Foto: Sine Plambech

Victims or heroines? Images of women migrants in global migration

There are two contrasting images of women migrants engaged in global migration: either victims suffering from sexual violence drowning in the Mediterranean, or brave, empowered heroines supporting their families. Such images serve a range of political, humanitarian, and economic agendas, but what are their respective implications in global migration politics?
Sine Plambech, Sofie Henriksen & Ahlam Chemlali

Foto: Sine Plambech

DIIS Blog

In 2017, a funeral was held in the southern Italian port city of Salerno for 26 Nigerian women who had drowned in the Mediterranean in two separate shipwrecks, 23 from one ship and three from the other. 

Their bodies were found floating in the water by a rescue ship, and the survivors on nearby rubber dinghies, which had partly capsized, told the authorities that the women had departed from Libya. The 26 bodies were retrieved from the sea by the Spanish rescue ship Cantabria, deployed as part of the EU’s Sophia anti-trafficking and smuggling operation. The women were accompanying some four hundred other migrants who landed in Italy on the same day. Most of the survivors were also from Nigeria or other sub-Saharan countries, including Ghana, Sudan and Senegal.

At the funeral, a Roman Catholic bishop and an imam both said prayers at the simple ceremony at which the women’s 26 wooden coffins laid out on a stone dais. A single white rose was placed on the lid of each coffin. The funeral for the migrant women, paid for by the Italian government, received massive media coverage, including on the front page of The New York Times. It was attended by NGO activists, Italian and international media, local politicians, and Nigerian migrants in Italy. Only two of the Nigerian women could be identified, both of whom were pregnant. 

Western media quickly concluded that, in the words of the New York Times, “It is very likely that the 26 girls were, in fact, victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation”. The Nigerian media likewise portrayed them as women and girls who had been forced from their homes to sell sex in Italy. In this way, both Western and Nigerian media framed the deaths of the women through a framework that emphasized the tropes of “victim” and “rescue” in which rescue organizations were cast as heroes and saviors, while there was little interest from the broader public or politically in the women’s actual contexts and stories. 

The ease with which the complex stories of these women had been placed in and reduced to the well-known narrative of women migrants as victims underlines just how robust and persistent this narrative is. However, it also shows how the symbolic figure of the migrant woman continues to capture public and political attention. In stark contrast to the limited legal mobility afforded actual migrants, the figure of the migrant woman travels with ease across borders and mobilizes responses from humanitarian, political, and academic actors globally. These different contexts often cast women migrants in two opposing or co-existing images: the victim and the heroine.

The woman migrant as victim: European border imaginaries

The media portrayals of the funeral in Salerno were hardly surprising. Policy-makers, the media, and humanitarian organizations have focused on migrant women mainly as victims in need of rescue, especially during the so-called migration crisis. The violence experienced by women migrants is often sensationalized and framed as “spectacular,” with references to sex slavery, mass rape, human trafficking, and sexual violence – types of violence that are specifically gendered. In particular, representations of trafficking and slavery are pervasive within media, policy-making, and humanitarian debates, discourses, and interventions. 

This was also the case for the funeral in Salerno. The news circulating on social media generated an international wave of outrage, emphasizing a persistent narrative of how irregular migration in and of itself is dangerous to women, as it leads to sexual and other forms of violence, human trafficking, and sex slavery. 

Alongside such portrayals, a semantic shift has taken place in recent years in which the European Union’s “fight against irregular migration” was reworded as “the fight against human trafficking.” Although human trafficking does not refer specifically to trafficking in women, the term has traditionally been conflated in public discourse with notions of women being sold as “sex slaves.” As such, the framing of migrant women as a specific victim group and concerns over women’s bodies has come to play a significant role in European border politics. In effect, the representation of the externalization of Europe’s borders as a humanitarian intervention has been legitimized by the political desire to rescue migrant women, which is enabled by gendered constructions of victimhood.

Like the funeral in Salerno, the images of slave markets in Libya that surfaced in late 2017, when a CNN video documenting the slave auction of sub-Saharan African migrants in Libya started circulating on social media, triggered a global outcry. These images reinforced existing gendered constructions: whereas male migrants were portrayed as “slaves,” migrant women were described as “sex slaves.” This caught the attention of politicians and policy-makers in their attempts to justify more restrictive border controls and repatriation schemes. As such, the images of women migrants as victims of “sex slavery” enabled certain migration control initiatives that the EU desired but that seemed to be lacking the final rhetorical push. As a result, gender was made visible and was incorporated into the broader sociopolitical agenda of controlling the EU’s borders.

This framing is aligned with gendered constructions that fall under the term “sexual humanitarianism,” which pays attention to how the mobility of particular migrant groups is restricted by being strategically essentialized and othered as “pure” victims of oppression and sexual exploitation
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The use of victim images of women migrants to enforce border policies poses a dilemma. 

One the one hand, it is important to stress that migrant women are statistically at greater risk of dying along the migration routes and while crossing the Mediterranean than male migrants. They are also more exposed to systematic violence, which often assumes a sexualized or gendered form. On the other hand, the failure to prevent sexual violence and other abuses against migrants in EU policy is sustained by the framing of the crisis in terms of “human trafficking,” where pullback and containment are understood less as exacerbating vulnerability than as disrupting criminality and therefore ultimately benefiting migrant populations. 

This framing is aligned with gendered constructions that fall under the term “sexual humanitarianism,” a term coined by sociologist and filmmaker Nicola Mai in 2014 which plays a role in restricting the freedom of movement of groups of migrants who have been strategically reduced and “othered” to “pure” victims of oppression and sexual exploitation (e.g., sex-trafficking and victims of sexual slavery). 

