Immigrant
Muslim Youth Being Lured, Abandoned in Homelands
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
February 21, 2019
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Image from the Dutch
Information Exchange on Integration and Society.
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Summertime.
For most teens, that means vacation, and Amara, 16, looked forward to spending the warm and lazy
days with all her friends. The daughter of Somali immigrants to the
Netherlands, Amara had been working hard at school while also helping out
at home. She was ready for a break.
But her grandmother in Somalia was ill, her mother and stepfather said,
and wanted to see Amara one last time; so the girl flew with her stepfather
to Africa. Once there, her stepfather suggested she give him her passport
and phone for safekeeping. She agreed.
Then he left.
As it turned out, Grandma wasn't ill at all. Nor had she asked that
Amara come and visit. But there she was, without a passport, without a
phone, no money, and no way to get back home. Worse, there was no longer
any real "home" to go to.
Amara is one of dozens, possibly hundreds, of Dutch Muslim children taken abroad by
their parents every year and abandoned there. And the problem, experts now
say, is only getting worse. Official figures show that 23 children were
left behind in their parents' land of origin in 2005, and 30 in 2018. But a
new report from the Dutch Information Exchange on Integration and Society
(KIS) confirms that these numbers don't tell the real story: in fact,
somewhere between 180 and 800 such children are abandoned every year. Most are the second-generation children of Moroccan or
Turkish parents. Others come from Afghan, Somali, Kenyan, Yemeni, Iranian, or
Iraqi families.
About half of these children do manage to get back eventually, but they
are often traumatized. Not only have they been deceived and
abandoned by their parents, but often they will have witnessed wartime
horrors, extreme poverty and famine, or been subject to sexual or physical
abuse. In some cases, they are not even left with relatives, or the family
they are to stay with can't care for them. They may not know the land or
the language. Yet they are left to fend for themselves. Their ages
generally rage from 11 to 18, though there is one known case of a child as
young as 8, according to the report.
And it isn't only children. Women are even more likely to be brought
abroad and left there, usually by their husbands, though often, in the case
of younger women, by parents who then force them to marry.
Reasons vary. While it has long been assumed that forced marriage, or
occasionally problems orchestrating a new, second family were behind these
cases, the new report reveals that discipline patterns between Muslim
migrant parents and their young teens play a major role. Parents who find
their children "too Westernized" are most likely to pack them off
to live in a culture they find more suitable for teaching the
"right" values. Other children might have "the wrong sort of
friends," in their parents' eyes, or exhibit signs of homosexuality.
Similar problems have also been recorded in Denmark, where migrant
children are occasionally forced into "re-education" boarding schools
abroad out of concern they are becoming "too Danish." And in the
United States, Somali-American Mahad Olad, who is gay, was lured by his mother to Kenya for forced
"conversion therapy" that promised to include regular beatings,
starvation, and other abuse. With the help of Ex-Muslims of North America,
an organization that supports those who, like Olad, have left Islam, he
escaped. Yet that the situation occurs in all of these countries suggests
that it is more widespread than we are currently aware, possibly occurring
in most if not all countries with sizeable Muslim immigrant populations.
More is known about the women who are similarly abandoned, as officials
have been aware of this issue for far longer, and the women involved, as
adults, have more legal avenues available to them to report and fight
against their situation. So common is the problem in the Netherlands that
several organizations have been established to combat the practice and lend
support to women who have been or fear they will be left abroad. The Dutch
Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) offers informative booklets,
and information about Turkish and Moroccan marriage laws and rights are available through
groups like Femmes
for Freedom, a foundation that supports women facing forced marriage,
child marriage, and polygamy.
As with the children, these women are lured to their homeland with tales
of family illnesses or fun family vacations. Their husbands take control of
the documents, including passports and Dutch residency cards, and often,
too, their phones. The husbands may then return to Holland with promises
that they or someone else will arrive in a few weeks to bring the women
home.
But no one ever comes.
Complicating the situation is that many of these women are left with
their young children. While they may be able to return home, their children
usually require the permission of the father – who refuses.
But it is the tales of children who are abandoned on their own that are
the most distressing. Dutch social workers caution that the parents of
these children are acting in what they believe to be the best interest of
the children, not in an effort to abuse them. But what this says, clearly,
is that while they may have come to Europe to reap its economic benefits,
they reject Europe's Western, Enlightenment values. What's more, they will
go to any lengths to ensure that their children don't embrace them, either.
In this, it is a practice that endangers not only the children, but the
future of Europe, with them.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism,
will be published by Potomac Books. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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