The UNHCR uses “vulnerability” to mean: Persons in danger of losing their lives or freedom due to armed conflict, endemic violence, or the systematic violation of their human rights;Vulnerable persons as defined by European Directive 2013/33 of 26 June 2013 (minors, unaccompanied foreign minors, disabled people, elderly people, pregnant women, single parents with minor children, victims of human trafficking, persons with serious illnesses, persons with mental disorders, and persons who have been subjected to torture, rape, or other serious forms of psychological, physical or sexual violence).
For the Humanitarian Corridors program, Caritas Italiana and the Community of Sant’Egidio interpreted the concept of “vulnerability” as extending to family units as well as to individuals. For this reason, where one person has suffered from physical or mental illness or experienced violence, the entire family unit may be brought to Italy. Nor is the definition of family limited to parents their minor children, as it would be under the Italian law for reuniting families.
The program has selected family units that include adult children, or elderly parents, or adults not related by parental or filial ties, like siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, or nieces and nephews. This choice was meant to provide the highest degree of protection for vulnerable persons, as well as to facilitate their integration in Italy.
It has, nevertheless, sometimes compounded the challenges faced by Caritas social workers and host communities. It has, at times, been more difficult for families with serious vulnerabilities and many members to integrate with their new communities. One Caritas director in Central Italy recounted that a few weeks after one family arrived, the wife began showing symptoms of serious mental illness, something difficult to treat in the mostly rural context of that diocese, which is made up of small villages and towns, which lack mental healthcare facilities, and are dozens of kilometers away from the nearest hospital.
If someone turns out to have a psychiatric issue that doesn’t fit into the vulnerabilities we were prepared to address, it’s a total disaster […]. Now the husband, given the situation, doesn’t like the idea of having another family near them, because he knows that his wife would never accept that. So […] how much can we really integrate like that?
The same dynamic has played out in the four cases that involved families with very large numbers of children. Integrating these family units has meant addressing a wide variety of needs, expectations, requirements, capabilities, and projects. A single place is not always able to produce work opportunities for adults, specialized care for family members with health needs, and the best paths into the school system for children (I. Schnyder von Wartensee and B. Panchetti, “Family within the Humanitarian Corridors Program,” in La Famiglia: Rivista di Problemi Familiari, 2021, p. 317- 327).
Because of this, Caritas Italiana and the Community of Sant’Egidio have changed how they select family units of this kind, and now provide more in-depth preparation for the communities and teams of social workers who will receive them.
Integrating refugees with very little education, or who are illiterate, is another challenge. In these cases the program has needed to provide Italian language instruction and lessons about the most basic and important Italian social norms and habits for much longer than the 12-month duration of the hospitality program. Here, host dioceses and communities have had to dedicate financial and professional resources (chiefly cultural mediators) that were, in most cases, not planned for or budgeted for at the beginning of the one-year hospitality project. Only a handful of dioceses had put aside the resources to continue providing integration and hospitality services after the 12 months funded by Caritas Italiana were up.
These challenges were particularly prevalent for refugees from the Kunama ethnic group, because in 2018-2019 there were no mediators for them in Italy. In one case, even the Italian authorities who had to review their asylum requests were forced to delay the family interview several times, due to the country’s total lack of mediators.
