Inheritable traumas - Refugees in Ukraine
Inheritable traumas – Refugees in Ukraine
Everyone has heard a lot about people fleeing Ukraine because of the war situation. It is much less known that many of those who were forced to leave their homes sought new places of residence inside Ukraine. Today, 3.5 million people in Ukraine are living as so-called internally displaced persons, often in emergency shelters far from their former homes (data source: IOM¹). The majority of IDPs live in eastern Ukraine (Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions) and in Kyiv, but roughly the same number of refugees as the population of Szombathely (72,000) live in the most deprived and poorest² part of the country, in Transcarpathia. Based on all this, the people living in Transcarpathia constitutes one of the most vulnerable groups of IDPs in Ukraine. In our brief analysis, we draw attention to their situation in comparison with previous and Hungarian data.
A questionnaire survey was conducted among IDPs in 4 community shelters, which was completed by a total of 119 people. Most of the refugees came from the remote Luhansk (34%) and Donetsk (32%) regions, but there is also a relatively high proportion of people from Kharkiv (16%). The majority (92%) lived in a big city or a small town before they fled. Nine out of ten people who came here had been living away from home for more than a year. Three-quarters of the refugees (77%) arrived in Transcarpathia immediately, but nearly a quarter (23%) arrived in the area after one or more temporary accommodations. Even though many people arrived immediately in Transcarpathia, the majority had no local contacts: four-fifths of the refugees (80%) did not know anyone in Transcarpathia, only 11% had friends or acquaintances and 9% had relatives in their new place of residence. Most of the refugees (55%) left their former home with a close family member (child, spouse), almost a third (30%) came with a distant family member, while 15% came alone.
Almost two-thirds (65%) of the refugees involved in the research are women, and nearly half (45%) are over 55 years old. Almost a third (30%) of the refugees who came here have a higher education, while another two-fifths (39%) have a secondary education. Despite their high level of education, only one in five (21%) found work in the very poor area (mostly in cleaning or unskilled jobs of much lower prestige than their qualifications). Before the escape, the proportion of people working full or part-time was 34%. One fifth (21%) of refugees are unemployed. Before the escape this rate was only 9%. Nearly half of refugees (46%) are forced to live on the extremely low pensions according to their age.
[1] The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
[2] The GDP per capita in Transcarpathia is USD 2,224, less than a fifth of the Hungarian GDP per capita (USD 16,287), but just over half of the average for the Ukrainian regions (USD 4,376). The population of Transcarpathia is 1.2 million, of which nearly 6% are internally displaced.
The financial situation of refugees living in Ukraine is well characterised by the fact that almost a quarter (24%) of them have a household income per capita in the lowest income decile, i.e. they belong to the poorest tenth of the Ukrainian society. A further third of the refugees (32%) have a per capita household income below the median per capita income.
We considered it important to examine how the human relationships of internally displaced persons have changed. We found that before fleeing, almost half of respondents (45%) encountered at least 10 people on a typical weekday, while as refugee just over a quarter (28%) do so. In addition to this, a fifth of the respondents reported some symptoms of loneliness (lack of company, isolation from others, feeling left out of something).
The general health condition of refugees is poor, partly because of their age and partly because of their circumstances. We have assessed the health status of the refugees by asking questions originating from the European Health Interview Survey (EHIS). The general subjective state of health was measured on a five-point scale. The proportion of Ukrainian IDPs reporting at least good health did not reach one fifth of the respondents (19%). In comparison, this rate is 58% in Hungary and the EU average is 69%
With some additional questions in the EHIS, we also assessed the incidence of certain chronic diseases and conditions. Compared to the situation in Hungary, we found significantly worse situation particular for depression, chronic lung diseases and high blood pressure. Almost half of the IDPs we interviewed suffer from high blood pressure (45%), more than a quarter from depression (27%) and chronic lung diseases (26%).
Depression, as one of the most important mental illnesses, was also assessed with an objective measuring method (EHQ8). We found that 42% of those who answered the questions could be considered depressed (this exceeded the proportion of those who considered themselves depressed). In comparison, in Hungary this rate is 8%.
Refugee status also comes with information uncertainty. People living away from home are more concerned with what is happening where they came from, they are looking for sources of information. It is well known that as one of the consequences of the war the rate of fake news has increased significantly, which affects refugees much severely. We have investigated where IDPs who live in Transcarpathia get their information, how often (they feel) they encounter fake news and which media are primarily affected by this. We found that most of the respondents get their information from social media platforms (56%), online newspapers and news portals (30%) and television (29%). Nearly half of the refugees (48%) have encountered fake news often or very often in the last seven days. They consider social media to be the most common source of fake news (62%), with a much lesser extent television (14%) and online newspapers and magazines (11%).
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