Most anti-violence organizers agree that the best way to stop sexual violence is to have stable community structures that are capable of both holding abusers accountable and keeping survivors and potential victims safe.

So when you belong to a community that is not stable in any sense of the word and you are a marginalized person (i.e. a woman, a child, queer, transgendered, etc), your chances of being raped sky rocket. And furthermore, your ability to “recover” from the trauma in healing and multiple ways are almost nonexistent. Which means that across the world, ‘home communities’ are being left to deal with the results of sexual abuse–even as the survivor continues to get no relief from the conditions that led to his/her sexual abuse to begin with.

From Time:

In many cases, Normawati explains, female migrant workers are raped and then dumped on the streets by their employers, who refuse to give them their passports after discovering that the women are pregnant. The women are then arrested by police and placed in jail. Sometimes they are deported before the child is born. Herlina [a care taker of babies conceived through rape and then abandoned by mothers] claims that airport officials have called her to ask what to do with the babies who are left behind by mothers.

Normawati says there are dozens of children who were abandoned by migrant workers in homes throughout Jakarta and surrounding areas.

The unsaid truth of the linked essay is that not only are women being sexual abused, assaulted and raped in countries that aren’t their own, not only are they being jailed and deported *because they were raped*, but there also seems to be very little access to safe and reliable reproductive health choices as well (i.e. abortions, birth control, pap smears, rape kits, etc). Which means that physical trauma to a woman’s genitals and pregnancy are potentially not the only consequences to the rapes–how many women got STD’s from rapists? Or never healed properly from rapes or pregnancies?

Sexual violence against immigrant communities is not new or unusual–and it is one of the main reasons why radical that I might be, I am very anxious for immigration reform to get pushed back on the table in the U.S.. These same rapes, these same traumas are happening here in the U.S., and if it takes “reform” to bring attention to the violence and *stop it*–than so be it.