Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to have been detained by the Syrian regime forces, including thousands of women. Accurate numbers are difficult to pin down as the Syrian regime denies access to detention sites to independent monitors. Documentation efforts by Syrian human rights groups indicate that several thousands of women have been detained without any contact with the outside world.
The purposes and patterns of women detention have evolved as the war dragged on. During the early months of the Syrian revolution, detained women were typically activists, dissidents, and humanitarian workers. However, the Syrian regime soon started arresting women relatives of opposition members, defected soldiers, and activists to exert pressure on the latter to turn themselves in. Later on, the regime and its militias resorted to indiscriminate detention of women to use them for prisoner exchange deals with armed opposition groups.
Arrested women are usually held in appalling and dehumanizing conditions, regardless of their age or health where physical and psychological torture, sexual harassment and abuse are brutally carried out by regime personnel. Such abuses amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, therefore triggering individual responsibility under international law for perpetrators.
Consequently, this research was produced to investigate the obstacles that survivor female detainees suffer from to be integrated into the local community after their release from imprisonment by the Syrian regime. The obstacles include economic, social, and psychological/personal factors which affect the integration of survivors into the local community. The result of this research is based on a sample selected randomly from a survey conducted with 68 survivors, which included questions demonstrating the difficulties and obstacles that the survivors encounter following their release from regime detention centers and their integration into the local community. Keeping in mind the unstable economic, social and security situation within the local communities in areas north of Syria.
Through this research, we were able to define the obstacles which hinder survivor female detainees from having a functional social life as they had prior to their imprisonment. Thus, making them ineffective members in the community as a result of the obstacles, as well as specific customs and traditions which in some sense are restraining women.
Field Research – Obstacles of Syrian female detainees (1)
