Persecution is foundational to the definition of being a refugee. A history of persecution in one’s home country entails that the person was fearing for their life due to being a target in regards to their race, religion, nationality, or social group. However, sexual orientation is noticeably missing from this definition, or rather its explicit mention is not recorded. This is of major importance due to the specific nature of the law, and though the UNHCR has released documents that provide interpretations of this legal definition which include sexual orientation, often the host country has a final say as to whether they recognize this as part of a refugee claim.  This has a major impact on Nahed as she has experienced a long history of persecution due to being a gay woman and refusing to follow Muslim practices. For Nahed, this persecution takes many forms…

Over her lifetime, Nahed has experienced intolerant people, acts of aggression, and outright violence occurring at regular intervals. As a consequence, her ability to create relationships with others has been affected and she found herself isolated at many points. This sense of isolation and fear is crucial in understanding Nahed’s motivation to continue moving and trying to find a place where she is comfortable.

1. Different Since Youth

Since Nahed’s early childhood, she was seen as different. She was not interested in typical ‘girl’s’ toys such as dolls. Instead, she wanted toys like swords and athletic gear which were typically reserved for boys. Nahed did not want to wear the dresses and frilly clothes that her mom wanted. Though she was able to collect non-girly items that made her happy, she was eventually reprimanded for being different from other girls.

This experience represents a key foundational moment in Nahed’s life, in which she was taught that she was somehow different from what she was supposed to be and she would be reprimanded by her family for it. Nahed learned that wanting the things she wanted openly would lead to negative reactions from those around her, and support would be withdrawn. Though she was not sure yet how exactly she was different, the punishments and comments made clear that Nahed was doing something wrong in the eyes of the people around her. This lesson carried through as she progressed through school.

By grade school, many of her peers were experiencing puberty and developing feelings for the opposite sex.  Though Nahed was not yet developing specific crushes on certain girls around her, she knew that she did not like the boys around her romantically. However, some boys liked her and when she rejected them, it became a problem.

Already from a young age, people around her were targeting Nahed for her appearance and demeanor. Boys found it offensive that she was not interested in them, and resorted to insulting her. Through these experiences, her disinterest in boys evolved into a distrust towards them, after so often being berated for her appearance. However, this particular instance also serves as one of the early examples of Nahed resisting bullying, yelling back, and standing up for herself in a vulnerable situation. It shows her tenacity even at a young age to find ways to defend herself. 

This bullying meant that Nahed was isolated and struggled to make friends with classmates, which in turn delayed her understanding of relationships and feelings towards others. At around fourteen years old Nahed realized why she felt different from other girls around her. She realized she was romantically interested in girls.

Though Nahed states that she was not open about this aspect of her identity, people around her continued to harass her because she did not meet expectations of what girls should act and dress like. Once they became aware, Nahed’s family went into denial and refused to acknowledge Nahed’s reality as a gay woman. Met with this aggressive bullying on one side and a wall of denial on the other, Nahed wanted to turn to mental health support services but unfortunately had none in her school that she could access. She was forced to endure isolation and bullying by closing herself off.

2. Harassment as a Young Adult in Tunisia

As Nahed transitioned into young adulthood, her experiences with persecution and harassment continued. Her school bullies morphed into harassers on the street, policemen, and office managers. Though it is difficult for her to recount these traumas, she recognizes that they are an important part of her persecution story. A common occurrence was harassment happening when she was simply walking down the street. Nahed pinpoints young, uneducated men as being the most likely perpetrators of the abuse hurled at her in daily scenarios. They made assumptions about Nahed being gay due to the way she dressed and looked, and therefore made the decision to harass her verbally.

What these scenarios that Nahed recounts display is the consistency of this harassment. One of the aspects that make these experiences particularly traumatic is the gravity of many of the situations Nahed faced. An extremely scary situation Nahed found herself in living in Tunisia was with the police, who are meant to protect citizens.

The situation is clearly escalating from the bullying Nahed endured in high school. The police, those meant to protect people,  are the ones she is in danger from. When the government is the entity that is posing a major threat, there is really nowhere to turn to for support and protection as a citizen. Nahed faced threats on all sides now. 

