Women, Children and War

• Overview of the Consequences of Conflict on Women and Children
• Maoist Abduction of Children for Soldiers
• Maoist Perspective: Children in the War Zone
• Rape for Profit: Neplai Women and Girls Sold into Sex Slavery
• Gathering Fuel: Sexual Attacks
• "Half Widows" result of Disappearances
• 2006 UNICEF report on Women and Children in Nepal ( very well done!)
• Women's Voice, "We Want Lasting Peace."
• Women's Voices Must Emerge as Leaders

Refugees Face Sexual Attacks while Gathering Fuel

Few groups are addressing fuel for refugeess forcing women to go into the outlying areas to gather fuel.  Sexual attacks are all too common.  Fuel is a woman's issue which must be addressed. Download the full report : The Perils of Direct Provision: UNHCR’s response to the fuel needs of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal ( 245 KB, .pdf, Download Acrobat Reader)

Approximately 105,000 Bhutanese refugees currently live in camps in eastern Nepal. The majority of the refugees arrived in Nepal in the early 1990s, fleeing increasing harassment of ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan. Most refugees have been living in the camps for over a decade. Thousands of children have been born in the camps, and have never seen the land their parents still consider home.

Locally hired “forest guards” harass refugee women and girls collecting firewood outside the camps, beating them, stealing their wood and personal property, forcing them to pay fines and often imprisoning them despite pleas by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that they not do so. Refugee girls have been gang-raped and murdered in the forest by opportunists from local communities who know they will not be punished for their crimes.

Despite these graphic stories, however, sexually based attacks on refugee women and girls outside the camps in Nepal occur less often than in many other refugee or internally displaced persons (IDP) settings. This is in part due to UNHCR’s longrunning    direct fuel provision scheme.

In an effort to stave off a worsening of the tensions between the refugee and local populations, UNHCR began providing a weekly kerosene ration to all Bhutanese refugee families in 1992 - 93. However, though kerosene was in the words of UNHCR “cheap, available and easy to obtain” when the distributions began, the price has more than doubled in the last two years alone, and strikes and blockades imposed as a result of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal have caused frequent scarcities of the fuel and delays in transporting it.

The rapid rise in the price of kerosene has led UNHCR and its main implementing partner, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), to embark on a major alternative fuel development program, with an abundance of different initiatives in various stages of development. They plan to cease kerosene  distribution in early 2006. Because of these wideranging, intensive efforts, Nepal can be seen as a sort of “cooking fuel laboratory.” The camps present a unique opportunity to carefully study a wide variety of different fuel options, and to weigh their respective advantages and disadvantages.

However, there is much less willingness on the part of refugees to actually use such fuels. This is partly because kerosene is easy to use and satisfies many of the refugee women’s preferences for cooking fuel, namely, speed of cooking, ability to cook indoors and flexibility of cooking time and temperature. In large part, however, refugees are reluctant to accept the introduction of alternative fuels because they are reliant on the sale of kerosene as a key source of income. They then collect or purchase firewood to use as cooking fuel.

SOURCE: UNHRC