Gender
Panel 2: Reducing or Inducing Risk: Gender and Migration in South Asia
Strengthening Whom? The Role of Transnational Migration for Women and Men in North-West Pakistan
by Karin Astrid Siegmann* and Maqsood Ahmad Jan**
About four million Pakistanis - most of them men - earn their living abroad. At the national level, this has been fetching a large amount of foreign exchange in the form of remittances. Migration is an important livelihood strategy in the area of study, the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan. With 9% of average monthly income, rural NWFP has the highest dependence on foreign remittances of all provinces. The region is exposed to different types of risks and crises, from the absorption of millions of Afghan refugees, to earthquakes and very poor health indicators in national comparison. It also shows comparatively wide gender gaps in access to livelihood assets and severely curtailed spatial mobility for women and girls.
International evidence shows that transnational migration has the capacity for individuals, households as well as for developing countries to improve their socio-economic conditions and protect themselves against volatile political, economic and social conditions. But a shift in focus from financial flows to migrants’ moves uncovers that just as migration can address the risks of poor and vulnerable households, in certain cases, there is an importation of risk along with resilience, such as the spread of highly infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, households’ increased dependency on remittances and brain drain from developing countries.
Under these circumstances, households may still serve as entry points for the study of livelihoods, but they have to be reconceptualized as embedded in highly gendered networks of exchange and support, in which conflicts are negotiated, and people, goods and services move between different regions and between rural and urban places.
The objective of the paper is, therefore, to investigate the role of transnational migration for vulnerability and resilience of the sending villages in rural NWFP from a gender perspective. It makes use of between-method triangulation, analysing quantitative data from a comprehensive quantitative survey and qualitative information generated via in-depth and key informant interviews and in four villages in the Upper Dir and Swat districts in NWFP.
* Dr. Karin Astrid Siegmann is a Research Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad. She holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Bonn, Germany. Her specialization is in gender and globalization.
** Maqsood Jan has over seven years of experience with various national and international NGOs. He has worked extensively with rural communities on community-based projects, and has vast knowledge of survey methodologies, proposal development, project planning and evaluation.
Sexual Exploitation and Misery of Pakistani Female Migrants
by Aneela Sultana*
This study explores economic, socio-cultural, developmental and environmental conditions which actually promote commercial sexual exploitation of Pakistani women and also identifies compelling factors which persuade individuals and their families to throw young women into the sex industry where they are victimized, initially against their will and ultimately by accepting the environment helplessly.
The main objective of this study was to explore gendering of migration because women still remain largely invisible in the migration research and it is extremely important to find out the factors that produce and reproduce multiple forms of marginalization and exploitation of female migrants and their inclusion in sex industry in the context of Pakistan. To meet this objective, specific questions were asked from victims about their nature of work, criteria of recruitment, different forms of exploitation which they confront at the point of destination, the main agents involved in this whole process of trafficking, what types of services they provide to their clients and employers, level of earning, beneficiaries of their income, etc.
This anthropological study revealed that poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and discriminatory customs (false and short term marriages) have provided green pastures to the opportunists who lure many young women to leave their hearth and home for luxurious life only to land in the abyss of disgrace and dishonor.
The fieldwork for this study was conducted in three major cities of Pakistan, i.e. Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan from the province of Punjab. In-depth interviews were conducted with the key informants including employer, users and exploiters, victims and the traffickers. To obtain qualitative information from the respondents’, focus group discussions were also organized with the relevant persons. The study provides a general picture of commercial sexual exploitation of migrant and trafficked women in Pakistan and proposes clear recommendations for the improvement of legislation, policy and programs relating to the prevention of and responses to violence against women.
* Aneela Sultana is a cultural anthropologist presently teaching at the department of Anthropology of the Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU), Islamabad, Pakistan. She is a research scholar and has worked with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Women Study Center (QAU) and UN agencies.
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