In early March, I visited two refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border to report on the challenges facing refugee women and girls and was struck by the enthusiasm of students I met in Ban Mae Surin, a camp set in a remote but picturesque setting along the Mae Surin river.

The students were part of the Karenni Further Studies Programme and were rehearsing a group dance for International Women’s Day celebrations on March 8.

On that day, they learnt the dance moves for a song that calls for the elimination of violence against women and girls. Despite the sweltering afternoon heat, the four dozen or so students – and some alumni – practised non-stop.

In a normal schoolroom of 17 to 23 year olds, you’re sure to find some who would refuse to participate in such an activity because it’s ‘uncool’, no matter how worthy the cause. I would’ve been one of them, but there was none of that cooler-than-thou swagger in this group.

Of course this wasn’t just any ordinary schoolroom. Many students were born and raised inside the camp after their parents fled political persecution and economic difficulties in Myanmar. Others are relative newcomers who crossed the border five or six years ago for the same reasons.

Despite the difficult and restricted lives they’ve led, many were full of hope and energy, and clearly enjoyed learning, whether about conflict resolution or dancing.

A little over two weeks after my visit and right after those students had their graduation ceremony, a devastating fire swept through the camp, killing 37 people, destroying more than 400 houses and leaving 2,300 people (out of a population of 3,500) homeless.

(Taken on March 6, 2013)

The above photo shows how Ban Mae Surin looked during my visit, facilitated by a small NGO called WEAVE which was supporting the further studies programme. I was told the camp is flood-prone during the monsoon season, cutting it off for up to two months if the rains were particularly heavy. My hosts didn’t anticipate a fire.

(Both taken by Athit Perawongmetha on March 23, 2013)

The two photos above show what it looked like after the fire. Two of the four sections of the camp were completely burnt down.

My colleague Alisa Tang wrote about how the fire spread so easily because the homes were built using bamboo and leaf thatch. The Thai government doesn’t allow the use of more permanent, fire-retardant materials because these camps – there are nine along the Thai-Myanmar border, housing some 140,000 people – are supposed to be temporary, even though many have been around for more than two decades.

There are also questions about how the fire started: The Bangkok Post has a good piece that raises doubts over the official explanation that it was a cooking accident.

(Taken by Athit Perawongmetha on March 23, 2013)

I found out that two young men who were so enthusiastically practising their dance moves the March afternoon I visited died in the fire. One was an alumnus who, after saving two children, tried to save a third, but was engulfed in the smoke and fire. The other young man was a student who had graduated just hours before the fire.

The family of Saw Gay, a 19-year-old student who wants to become a teacher so he could impart his knowledge to children in the camp, was one of those who lost all their possessions and livelihoods.

The two resilient ladies I included in this short film are safe, but their relatives and friends have lost everything.

The families with whom we shared meals and the families who gave us room to sleep that balmy night I spent in the camp are homeless now, too, and I keep thinking of this young boy downstairs from our bedroom who was studying by candlelight.

Did he manage to save his exercise books? Where will he study now?

(Taken on March 5, 2013)

The Border Consortium, an NGO that has been working in the camps along the border, has launched an emergency appeal for $433,000.

Food and shelter are the two big needs, of course, and the hottest days in Thailand may be yet to come.

I had always thought – naively as it turns out – that rape is when a person forces another person, either physically or by using threats, to have sex and/or when there’s an absence of a clear ‘yes’.

Apparently not.

According to the laws in some of Southeast Asia’s fast-developing nations, rape within a marriage isn’t rape. Or if you go by some of the decisions handed down by the courts, it’s not rape if there isn’t a physical struggle or the perpetrator is in his 60s.

Politicians and law enforcement officials raise doubts that a rape has occurred if the victim and the perpetrator know each other or if the female victim is behaving in an ‘unladylike’ way, for example getting drunk, staying out late or being overly friendly with members of the opposite sex.

I came across these laws, judgements and comments when I was researching a story on how difficult it is for female rape victims to get access to justice in Thailand.

I found rape-related laws that are discriminatory and weakly enforced and archaic societal attitudes about women, not just in Thailand but in other middle-income countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. What I didn’t find was a dedicated shelter for rape victims of all ages in Bangkok, a city of some 9 million people.

WHAT RAPE? 

Thailand reformed its criminal code in 2007 and recognised marital rape – rape within marriage – as a crime and acknowledged that rape could occur to all sexes.

Yet it does not consider some types of rape to be serious offences that harm society in general. This allows the perpetrators to get away with rape by paying the victims some money – sometimes as little as $670.

Forget about the violence, humiliation, hurt and potential lifelong trauma the victim might suffer. The case is over once the man pays up.

Maybe he’ll do it again to some other women but as long as he didn’t use a weapon and it doesn’t result in grievous bodily harm or death, this kind of rape is a lesser offence.

