Mother Blaming in the Camps

In most of the focus groups that I conducted in the camp of Nyabiheke and in a couple in Mahama, people kept mentioning a concern about young children who were malnourished and neglected. They explained that their mothers left them in order to go to "Dubai" (meaning either to Kigali or anywhere else outside the camp) in search of money. Some of these women had day jobs; others would leave for extended periods of time. Some begged, others worked in domestic service or prostitution.

The women would leave because they didn't have enough money to provide for their families. However, people in the camps were concerned that children left behind were neglected because there was no one taking care of them.

I tried to get a sense of the scope of the problem, and people seemed to think there were at least 50 cases in one camp. Now, these camps range between 15,000 and 50,000 people, so 50 cases is not exactly a pandemic. However, it's significant enough that it's worth considering.

My first question was, where are the fathers? Presumably most of these children have fathers who are in the camp, too. It turned out that in some cases the fathers were also leaving to work (but of course not being blamed for the neglect). In others, they simply weren't taking care of their kids. Some would leave their wives for other women, abandoning their children.

I understand that women typically are responsible for their children. However, it surprised me that even in a camp, where almost no one is working and men are complaining about the boredom of having nothing at all to do every day, that these gender roles still haven't changed. It amazes me that women could be the ones taking care of their children, cooking, cleaning, and in some cases working, and men would still sit around bored all day without offering to contribute. And in these cases, apparently even as their children were neglected, they were not stepping in.

Equally surprising to me was that there was not a strong enough sense of community in the camp that other adults would take care of these children. In such a large community, I would imagine that extended relatives, friends, or neighbors would offer to take care of children. I could see this happening for free or for a small fee, but neither seemed to be happening.

I'd be interested to learn what would have happened in similar cases back in the DRC. Would there have been more support and community involvement in taking care of neglected children? Could it be that the systems of dependency built into the camps made people less motivated to take care of others' problems? Or was this simply a cultural difference that I don't quite understand?

Finally, I was surprised and somewhat disheartened by the fact that even people on our Joint Assessment Mission team from UN agencies and large NGOs seemed to blame the mothers, suggesting we recommend punishing women who leave their children behind.

I spoke up during the debrief, advocating against including the recommendation in our report to pushing these women. We need to recognize the circumstances driving them to leave their children behind to earn money and to hold fathers equally accountable. Otherwise, we perpetuate gender inequality and hold these women to impossible standards.

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