BEIRUT: Young Iraqi and Sudanese refugees, exposed to sexual and gender-based violence in their home countries, tackled the issue in an interactive performance of scenarios written by the young actors and inspired by personal experiences.
The event, organized by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees and the Mazkhoumi Foundation, invited refugees from both Iraqi and Sudanese communities in Lebanon to attend, and participate in question and answer sessions surrounding the issues raised.
Sunday’s performance follows a series of workshops with the 11 “actors” involved, which saw the young refugees develop characters based on people they have known, and experiences in their lives. While UNHCR and the Mazkhoumi Foundation have held events dealing with family violence before, this was the first such event to include adults, rather than just children.
Ninette Kelly, the regional representative for UNHCR, attended the performance and said that this form of peer to peer training provided an essential outlet for many young displaced people.
On top of other domestic violence, “Children who have come from conflict zones have also often experienced sexual violence ... so on top of all the other challenges of survival that refugees face, many also have to deal with this.”
Gender-based violence, in all communities, not just among refugees, “is a big issue in Lebanese society,” Kelly said. “And it’s very difficult to talk about, and there are not a lot of systems in place to help survivors, or preventative measures.
“It’s such a taboo subject, so to have the youth here to discuss these issues openly with an audience is so important,” Kelly added.
The project coordinator, Malak al-Hout, said that the impact of GBV more than just those directly affected.
“Violence against women and children can have repercussions on the entire family,” she said. “This project is about how they can deal with certain scenarios differently in the future.”
Rachel Malak, a social worker who trained the youth throughout the workshops, said that the main objective of the entire exercise was to allow the participants, both those acting and those in the audience, to “share experiences with each other and express the realities of their lives.”
The workshop included activities such as meditation exercises, aimed at remembering both positive and negative experiences from their adolescence, role-play and relaxation exercises.
“In the workshops they brought up the topics that they wanted to discuss, and after that they wrote the characters, which then led to the scenarios,” Malak explained. “The characters were based on people they have met in their own lives, including sometimes their parents or other relatives.”
One of the three “scenarios” acted out, saw a father complain to his wife over her cooking the same meal every evening. After defending her actions, he becomes more enraged, eventually severely beating her.
The actors then remained in character, and the audience asked them questions, which included, to the character of the wife, “Why were you so disrespectful to your husband?” However, another audience member interjected that, “Why should she respect him if he does not respect her first?”
A young male audience member suggested that an important step forward in battling such attitudes would be for the Lebanese government to criminalize domestic violence. A draft law on domestic violence is currently being discussed by a parliamentary sub-committee, having been approved by Cabinet in 2010.
In another scene, a young man beats and ties up his step-sister as punishment for allegedly conversing with a man of a different religion. One young audience member asked, “Shouldn’t there be equality between religions? Whether Muslim or Christian, we are all humans at the end of the day.”
There are around 8,000 non-Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, around 80 percent of which are from Iraq.
Around 50 refugees, mainly between 15 and 30 years old, attended the event, which was held at the Holiday Inn Beirut.