with signs that clearly designate well-lit, gender-separated washing areas.
Wait — you’re saying that gender-segregated bathrooms make women safer and more secure? Gosh, that’s news to me, especially because I was just reading in [the same PC publication] Quartz the other day about what a great thing it is to have non-gendered, unisex bathrooms in high schools, so trans students feel safe.
So it seems that we should have gender-segregated bathrooms for the safety and comfort of women at risk of being sexually harassed or assaulted by men … except when transgendered people say their safety depends on … oh, to hell with it.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
