Photo: Julius Mwelu/IRIN. Rowdy youth use slings to throw stones at a rival group in Kenya’s Kibera slums in violence that killed three people in January 2008
Source: IRIN
RIO DE JANEIRO, 15 May 2013 (IRIN) - In slums where killings, rape,
kidnappings and other criminal violence are commonplace, say
researchers, lives and livelihoods are hampered by a force that is tough
to measure: Fear.
“We talk about homicide rates and deaths. Fear is a huge part of the
protection mandate, and we don’t measure it well,” said Ronak Patel,
director of the urbanization and crises programme at the Harvard
Humanitarian Initiative. He said surveys in recent years in slums in the
Kenyan capital Nairobi - in a “non-crisis” peacetime setting - showed
that 34 percent of people altered their daily activities for fear of
violence and a quarter felt afraid in their own homes.
“This doesn’t get measured like mortality rates or rape incidence, but
it has a huge impact that the humanitarian community needs to address.”
For example this fear affects a woman’s ability to access a market, a
prospective workplace or health care, he said.
Carlos Vilalta, professor and researcher at the Center for Economic Research and Education in Mexico City, at a recent conference presented preliminary findings from research under way in Mexico.
Based on government survey data, he estimates that in 2010 it cost a
family driven from home by fear of gang violence about US$611 to
relocate, where the average monthly income was about $800. Very few
studies into the fear of crime exist: it is an area that needs more
attention, Vilalta said.
“Governments and particularly the police are obviously working very hard
in fighting crime. However they seem to forget that fear of crime is
also an issue for civil society and a matter of criminal policy.”
He said the premise that reducing crime will automatically reduce the
sense of insecurity is false: “Mexico today has a lower crime rate than
in the 1990s and, ironically, fear of crime is much higher.”
The European Commission’s humanitarian aid department, ECHO, says that
in Central America, fear of organized violence is a constant.
“A frequent scenario is that people first escape inside the country,
trying to seek refuge with family or friends, but are then localized by
their aggressors and decide to leave the country,” ECHO said in its 2013
humanitarian implementation plan for the region.
A recent report
(Spanish) by the Costa Rica-based International Centre for the Human
Rights of Migrants (CIDEHUM ) confirmed that organized crime is driving
the displacement of populations in Central America.
Overlooked
The UN Refugee Agency, which commissioned the CIDEHUM study, three years ago issued guidance
for assessing whether victims of gang violence may be eligible for
international protection. For now in Central America the human impact is
largely overlooked, UNHCR said.
“While organized crime is being dealt with from a security angle, such
as crime prevention and response, little attention has so far been paid
to the impact of this phenomenon from a humanitarian and protection
perspective,” the agency said in a February 2013 paper.
The 1951 Refugee Convention does, however, recognize the concept of
fear: it defines refugees as individuals with a genuine fear of
persecution, not people who have necessarily experienced persecution.
Still, Javier Rio Navarro, Médecins Sans Frontières operational adviser
in Mexico and Central America, says emigrants from Mexico or Central
America are generally regarded as economic migrants.
"This is no longer applicable to all of them. A significant number of
them are survival migrants, or displaced, or as they would be called
anywhere else in the world - refugees."