This is an experience shared by many LGBTQIA+ members in Tunisia. As Tunisia has outlawed being gay, the police abuse this line and go out of their way to threaten people who they believe to be gay. This not only holds consequences for when they catch Nahed in compromising acts with other girls but also limits her ability to seek protection when she is in danger in other situations. This particular event shows the violent nature in which Nahed was being threatened as a young adult, particularly as a woman. 

This reflection on why people targeted her illustrates Nahed’s thinking in terms of other people’s motivations to hurt her. It is interesting that she talks about the ‘mixing of concepts’ regarding how people ascribe additional traits to a person based on one observation or judgment. This concept of being put in a box is a system that Nahed wants to fight against and repeatedly talks about through her experiences with others. Humans are quick to judge her and create narratives about who she is based on what little they know.

Survival Strategies: Knowing How to Physically Protect Yourself

Survival strategies is a term often used in reference to the tactics that refugees use in order to find ways to better stay, make a living, and generally be more comfortable in environments of persecution and later in new countries. Depending on the type of refugee, the strategies can differ. For example, the methods needed for a refugee living in a refugee camp may address more basic needs, while more established refugees who have their basic needs met may have strategies for social integration and improved employment opportunities. For Nahed, her strategies stemmed from her experiences with harassment in Tunisia and stem from the need to maintain her safety as a woman.

Nahed’s experiences with persecution in Tunisia clearly illustrate that she was experiencing extremely high levels of immediate physical threat on a daily basis. From boys targeting her in high school, to heckling from young men on the street, and threats from police who are meant to protect citizens, there was a constant presence of fear and anxiety. Because of many of these threats occurred from random people who saw her appearance and made immediate judgments based on that, Nahed could never be sure where the next danger would come from and subsequently had to operate on high alert in almost any public environment. 

With this constant threat of danger, one of the survival strategies that Nahed references multiple times is the idea of being able to physically protect oneself should situations escalate. 

This concept of learning self-defense is a serious tool in the arsenal of strategies Nahed used to survive in Tunisia. By being able to fight back physically she could not only defend herself but also gain some level of respect. She references how these young men were not appeased by logic or even silence, they only understood violence. Therefore, Nahed had to learn their language in a sense in order to make it understood that she was not someone to be threatened. Nahed states that physical strength training is important to her because in her experience it was necessary to be able to physically protect herself, and perhaps gave her more confidence in daily life.  This strategy is important to her, it is also imperative to note that the drawback of engaging in physical violence is that it could escalate situations.

Though the state of constant peril was eliminated after her relocation to Japan, this survival strategy is clearly still deeply embedded in her mentality. It affects her daily behavior, down to small details like her footwear…

Though a decision regarding what type of shoes one wears may seem trivial to the average person, it has significant consequences for refugees in dangerous situations. Though Japan is arguably safer for Nahed compared to Tunisia, she still operates under the assumption that threats could still present themselves in any situation, so she must be ready. This survival strategy of Nahed’s is important in demonstrating the lasting effects of the trauma of persecution. Even though her environment and community has changed, her mentality regarding her surroundings has not.

3. Harassment at Work

For many young people transitioning into adulthood means finding a job. Though many people hoped for success, Nahed quickly realized that the workplace was not necessarily even safe for her. She began to understand that personally, her work-life experience depended heavily on the views and attitudes of her managers. Because they were in control of her employee status and controlled her task flow and schedules they easily held authority over her experience at her jobs in Tunisia.

Here, Nahed began to personally experience new forms of harassment. One type of harassment in the workplace stemmed from being outed as being an LGBTQIA+ person. 

Though Nahed chose to keep her gay identity private in her jobs in Tunisia, this event meant that her secret was outed to the office. She was subsequently fired for this. This strengthens the point about the lack of stability. Being fired from a job could happen unexpectedly, from one small slip. Not only was Nahed losing her job in this situation but also getting fired meant she would have to leave the housing that was provided by the job and in which the woman she was seeing at the time was also living. This secrecy and sudden changes due to needing to find new income or seeking safety from toxic work environments meant that keeping relationships with others was difficult for Nahed.

