For more than a month there has been war in Ukraine. “In this war, like all others before it, women and children are likely to be disproportionately the victims. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 7.5 million children are in grave danger of physical harm, severe emotional distress and trauma, and displacement”,  Eirliani writes in an article in the Harvard Kennedy School Review.

There is a great risk that Ukrainian women and children who have fled will become victims of human traffickers. “Stories of trafficked and sexually assaulted Ukrainian women, and unaccompanied children who have gone missing, abound”, Eirliani writes in an article on human trafficking for the Diplomatic Courier.

Even before the Ukraine war, human trafficking was a major issue. “A 2020 European Commission report estimates the annual global profit from the crime is €29.4 billion ($32 billion).” After the Crimean conflict, the profiles of the people involved had changed: Whereas previously it was often women and children who were forced into prostitution, put into forced labor or were sold, increasingly urban young men have also been trafficked into labor like drug trafficking.

“The difference since the invasion of Ukraine is that traffickers’ access to potential victims has increased exponentially, with 3 million Ukrainians–including more than 1 million children–having fled the country“, writes Eirliani.

The often chaotic and unstructured conditions in receiving facilities, for example in Berlin, also facilitate the work of human traffickers. The refugees, tired of fleeing and long travels, become potential victims. “Those travelling alone, who do not understand the local language, and/or have no local networks, face additional challenges on top of the trauma they are facing from having witnessed the brutalities of war. While there are many volunteers who truly intend to help, it is not difficult for traffickers to slip among their midst so long as there are no registration and/or vetting processes,” writes Eirliani in the article.

Refugees need to be informed more about their rights, and transnational rules are also needed, such as “the urgency of registering the national identification documents and/or registration plates of vehicles of those who have offered to help the Ukrainian refugees”.

In her article, Eirlani cites what meaningful help might look like: “If you are a private citizen intending to help in volunteer efforts and come across a child who is alone, kindly note the following guidelines, adapted from UNICEF.

For all German-speaking people there is also an interview with Eirliani about the topic.

In the article cited first, Eirliani also provides impetus for rethinking how to deal with the current situation: “War on Ukraine: Time for a Feminist Foreign Policy?”

So Eirliani writes about this approach: “But suppose we could reimagine a world where we stop looking at security from a militarized lens. Instead, women, children and the most vulnerable in society are central to decision-making and their needs accounted for in every aspect of policy-making. This approach, called feminist foreign policy (FFP), may hold the key to getting to the roots of conflicts and challenging the current neoliberal underpinnings of international political discourse. The stark difference between realpolitik and the FFP as frameworks is that the latter brings the welfare of the vulnerable to the fore.”

Read the entire article here.