“In the town we are in shock, desolate. “We were surprised by the number of girls who were in that canoe,” says Khadim Diop, a resident of Goop, the small town of Gandiol, in the north of Senegal, from where the boat that capsized on Wednesday night and which has left an unknown number of missing people, among them, according to neighbors, about 30 girls. The sea has already returned four bodies of young women, between 15 and 20 years old. All of this reveals a progressive incorporation of women into maritime emigration that was unthinkable just a few years ago due, according to experts, to changes in Senegalese society and the enormous impact of social networks.
For a few days it has been circulating on the social network Tik Tok a video shared thousands of times. In it you can see the passengers of a canoe that is supposedly heading to the Canary Islands, among whom there are several young girls and minors. They smile and gesture at the camera as the boat speeds along. “This video, where everything seems very easy, has been seen by everyone and I think some of the young women on Goop have wondered that if the women in the video are gone, they could do it too,” adds Diop. Many of them had dropped out of school and worked cleaning houses or helped their family with the processing of fish, the main economic activity in the area.
Goop’s sandy streets overlook the mouth of the Senegal River. The town has been suffering for twenty years from a growing process of coastal erosion and salinization of arable land. In addition, fishermen have been complaining for some time about the scarcity of catches, which makes them go further and further to fish and makes their survival difficult. “When my mother called me to tell me, she couldn’t believe it,” explains Diop, “we all know each other in the town and some of them were just girls, less than 15 years old.” The survivors of the shipwreck have been taken to the police station by the Gendarmerie, which is trying to find out who organized the trip in order to arrest them. At least one person has already been brought to justice. Some neighbors are afraid and don’t want to talk.
Aminata Touré is the only woman who has been prime minister in Senegal and is now a candidate for the 2024 presidential election. “The silence and inaction of the Government on this issue are scandalous. Our young people leave in the midst of total indifference from the authorities. Now women are also leaving, which I understand is a perverse effect of our advances in equality. They also dream of better living conditions and are willing to take enormous risks on that trip, much more than boys, such as sexual violence. That the Government is silent is unacceptable,” she says.
In the canoe crisis of 2006, the year in which almost 32,000 people arrived in the Canary Islands, mostly from Senegal, there were hardly any women on board and when this happened, alerts about possible cases of trafficking were immediately raised. But this is slowly changing. In 2020, 5% of those arriving in canoes and boats to the Canary Islands were women, while this percentage has risen to 7% so far this year, according to Red Cross figures for the period between January 1 and mid-2020. October. As for minors, the percentage is smaller: of the 4,200 currently sheltered in the Canary Islands, about 150 are adolescent girls, 3.5%. The number of men is still much higher, but the appearance of young women in the canoes that set sail from Senegal or Gambia points to a phenomenon that, according to Touré, “should be thoroughly investigated.”
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Yaye Bayam, president of the Women’s Collective for the Fight against Clandestine Emigration (Coflec), believes that the growing presence of women in the cayucos responds to a profound cultural change due, precisely, to the intense emigration. “Social customs and norms are being blown up. Before, women were submissive to men, whether they were their husbands or their fathers. But there are so many who have gone to Europe that now each member of the family makes their own decisions,” she says. For Bayam, who lost a son in the shipwreck of a canoe in 2006, many women also take the route of emigration with the aim of, in the future, being able to give their children a better education and opportunities.
But it is one thing to read some cold statistics or have a vague impression and quite another to collect the bodies of girls on the shore. Babacar Diop is a sociologist from Gandiol. “Many young men have left this area in recent years. What is happening now is that many of them return, get married and take their wives to Spain. In almost all families there are women who have left and leave behind sisters, cousins and young people in the family who also develop that aspiration to leave. Currently, Senegal is experiencing a deep political, social and economic crisis that affects both men and women,” he explains.
Both Diop and Touré agree that this is a new generation very marked by the constant use of social networks. “That amplifies things,” adds Diop, “just like the boys, they are present in WhatsApp, instagram, Facebook either Tik Tok and in contact with those who have left and have the dream of achieving the same quality of life, especially in a place like Gandiol affected by the destruction of its main economic activities, whether fishing or agriculture.” For Touré, the increasing access of girls to education and, therefore, to new technologies puts them in a similar situation to boys. “Many of them are heads of families,” she says.
A silent sadness reigns on Goop and the names of the drowned young women echo in low voices while their photos circulate on mobile phones. Neighbors ask local media for awareness campaigns to stop the drama, but Khadim Diop has another vision. “They saw that their future was to get married, have children and spend their lives cleaning, cooking and sweeping. Now people point at them and wonder why they wanted to leave. The question we have to ask ourselves is why they can’t go by plane, like the Spanish do when they come here, who have no problem. The issue is the right to travel, to mobility,” says this young man from Gandio.
For his part, sociologist Djiby Diakhaté, from the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, considers that “the impoverishment of the population due to covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, which has led to an economic crisis, hits the women than men. They are the most vulnerable. Before, it is true that they emigrated much less, but because man supported them. That has changed, they no longer depend on others and are forced to make a living. In addition, other women who have emigrated regularly before them have become models of success. If they could do it, so can we. That’s what they tell themselves,” says Diakhaté.
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