On 16 September 2014, the northern Syrian town of Kobane came under siege. Since then,
188,000 refugees are reported to have flooded into Turkey. This is an emergency which, like so
much of the Syria crisis, revolves around issues of protection and gender.
On Thursday 25 September, within the first week of the influx of refugees, CARE International led a multi-agency gender and protection assessment with partners, including IMC. Each agency brought its own skills, experience and knowledge to the assessment and ensured that we were able to assess the protection needs and concerns of the refugee population as well as conduct a rapid gender analysis to a high standard.
It is with a sense of optimism that we write this protection and gender report. With every day that the Syria crisis continues, it becomes more and more apparent that we can no longer work in siloes if the international community is going to be able to respond appropriately to the vast array of protection concerns we are facing in the region.
We write this report and subsequent recommendations:
- to help support the work of multiple agencies in strengthening their response, and providing
services in ways which respect the different needs of women, men, boys and girls; - to provide agencies with enough information to avoid doing harm;
- to ensure that actors are able to mitigate risk of SGBV and other protection concerns
immediately.