Las Palmas De Gran Canaria, Mar 1 (EFE) detection of “violence” suffered by the group in the homes where they work.
These are “vulnerabilities” to which women of Latin American origin are subjected, who arrive by plane and, after the established time, remain in an irregular situation and seek their livelihood as domestic workers, an area in which they suffer gender-based violence and situations whose detection escapes the institutional protection system to a greater extent than those detected by the emergency reception system, more focused on irregular flows by sea.
This was explained this Wednesday at a press conference by Joana Suárez, coordinator and co-editor of this “Participatory diagnosis of migrant women on the island of Gran Canaria”, a study carried out during the second semester of 2022 by Alianza por la Solidaridad commissioned by the Equality Council of the Cabildo.
Its head, Sara Ramírez, has highlighted that as a result of the migratory surge registered in 2020, due to which thousands of people were overcrowded on the Arguineguín dock, many of them women, her department detected the need to promote initiatives that would allow “talking de tú a tú” with this group in order to find out their real demands, for which the General Directorate for Citizen Participation promoted the project “Allies: weaving networks of rights and participation for citizen governance in Gran Canaria”, aimed at facilitating their citizen participation.
To go a step further in this objective, and on the occasion of International Women’s Day, Equality commissioned this study, which has involved “migrant women who can be leaders” among their peers and promote in them “female empowerment so necessary” for the collective, Ramírez has referred.
Access to training, having their own spaces or having support networks when they arrive on the island, which do not exist or are not very solid, according to 75% of the Gran Canaria town halls that have participated in this survey, are some of the claims more repeated among Chilean, Argentine, Colombian, Senegalese or Moroccan women with whom information has been exchanged, the counselor has detailed.
The coordinator of this study has stressed that “50% of the public administration services do not know if their local government takes specific measures against institutional racism”, which leads the promoters of this survey to “propose the need to institutionalize the anti-racist perspective”, as has been done with the gender perspective, and to influence the collective’s administrative regularization, as the “Regularización Ya” collective defends in a popular legislative initiative.
Joana Suárez has also alluded to the little training on the reality of migrants that is offered to public administration services, for which she considers that both those of the municipal network and the general network should have more information on immigration matters, especially those related to sexist violence.
This diagnosis has also detected that the irregular administrative situation suffered by migrant women “nullifies” their possibility of accessing training or a job and denounces, in the same way, the “opacity” of the reception system, which prevents women from migrants arriving by sea access external services.
Regarding the role of the consulates, the study also warns of the “absence of identity card or passport processing services on the Islands” and the lack of coordination that exists between these representative bodies and the insular networks of gender violence, which that prevents detecting cases of this type among the group. EFE