Devoutly Buddhist Thailand isn’t alone in taking such a stance.

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, the criminal code does not apply to rape within a marriage and sexual assault is defined as involving force or threat of force. Settlement is common.

In Philippines, a largely Catholic country, marital rape is considered a criminal offence but there’s provision for a wife to forgive her husband. Such provisions can perpetuate the assumption that some types of sexual assault are less serious than others, according to a legal expert I spoke to.

MEN AND THE MEDIA BEHAVING BADLY

The brutal gang rape of the Delhi student in December prompted media outlets and pundits around the world to talk about how bad women had it in India. But all is not well elsewhere.

In January, Indonesian high court judge Daming Sunusi, a Supreme Court hopeful, said both victims and rapists “might have enjoyed their intercourse together” so the death penalty shouldn’t apply.

In 2010, CEDAW, the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, found the Philippines in violation of the convention in a rape trial. The judge found an employer not guilty of raping an employee, citing reasons such as a man in his sixties may be incapable of rape.

Last year, a senior Thai police officer said a foreign tourist may not have been raped because she went to dinner with the accused.

In February, a news website published the identification card of a Scottish woman who said she was gang-raped in Thailand. Stories questioning the woman’s claim with repeated references to how drunk she was appeared before a man confessed. He then claimed it was consensual because she didn’t resist.

“How is a man trying to force himself on an insensible woman an act of “sex,” not “rape”?” said Kaewmala, Thai social commentator and writer.

A similar question was asked in America last week over the case of two high-school footballers in Steubenville, Ohio, who were accused of raping a 16-year-old who was in a drunken stupor.

The defence’s argument that it was “consensual” because she didn’t say ‘no’ irked two feminists so much they wrote about campaigning to change the perception of sexual consent from “‘no’ means no” to “only ‘yes’ means yes.”

The accused were found guilty but a further furore erupted when media such as CNNreferred to the convicted rapists as men with “such promising futures, star football players, very good students” whose lives were now ruined.

PHOTO: Thousands of students and faculty members dance to the theme song of the One Billion Rising campaign in the quadrangle of the St. Scholastica college in Manila February 14, 2013. One Billion Rising is a global campaign to call for an end to violence against women and girls, according to its organisers. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco

A loud bang woke me. I realised after a few seconds it was the sound of the long bamboo pole that held down the tarpaulins sheltering me banging against the balcony outside my room with ferocious force.

Then came the piercing sound of the wind. It was here in eastern Mindanao – in a small two-storey house recently repaired after Typhoon Bopha blew away its roof – that I truly understood what a “howling” wind was.

As my phone buzzed with text messages warning of a Signal 1 storm (defined by the Philippine agency that forecasts and monitors storms as a tropical cyclone with winds of 30 to 60 km per hour) I watched people in flimsier shelters struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Some tarpaulins that had been weighed down by stones and bamboo or nailed onto roofs were coming off and flapping in the wind.

It was Saturday, Jan. 19, and it had been raining heavily for 24 hours when the wind picked up. Little did we know the grim weather would continue for another 12 hours.

By midmorning the next day, the area’s Cateel River had swollen so much that it had started to flood communities along its banks. Water was lapping at the sides of the road, and families who had recently returned to patch up homes that were damaged and destroyed by Bopha fled yet again.

By midday, the lone bridge that crosses the river and links Cateel and Baganga – two of the worst-hit municipalities in Davao Oriental province – was starting to erode. Residents lay down a metal sheet to cover the widening hole, making it barely usable for heavy vehicles.

My housemates, employees for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) doing disaster relief in some of the worst-affected municipalities, were supposed to have their first Sunday off since Bopha hit on Dec. 4, but they were called out for emergency assistance.

LIVES UPENDED AGAIN

I visited Davao Oriental and Compostela Valley nearly seven weeks after Bopha. Mindanoans had been warned before Bopha, but the severity of the storm still caught them by surprise. For a few days, there was a sense of relief: it seemed that the death toll was low and that the early warning had worked.

However, a week later news trickled in from places cut off by the storm, and the scale of the devastation emerged – almost 2,000 people dead or missing, more than 210,000 homes damaged, 1 million people in need of food assistance, and more than 6 million affected.

When I visited Davao Oriental a month and a half after Bopha, flattened homes, uprooted trees and twisted metal still littered the roadsides. Many schools, churches and government buildings still had no roof. Livestock roamed the streets, searching for food.

Yet there was also an amazing sense of community spirit amongst survivors like Evelyn Reyes, the owner of a plot of land on higher ground that is a stone’s throw away from the bridge across the Cateel River.

Also displaced, Reyes was letting some 200 people take refuge on her land. Her home is in San Alfonso village along the river, but like others, she fled in the early hours of Sunday. Many people were unable to bring the relief goods they had received over the past several weeks.