Another type of harassment stemmed from religious managers being perturbed by Nahed’s lack of religious practices. In a majority Muslim country, some managers expected Nahed to observe customs of not eating during the days of Ramadan, or in general talk about attending prayer and respond positively to questions about her faith. Due to her childhood experiences, Nahed already learned to be careful in regard to the answers she gave to people and the information she was open about. When Nahed did not provide the responses the manager was looking for in regard to enthusiasm for religion, problems started to develop. 

Nahed’s lack of religious leaning was not the only problem for her manager. It was also the fact that Nahed was unwilling to demonstrate that she could be influenced to change. This steadfast confidence in who she was and what her values were continued to anger those around her who saw Nahed’s actions as wrong or inappropriate. Her need to live authentically for the sake of her mental health is what motivated Nahed to stand in defiance of those who tried to change her behavior.  Nahed was not necessarily overtly stating these views but when asked she would sometimes make her opinions known respectfully. This was not enough for the managers who saw this as disrespect and made Nahed suffer consequences for her behaviour. 

An important point is again understanding this constant instability and anxiety that surrounded Nahed’s past. When one can not even be secure in their job status, it calls into question financial status, living status, and general points of comfortable living. Always being at risk of losing one’s job is an extreme stress that many who are living in their home countries of persecution face.

4. No Longer Being Able to Tolerate Tunisia

The lack of support from her own family is what Nahed stated was the most intolerable throughout her years of persecution and harassment. From a young age, they did not support her interests and tried to convince her to be like more young girls around her.  They even went further by punishing her by giving away her possessions or outright ignoring her for weeks on end. This deep denial about one aspect of who Nahed was, a gay woman, caused them to withdraw their support from her in the home.

The lack of support affected Nahed so deeply because she felt that she did not have the foundation to be able to properly defend herself from the barrage of other harassment that was happening outside of the home. She even states that perhaps if she did have the support at home, she perhaps would have been able to survive living in Tunisia. However, this was not her reality, and faced with persecution on all sides, for aspects of her identity she was not in control of, Nahed realized what she needed to do for her future.

The gravity of the situation is clearly at an extreme at this point in Nahed’s life. Her options are death or escape. Nahed chose to escape Tunisia in order to preserve her life and find new places where she could live more authentically. Moving to a new country was her next step.

Nahed explains here that saving oneself within an environment of intense persecution is impossible. However, removing yourself from the place by moving and escaping results in a person attaining the means to exercise their rights to be who they are. They can find a country that respects their human rights, allows them to live authentically, and gives them the ability to help themselves and perhaps even others still in their home country. This is what Nahed did. She left Tunisia where being gay was illegal, and being non-religious was taboo. She sought new environments, eventually landing in Japan where she hoped to save her life.

Survival Strategies: Marriage

Like a multitude of other women, one of Nahed’s past survival strategies was her marriage to a man. Marriage is a survival strategy for many women as it provides a multitude of benefits such as physical protection, added income, and in some cases personal support. The benefits are a direct response to the persecution and abuse that many women face. For Nahed, her marriage was a direct response to the lack of support she received and as a resource to move out of the family home. By marrying a man Nahed gave herself a way to stem some of the gossip surrounding her sexuality, someone who could provide transportation and support to finish her masters degree in Tunisia, and overall an escape from her family home.

Marriage for Nahed represented a way out of life she felt was unsustainable at this point. Escape meant not only a way out of her current living situation but also a chance to finish her education and perhaps gain more opportunities. It is also important to note that at this point in time transportation was a major benefit for Nahed through getting married. During her university years, the Arab Spring was occurring in Tunisia. During this period of protest, much of the city’s infrastructure was shut down making it difficult to commute without personal vehicles. By marrying a man who was willing to drive her to school Nahed secured the support that she needed to finish her degree which was of importance to her. Though the marriage ended in divorce after about a year, Nahed firmly states that she has no regrets. However, she can recognize that this survival strategy was a young person’s desperate attempt to escape.