International News
2015.08.06
Women and children arriving at Calais's migrant camps 'need greater protection'
Jean-François Corty, director of humanitarian organisation Médecins du Monde, wants more to be done by Europe to help the migrants in France
Emma Graham-Harrison in Calais

Women and children are turning up in large numbers at migrant camps in Calais for the first time and authorities are not doing enough to shelter and protect them, a senior aid worker has warned.

“Since last summer we started to have an increase in woman and children and families. It was not like that before,” said Jean-François Corty, director of French operations for Médecins du Monde (MdM), which runs a clinic in the camp.

Corty has worked with migrants in Calais for about a decade, and for most of that time the new arrivals were almost all young men, usually between 15 and 30 years old.

The shift in camp demographics is not obvious to visitors during the daytime, perhaps because women are wary of the extra dangers they face from migrant life, but they are a regular presence on night-time treks to the Eurotunnel freight stations and in the crowds trying to climb on cross-channel lorries.

“It’s not easy to see them in the day, they don’t want to go out, but you can see them at night when they are trying to cross,” Corty said.

The Jules Ferry Centre for women and children provides the clearest picture of how a shift that began 2014 has accelerated this year. French authorities announced the plans for 100 beds last autumn after more families began trickling in, but the shelter took eight months to set up and all its beds were full within weeks.

Corty said his group had not tried to count the women, but other aid groups working in the camp estimate that there are now at least another 100 women and children living outside the secure area. “There is this kind of specific support [at Jules Ferry], but the places are not enough and there are also women who are dying in the last days,” Corty says. “We need to improve.”
Ahlem Aloush, 31 and seven months’ pregnant, is among the Syrian women who have found a place inside the women’s camp. Her husband reached the UK before her and is seeking asylum there. Most nights she treks two hours to the trains and lorry parks to try to join him, and two hours back after she fails.

They have been married for 14 years and doctors had told the couple they were infertile. “We used to go to doctors and they said I can never get pregnant,” she says. “Now, thanks be to God, I am.”

The risks for her and her baby were starkly spelled out last month, when an Eritrean woman who was 22 weeks’ pregnant fell off a moving lorry and miscarried. Her son was buried in a nearby cemetery, days before another Eritrean woman was killed when a car hit her.

But Aloush says she has to keep attempting to cross, because she cannot stay in France alone. “I have no one here,” she says. “I left with only my husband and now he is in England.”

Deaths among migrants have risen at an alarming rate this year, Corty said, with 10 registered dead since June alone, compared with 14 or 15 in the whole of 2014.

“What is new to me from the last two months is the high level of mortality rate,” he said. “This is a young population and they should not die today at this rate.”

Corty wants a discussion at a European level on how to tackle the growing desperation driving migrants, who he says are unlikely to be deterred even by much stricter security measures that the government is currently planning.

“Its a middle-class population, most of them are well educated, they are not very poor,” he said. “That’s why if they are taking all these risks, with the high mortality rates, it’s not because they are stupid or unconscious of the dangers. They are under huge pressure and not used to living in bad conditions, not trained for bad conditions.”
 

The diseases treated at a camp clinic run by MdM five days a week are testament to terrible conditions in the slum, where sand turns to mud in the rain and there are just a handful of toilets for thousands of people.

“The diseases we have to face in the camp are related to the poverty,” Corty says. They include scabies and frequent, serious cases of diarrhoea. Then there are the traumatic injuries picked up on failed attempts to reach the UK, including broken limbs and open wounds slashed by razor wire when migrants try to scale security fences.

“Do you know when the doctor is here?” Hekmatyar, a 14-year-old Afghan travelling alone, asked outside the MdM centre . He held out a badly swollen wrist covered with large scabs, damaged the previous night when was trying to jump on a train.


source: the gardian

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/aug/02/women-children-arriving-calais-migrant-camps-greater-protection



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