“They need food and shelter. They only have about two days’ worth of food,” she told me, pointing towards newcomers pitching makeshift tents in the pouring rain as buffalos and pigs grazed nearby.

Some had been there for weeks. In one tent, a family of six had not gone home since Bopha. The wife gave birth to a baby girl in the one-room tent on Jan. 10. “She’s healthy, but we haven’t been able to get medicine or check-up for her,” she told me.

HELPLESS

ICRC only happened upon the plight of the flood victims on Reyes’ land because they were forced to stop nearby, their vehicle unable to pass a flood-affected stretch of road. It made me wonder about other spontaneous makeshift settlements that journalists and aid workers had not or could not reach. Surely there had to be more.

Many people I met, both aid workers and survivors, felt frustrated and helpless under the relentless downpour.

Gilbert, a 21-year-old student, who lives near the Cateel River and sadly surveyed the flooded scene the Sunday when I visited. His house, damaged by Bopha, was already half-submerged by rainwater that had spilled down the hill behind his home. If the river rose any higher and reached his house, there would be nowhere to go.

He and a few villagers were monitoring the situation and doing the only thing they could do – pray for the best.

Then there were those who live on the wrong side of Andap, a village in Compostela Valley. On Tuesday, Jan. 22, the only road linking them to the outside world was obstructed by logs, rocks and a raging torrent triggered by the previous night of heavy rain.

Villagers on the other side of the stream were completely cut off. Even military vehicles were unable to cross.

We had earlier crossed sections of the road littered with debris – first with a small car, then by hitching a ride on a four-wheel drive, but when we reached the blockage in Andap, we gave up. As we were heading back to the nearest highway, a large army truck that was supposed to be evacuating villagers zoomed past, splashing muddy brown water everywhere.

I did not see any villagers in the back of the truck and hoped they had left empty-handed only to ask for reinforcements.

Picture Credit: Evelyn Reyes, owner of a plot of land in Cateel municipality in Davao Oriental province that has given refuge to about 100 families who were displaced again due to bad weather. Reyes herself lives in a community near the Cateel river that was flooded again on Jan 20, the day this picture was taken,  after hours of heavy rain. AlertNet/Thin Lei Win

An international rights group is urging Indonesian authorities to allow foreign media and civil society groups access to its Papua island following violence which has left at least 14 people dead since May.

In a separate incident – perhaps a sign of rising tensions – latest news reports say angry residents in Papua burned cars and shops on Thursday after an independent activist was shot and killed.

Mako Tabuni, deputy of a group pushing for a referendum on Papuan self-determination, was shot dead while resisting arrest, a human rights activist toldReuters. Tabuni had been campaigning for an investigation into the recent spate of shootings which HRW also expressed concern about in its statement.

Access to the region is severely limited and foreigners are required to obtain special permits routinely denied by authorities, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement released on Thursday.

“The Indonesian government has failed to hold to account those responsible for recent violence,” the rights group said in the statement, referring to raids it said were conducted by hundreds of soldiers earlier this month in Wamena, a city in Papua’s central highlands.

A military spokesman initially denied that soldiers had injured any Papuans, although reports alleged that one person was killed and seven others injured during the raids, according to the statement.

The attack was in retaliation for an incident where a crowd stabbed an Indonesian soldier to death and injured another after their motorcycle struck a Papuan child.

“By keeping Papua behind a curtain, the Indonesian government is fostering impunity among military forces and resentment among Papuans,” said Elaine Pearson, HRW’s deputy Asia director.

“It needs to let the media and civil society shine a light on conditions in the province,” she added.

Papua,  the western half of an island that includes Papua New Guinea, has long suffered strained ties with Indonesia which took over the area from Dutch colonial rule in 1963.

Despite being resource-rich, it is one of the least developed regions in Indonesia. According to the United Nations, 40 percent of Papuans live below the poverty line of $1.25 a day, compared to the national average of 18 percent.

HRW said there have been other violent incidents in Papua’s capital Jayapura in the past month, including unknown gunmen shooting dead several non-Papuan migrants and police killing members of a militant independence group while breaking up a protest.

Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said there would be sanctions for law enforcement officers who commit inappropriate actions but also said the attacks were small scale compared the events in Papua with violence in the Middle East, Jakarta Globe reported.

HRW called his response inadequate in its statement.

“President Yudhoyono should stop making excuses for his government’s failure to investigate the violence,” said Pearson.

“Allowing full access to the province for UN rights experts, the press, and other monitors could curtail the rumours and misinformation that often fuel abuses.”

(Editing by Julie Mollins)

Picture caption: Residents set fire to a motorcycle and shops by in Waena, Jayapura of the Indonesia’s Papua province June 14, 2012. REUTERS/Frederik