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Marta Luceno Moreno is a Spanish researcher who has been living in Tunisia for five years. Among other things, she carried out a qualitative and exploratory study in 2021 for the office of the United Nations Population Fund in Tunis on “Violence against women and migrant girls in Tunisia.” We met her for an interview.
Throughout your research on Tunisia, what led you to take an interest in the violence that sub-Saharan migrant women suffer?
When I first arrived in Tunisia, I didn’t have many connections with migrant women. But as I integrated into society here, I realized that some of my friends had hired sub-Saharan women to help them with their household cleaning. I’ve always felt an affinity to sub-Saharan people because my ex-husband is of sub-Saharan origin, and my son is half-sub-Saharan. So I created a small community around me of women who work in households but also of racialized students. The more I talked to them, the more I grasped the seriousness of the problems they suffered from not only as foreigners, but as Black foreigners. But this theme hasn’t always been deemed relevant to current events—I first attempted to explore it back in 2019, unsuccessfully.
Was the fact that you yourself are a migrant woman residing in Tunisia an additional reason for your interest in this subject?
Definitely. But being a migrant from the West, I have a lot of privileges compared to racialized migrants. I have experienced discrimination, but that was when I was living in Northern Europe for a few years and working as a waitress to pay for my studies. In Belgium, I witnessed people being racist against others who didn’t speak the country’s language very well. I got involved with associations that fight for the rights of migrants to settle in host countries with dignity. When I arrived in Tunisia, I was getting harassed and experiencing violence in the street. A part of the male population whose minds are stuffed with stereotypes think that a white woman from Europe could be an easy sexual prey and vulnerable to different types of scams and fraud. But when you have a car and go to relatively expensive places, your reality has nothing to do with that of sub-Saharan women who move in public spaces, be it on foot or via public transportation, and the insults they are subjected to because of their race. During the first two years I spent in Tunisia, I was technically an illegal migrant since I didn’t have a residence permit and couldn't obtain one because my employer—a Belgian university that gave me a scholarship—doesn’t have a base in Tunisia. But unlike sub-Saharan migrants, I had the means to leave the country every three months or otherwise pay the overstay fines.
In the qualitative study you carried out for UNFPA on “Violence that migrates with women,” you note that violence punctuates the entire migratory journey of sub-Saharan women—from the very beginning of their plan to leave their countries until they actually settle or transit through Tunisia. Even more when they intend to reach Italy by sea. Is this the fate of all women who migrate clandestinely?
The paths that these women end up having to follow are all somewhat similar, be they students or women arriving “under contract,” a process that can be described as human trafficking. The latter, once their “debts” are paid, settle in the country by continuing to do the same type of work—cleaning in particular—but more freely. Many of these women come here with the intention of going to Europe after a transit period in Tunisia. Others have already attempted clandestine passage to Italy and do not want to risk their lives again. Given their irregular status, they also suffer from the constraint of no longer being able to leave Tunisia to see their children, whom they are sometimes separated from for ten years. The second category of migrant women come here to study, but once they get their diplomas, they also become illegal workers because of the Tunisian law on the employment of foreigners, which gives preference to Tunisians during recruitment. When violence against migrants broke out in Tunisia (editor’s note: last February, following a racist speech by President Kais Saied), the hostility all around forced them to take to the sea. Returning to their homes is never easy. Some have fled violence and war, and others have escaped extreme poverty and abuse.
Theft, physical violence, and rape are committed against women by individuals who know that the illegality of these migrant women’s situation guarantees their own impunity.
You have both studied the issues and collected the testimonies of sub-Saharan women who have passed through what are called “bunkers,” namely these places of transit in which candidates for crossing to the Italian coast are gathered and kept for several days in the region of Sfax, in the south-east, while they wait for the smugglers’ green light for departure. Is this where women experience the worst kinds of violence? The ones considered taboo?