This gender-specific notion of humanitarianism has been instrumentalized in various cases surrounding migrant women, where a focus on sexual violence often leads to the fetishization of the bodies of migrant women of color. This obscures the very strategies that migrant women often deploy for their own protection and that of those who travel with them, as well as the relationships they may forge along the way for survival, company, and care.

Again the dilemma is that women do suffer disproportionately as a result of humanitarian crises, which humanitarian actors naturally act upon, especially in their interventions and communication strategies. This results in images of women vastly outnumbering those of men and thus women being portrayed as victims more often than men. In these types of imagery, women are still the stereotypical icons of vulnerability and need. 

The migrant as hero: Silicon Valley Imaginaries 

By contrast, however, in a different setting across the Atlantic, the strategic and survival skills of women migrants have recently taken center stage as a new image of the woman migrant as “hero” is emerging.

In early 2020, a few weeks before the spread of the new coronavirus became an all-encompassing global concern, a group of executives from some of the most influential tech companies in the world – Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Accenture, among others – gathered to talk about refugees, and more precisely, to talk about how they and their technologies can help refugees. 

They met in an enormous glass and steel skyscraper called “The Salesforce Tower” located in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. A large humanitarian aid organization had invited them to a workshop so they could recommit themselves to their joint partnership project, Signpost, an online platform that provides migrants and refugees with information about safe movement and legal rights along migration routes. In 2020 this project, which was initiated in response to the European migration crisis in 2015, was extended to cover migration routes in Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, and elsewhere thanks to new corporate partners and grants.

The words “Information is power” are written in bold white letters on the front page of the Signpost website. The project deliberately communicates an image of migrants that is intended to contest the usual victim narrative and instead emphasize the agency of the migrants themselves. “We’re shifting the power, which is normally held by service providers themselves, back to people affected by crisis,” the Signpost director explained in a recent interview. “It’s a whole new approach towards treating people with the dignity and respect that they deserve and recognizing their own agency in navigating their way through difficult situations.”

The Signpost partnership is just one of numerous corporate–humanitarian partnerships that emerged in response to the European migration crisis and have since been extended into a longer term corporate engagement with “the global refugee crisis.” For while EU politicians consider the crisis over, humanitarian organizations and their corporate partners continue to provide humanitarian help for refugees, being committed to filling the gaps left by governments that have not been willing or able to protect refugees. 

For example, companies like Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, and IKEA have all launched major campaigns to support refugees with donations, employment, and political advocacy. And for tech companies, the refugee crisis has become an opportunity to use their “tech for good” and showcase it to their customers. 

Among these corporate and humanitarian actors, the images and portrayals of migrants and refugees focus less on their need for help and more on their determination, courage, agency, and rational decision-making. For example, on the website of the humanitarian organization that is leading the Signpost project, the story of a young Sudanese woman fleeing from a violent husband is entitled “A mother’s brave escape.”

Another story on the website tells the experiences of 27-year-old Marie from Cameron: “I was raped, and I saw many rapes. But I had a goal in mind [and] I wanted to reach it. So, I decided to move on and not to look back or to think about what happened (…)” 

While the victim narrative has justified stricter border and asylum policies, humanitarian organizations and tech companies use migrant “hero” stories like these to make the case that technology can be used to empower migrants
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In both of these stories, the women migrants are depicted not as victims, but as heroes. But even in this hero narrative, the gendered references to violence (as rape) and bravery (as a mother protecting her child) persist. Just as women migrants are pictured as specifically gendered victims, their heroism is gendered too. 

While the victim narrative has justified stricter border and asylum policies, humanitarian organizations and tech companies use migrant “hero” stories like these to make the case that technology can be used to empower migrants. That is, if migrants and refugees have access to the right technology, they won’t need aid. In this way, the “migrant as a hero” story also helps market tech companies as essentially humanitarian actors able to provide efficient and new forms of aid. 

Thus, the images of women migrants enable and legitimize different actors’ agendas. However, while these agendas all express the imperative to protect women migrants, they diverge in their strategies for doing so. The victim images promote the idea that women migrants are best protected from harm by staying “at home.” The hero image, in turn, emphasizes how technology can help women migrants “help themselves” and protect them as they embark on their brave journeys. 

Both images illustrate widespread perceptions of the figure of “the migrant woman” as a subject calling for political and humanitarian responses. Therefore, the use of these images needs careful scrutiny, as new actors mobilize around women’s migration.

New actors, new images?

Were the 26 migrant women who tragically drowned in the Mediterranean victims or heroines? Does it matter – and if so, for whom? Historically, women migrants have been important figures in Western representations and visualizations of humanitarian crises. Images of refugee women and children have been used by humanitarian agencies to signify a form of innocence and suffering that can mobilize action and compassion across cultural and political difference. However, in other national contexts, women migrating to Europe for work have also become symbolic images of national pride and national shame, as in images of irregular “welfare migrants” arriving pregnant with so-called “passport babies” or “anchor babies”. 

Women’s migration has inspired a wide range of imagery. The images are embedded in cultural and gendered politics and are used by different actors to promote their various visions and political agendas. But as new actors mobilize around women’s migration and migration more broadly, how do these images change or re-confirm existing stereotypes? And what are the implications of these images for the ways in which migration is experienced and represented as gendered? 

 

Sine Plambech
Migration and global order
Senior Researcher
+45 6065 0479
Sofie Henriksen
Migration and global order
Researcher
Ahlam Chemlali
Migration and global order
PhD Candidate
+45 2887 9179