DEADLY DISCRIMINATION
When U.N. refugee workers placed Sudanese girls with families rather than in loosely supervised group homes like their male counterparts, they thought they were doing the girls a favor. Instead, they trapped them in hell, while many of the boys made it to the United States. Tara McKelvey tells the story in Slate:
Separated from their parents or orphaned in war-torn Sudan in the late 1980s, untold thousands of children, ranging in age from 4 to 12, left their towns and villages and walked across Africa in search of a safe haven. Traveling in small groups, they battled snakes, militias, and disease until they found temporary refuge in Ethiopia. When war broke out in that country, they set off again, chewing leaves, grass, and mud to stave off hunger as they looked for a way out of the seventh circle of hell. They became known as "lost boys of Sudan" because they, like the characters in Peter Pan who fended off crocodiles and pirates, covered a perilous terrain. Approximately 20,000 of the children eventually made it to an area in northwest Kenya that became known as Kakuma Refugee Camp. The survivors were mainly boys--with 1,000 to 3,000 girls....
In November 2000, the survivors started coming to the United States in one of the largest resettlement programs of its kind. Their journey has been documented on 60 Minutes II, in newspaper human interest stories, and, not surprising given its uplifting narrative arc, is soon to be the subject of a feature film (an "intimate epic" said Daily Variety). Yet among the 3,700 young refugees who were resettled in the United States on this program, only 89 are female. The other hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls and young women who survived the journey are still in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Many are living with so-called foster families and are being exploited as domestic servants or worse....
So why are the girls facing hardship in Kakuma while the boys are living out the American dream? Blame it on a series of blunders by the UNHCR, the agency entrusted with their protection and care. When the Sudanese children first arrived in Kakuma, the boys were placed in group homes and loosely supervised by adults. Meanwhile, the girls were placed in foster families. In theory, the foster families would provide a more nurturing environment. In practice, the girls simply disappeared.
Read the whole thing.