Solidarity & Hope in A System of Neglect
At EmpowerVan, this is our mission: Empowering marginalised communities and displaced women through self-defense as driving peaceful violence prevention. This mission is rooted in centering women who are repeatedly silenced by bureaucracy, policy debates, and hostile media narratives. The stories of displaced women are frequently flattened by far-right rhetoric, buried beneath headlines about “crisis” and “control,” and reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet. While women we meet living in camps bravely share their experiences with us, most do so in confidence. Many prefer to remain anonymous out of fear that speaking out could jeopardize their legal processes, safety, or mental wellbeing. As a result, much of what is happening in the camps remains locked in a vacuum of silence. The emotional and practical risks of sharing their stories mean that vital information rarely reaches those in power. The impact of this leads to a dangerous illusion of inaction where nothing appears urgent enough to change, and nothing, in turn, is done.
Any published information that highlights these realities is critical because it breaks the illusion that silence means safety, or that invisibility means irrelevance. It challenges the systems that depend on secrecy to maintain the status quo. A recent report by the Mobile Info Team and Refugee Legal Support highlighted the lack of access to essential menstrual hygiene products. Not only does this scarcity affect women’s physical health but also their dignity and sense of normalcy. A woman from the Malakasa camp in mainland Greece stated, “Some weeks they give the women sanitary products, other weeks nothing... so I’m sorry to say but if we have nothing for our period we have no choice but to bleed into our clothes. How can we speak about this? It is shameful, they make us feel dirty, they don’t care that we are women.”
In response to this urgent need, other NGOs have stepped in to fill the gaps left by systemic neglect. Founded by Melissa Rowlings, a former volunteer at Lifting Hands International's Female Friendly Space in Serres, Greece, Pads 4 Refugees is dedicated to supplying menstrual products to refugee women. Their mission centers on upholding the dignity of refugee women and girls by ensuring they have the necessary products to manage their periods. Through regular distributions to humanitarian environments, they aim to alleviate one aspect of the hardship faced by these women. While menstrual hygiene is a significant concern, it is part of a broader spectrum of health challenges within the camps.
The lack of critical healthcare for women is only a fraction in the broader spectrum of health challenges within the camps. The report highlights the dire state of healthcare access stating:
"Despite the Hippocrates programme starting in July 2024, camps still do not have the required staff to provide residents with necessary medical and psychosocial support. In particular, there is an absence of psychiatrists and in multiple camps there continues to be no doctors."
A law put forward in 2019 heavily restricts access for medical personnel and NGOs to refugee camps in Greece, meaning external doctors often need special permission to enter the camps. In practice, this permission is rarely granted, leaving on site healthcare stretched to its breaking point and people inside with nowhere to turn in moments for mental and physical health issues/ problems. This failure can be a matter of life and death for people living in camps. The same report documents the tragic death of a five-year-old Syrian girl in Schisto camp on December 9, 2024. Her family, desperate to get her help, struggled to communicate with medical staff due to a lack of interpreters. This is just one of many fatal consequences of a system that remains understaffed, underfunded, and ill-equipped to meet even the most basic human needs. Her death is not an isolated incident but part of a pattern that reveals just how dangerous inaction and neglect of healthcare, interpreter access, and legal accountability in refugee camps truly is.
We know that nothing exists in isolation. Every challenge is tied to another. That’s why our approach looks at the whole picture, not just the surface. Our self-defense classes aren’t there to replace medical or mental health support, but to offer something different - strength, confidence, and community. By building trust and giving women the tools to feel more in control, we help create support networks that make it just a little easier to keep going, even when the system fails them. Challenges for asylum seekers across Europe are compounding as the European Commission’s push to harden borders, criminalise solidarity, and expand surveillance. Challenges for asylum seekers across Europe are compounding as the European Commission’s push to harden borders, criminalise solidarity, and expand surveillance.
While asylum-seeking women in Greece bleed into their clothes, new laws are being proposed that will make life even more precarious for asylum seekers. The European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, set to take effect in June 2026, will make an already brutal system even harder to survive. It introduces accelerated border procedures, meaning people from countries with low recognition rates can be fast-tracked for deportation. It imposes a “mandatory solidarity” mechanism, forcing EU member states to either accept asylum seekers or pay to keep them out. And it proposes return hubs outside EU territory, centred upon where rejected applicants could be detained, out of sight and out of reach, while they wait to be deported.
The European Commission’s newly proposed Return Regulation represents the first concrete step toward the outsourcing of deportations, allowing member states to send rejected asylum seekers to countries where they have no prior connection, often in exchange for financial incentives. Consent is no longer a requirement. Detention, while already widespread, is expected to expand even further under this framework. While framed as a pragmatic solution to irregular migration, this new approach effectively redefines what “return” means and risks normalizing the displacement of people into further legal and humanitarian limbo, instrumentalising displaced people for politics. This hardening of migration policy is not limited to Greece and the wider European Union.
In the United Kingdom, internal government data recently revealed that an average of 10 assaults a day are being recorded against asylum seekers in Home Office care, alongside thousands of referrals for torture, trafficking, and hate crimes . These shocking figures lay bare the violence that unfolds under systems framed as “safeguarding” and “processing.” Survivors of trauma are being placed in unsafe accommodations, neglected after suicide attempts, and subjected to degrading treatment sometimes by the very staff tasked with protecting them. Women have reported sexual harassment by hotel staff, and in one case, a woman with a disability was forced to empty buckets of rainwater daily, told the leak would stop when the weather improved. This is all occurring against the backdrop of a growing far-right sentiment across Europe.
In Ireland, for instance, thousands of people participated in an anti-immigration protest in Dublin on April 26, 2025, coinciding with the Easter Rising commemoration. Protesters carried Tricolour flags, wore Make Ireland Great Again caps, and shouted slogans like get them out. Much of this backlash is unfolding in a context marked by post-pandemic strain, rising costs of living, and a worsening housing crisis. Across Europe, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. In many countries, people are working more for less, struggling to afford rent, energy, and basic necessities. The structural inequalities laid bare by COVID-19 have only deepened and in the absence of real accountability, migrants have become convenient scapegoats for systemic failures they had no hand in creating. Rather than addressing the root causes of economic injustice, populist and far-right rhetoric deflects blame onto the most vulnerable, fueling resentment and creating dangerous conditions for those already at risk.
At EmpowerVan, our motivation to create safe spaces, share positive moments, and strengthen women on the move comes from the inequalities we witness every day, and from the growing trend to dehumanise people seeking safety. In a dark place, in a dark era, we want to bring something different. We must not be overwhelmed by the rising noise of hatred and fear. It is important that we always remain on the side of humanity no matter how loud in hatred the other side becomes. But there are no true sides in this. It is not about being pro-migration or anti-migration. It is about recognising human beings in need, and choosing not to look away.
Written by Lauren Wilson
Data Source
Follow-Up Report April 2025
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/597473fe9de4bb2cc35c376a/t/67ed0a175970340427716c09/1743587869551/Follow+Up+Report+April+2025.pdf
Assaults on Asylum Seekers in Home Office Care Highlight Systemic Failures
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/21/assaults-on-asylum-seekers-in-home-office-care
Pads4Refugees: Empowering Refugee Women and Girls
https://pads4refugees.org/
Anti-Immigration Protest on Easter Rising Anniversary Draws Large Crowds in Dublin
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2025/04/26/anti-immigration-protest-marking-easter-rising-gathers-crowds-in-dublin/