There are several stages that precede the journey through the Mediterranean. Once the migrant woman decides to go forward with the crossing, she is called by a first contact, a Tunisian or sub-Saharan smuggler, who gives her the order to head to Sfax. She is then confined to a house or an apartment where many people are held, often several dozen, in a very small space. This is where violence can occur because of the lack of privacy, the obligation to not open any windows and not make any noise so as not to be discovered. A lot of tension can result from this. And this wait can last anywhere between a few hours and several days—the time required to secure the journey from the bunker to the shore. They also have to evade the National Guard and ensure good sea conditions. Migrants are piled up on top of each other there, sometimes up to 40 people at a time, in unsanitary conditions and sometimes without access to food or drinking water. This can go on for days, even weeks. Just before leaving, some migrants are brought to isolated olive groves where they wait to be sent to the boat. Sexual violence occurs here, at this point, when Tunisians discover their hiding place. Theft, physical violence, and rape are committed against women by individuals who know that the illegality of these migrant women’s situation guarantees their own impunity. I’ve collected several testimonies from migrant women who endured gang rape in front of other men, their compatriots. Three different women recounted the same ordeal to me. They were hidden behind olive trees near the sea, and every time a Tunisian man passed by there, he asked them for money—which these women gave him to avoid being denounced. In the evening, armed with knives, the men came back together to rape the women. The migrant women forbade their “brothers” from fighting with the aggressors; the battle was already lost. “Let them do it,” they begged them. Other women have also told me chilling stories like this one. The migrants were on the island of Kerkennah, in a remote corner. The smugglers were exploiting the situation—having to sit and wait in a place where there was no food supply—and multiplying the price of a tin of sardines or a water bottle by ten. And they asked the women to pay them with sexual services. These testimonies show us to what extent this transit is a no-women’s land, where they are easy prey for all those who know or discover the vulnerable situation they’re in.
Nannies in France are mostly North African. In Spain, women who take care of children are mostly Latina, and in Tunisia, sub-Saharan women are increasingly being hired as housekeepers. Women at the service of other women, who are hired by them thanks to their means earned through productive work—is this the price to pay for the empowerment of part of the female population?
In fact, what should happen is that these tasks that have been deemed “feminine” need to be equally shared between men and women. Sub-Saharan women hired as domestic helpers do allow other women to carry out productive work, but above all they exempt men from any involvement in reproductive work. Men continue to do nothing at home, while working women take on the double task of doing their jobs outside the house and doing the domestic work. The other point is the racialization of care, or care-giving work. We note that in most societies, it’s people of foreign origin, who don’t fully master the local language and who are in a position of vulnerability, who occupy these positions. It’s work that the country’s workforce often refuses to do because it is poorly paid, undervalued, and socially looked down on, when it should actually be seen as any other type of job—one that is fundamental for society, really, as the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to us.
In your opinion, what could allow women living on the margins of society to step out of these conditions that govern their lives?
Every woman suffers from different conditions of vulnerability. If we’re talking about migrant women in Tunisia, the regularization of their administrative situation could take them out of marginality and ensure their access to a dignified life. Not to mention the 2018 Tunisian law against racial discrimination, which has never actually been applied—if it did, these women’s realities would change. But to my knowledge, there has been no ruling pronounced to criminalize racist acts. On the other hand, valuing the work done by women living in various conditions of vulnerability could help them improve their economic situations and move towards greater well-being and a better self-image. There are also the women who work as street vendors, thrift sellers at tiny stalls, or collectors of plastic bottles, who are getting poorer by the day. Economic vulnerability is inherently linked to the economic system in which we live: capitalism rejects the poor and conceals all categories of people in need, offering them zero possibilities to improve their lives. With COVID, we saw that, the period of confinement notwithstanding, the rich have become even richer, and the poor have seen their resources reduced even further. Intersectionality also comes into play here. Women working in the informal sector also have their race to contend with. As for Tunisian women, they suffer from their social and regional origins, their sexual difference, their lives in working-class and underprivileged cities, situations of handicap, violence… Difference of any kind is vilified, ostracized. The solution would be to act on representation and people’s mentalities. A long-term job.
