Lexi Corner
Contributing Writer

With war comes violence, fear, and also refugees. The Syrian conflict erupting in the Middle East is a prime example of this, and now millions of its citizens are displaced due to the rising threat of rebel groups, terrorists and bombings.
As reported by the United Nations, 13.5 million people still need assistance fleeing Syria despite the strides taken by Germany, France and even the United States to take in refugees.

However, many Americans are hesitant to take in a growing amount of refugees into their neighborhoods.
Presidential candidate Ted Cruz has stated on the campaign trail that the United States should only accept Christian refugees although the mass majority of Middle Eastern people are Muslim.

“There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror,” he went on to say.

Accompanying Cruz is Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who announced his proposition of banning Muslims from entering the United States until “our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. Many of his supporters agree with his proposition, one stating to CNN that “who knows what they’ll bring with them” regarding ISIS and bombings.

Despite these fears, the United States has already accepted refugees from Syria in places such as Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

The Church World Service, an organization located in Lancaster, has helped 276 refugees in 2015 alone, as reported on their website.

“When a refugee comes to the United States, they have already gone through a long screening process,” Christine Baer, a Congressional Research Developer at C.W.S., explained. “The average time to go through the United States’ screening process is three years, but the average time in a refugee camp is 17 years.”

This is a true fact supported by the United Nations, Refugee Family Reunification Trust, ChangeMakers and multiple organizations. The screening process, too, is not a short and simple one. Both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security dig into each refugee’s lives, even newborn babies’, and during that time, the families stay in the refugee camps.

“Refugee camps are not safe,” Baer said. “Many times they are insecure. Rebel groups can still come in and target the camps to kidnap children to become soldiers. Some are struggling just to keep the refugees alive, let alone provide education and sanitary living conditions.”

refugees
A refugee camp is no place to raise children. Men, women and children are all victims of displacement. (Photo courtesy of Flickr)

A refugee camp is a temporary settlement built to receive refugees, but they are often places still brimming with violence and hate. As the UN Refugee Agency explains it, women and girls trying to escape war face “the rigor of long journeys into exile, official harassment or indifference, and frequent sexual abuse – even after reaching an apparent place of safety.” Often times, they are not solid communities, but rows and rows of tents and individuals who barely know one another, trying to keep their corner of the camp secure as more and more people arrive.

According to Jennifer Hyndman, associate director of York University’s Center for Refugee Studies in Toronto, these camps have unstable populations.

Life in refugee camps is not easy, but brutal. Jordan’s fourth largest “city”, Zaatari, is now a refugee camp that has been reported by Doug Bandow of Forbes. In this camp only a few miles away from the Syrian border, 80,000 people fill its crowded tents with more than half of its population being under the age of 18. As Bandow witnessed, residents have protested the inadequate food supplies and its horrible living conditions.

As he wrote in his article, “Although the size of a small city, its residents are largely dependent on the charity of others.”
Today the Zaatari camp in Jordan is the largest refugee camp in the Middle East, and fleeing Syrians are still seeking some sort of peace there.

There are countless obstacles for the refugees living there as well. Since most of them are children, providing schooling for all of them has been a rising challenge. According to the UNHCR, one in three children is not attending school, which questions the future of the Syrian country due to its growing population of uneducated individuals.

The refugee crisis also calls into question the future of the work force of Syria as well. As estimated by the UNHCR, about 9,500 young people in the camp are between 19 to 24 years old, and are in desperate need of skills training. Without the opportunity of refining their work skills, they will inevitably struggle to find a job in Syria or any other country they may seek asylum in.

Zaatari is not at its capacity. They can no longer take in any more refugees, and must turn people away to Jordan’s second camp in Azraq.

Many people across the globe believe refugee camps are the safest, most stable option for refugees, but with the rising number of displaced persons alongside the lack of global response needed to stop the Syrian conflict and ISIL, this solution of refugee encampments is no longer a solution.

“Refugee camps are not a place to live for 17 years and raise your children,” Baer continued.
With the lack of education, edible food and sanitary living conditions, it is hard to imagine any more issues spreading across Zaatari and Azraq. Unfortunately, there are.

Due to the conservative nature of Jordan and Syria, many rape victims of Zaatari and other camps go unreported or uncared for.

“If you have been raped, you wouldn’t talk openly about it because you would be stigmatized for your entire life,” Dr. Manal Tahtamouni, the Director of the Institute for Family Health who helped open a women’s clinic in Zaatari, stated. “The phenomenon is massively under-reported.”

According to women’s clinics in the Zaatari refugee camp, of the 300 to 400 cases a day, about 100 are female victims of violence, which tends to be domestic.

At night in Zaatari, many refugees fear the threat of violence, abuse and rape. In fact, many of its people have asked the UN to begin patrolling the areas to combat the gangs of men harassing and attacking women.

Abu Hussein, a local boss of a brothel and bar district, has requested such an idea to the UN.

However, these issues threatening the safety of Zaatari’s citizens will not be disappearing anytime soon. Despite some response against ISIL from the United States, Russia, Syria and other countries, violence still infects the country so deeply that these refugees cannot return home. There is no home to return to only war zones.

However, a portion of Americans is still nervous about helping Syrian refugees find new homes on their streets.

A common misconception is that refugees are flooding into the country, but the steps taken by the American government is preventing this type of insurgence of displaced individuals. Many also fear that these refugees are mostly young males, especially Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has stated several times that most of these refugees are “strong, young men.”

Again, this is not true.

Of those 276 refugees C.W.S. has assisted in 2015, roughly 40 percent were children with the remaining 60 percent being split between men and women.

A senior State Department official also stated to Time magazine that, “half of the Syrian refugees brought to the United States so far have been children.”

“I’ve gotten calls from people saying, ‘I heard 500 refugees are coming here’, but that’s not true,” Baer said.
C.W.S, along with other organizations assisting displaced individuals, can only accept a limited number of refuges per year. For C.W.S., the maximum amount is 370 people.

“I think the fear comes from not knowing,” Baer told. “Not knowing anything about the people beyond the face. If you just look at 21-year-old and male, that’s not telling you everything about the individual.”

With the strides taken by organizations such as CWS, more Syrian refugees will find asylum in the United States despite this growing paranoia among some Americans.