War, Women, And Refuge

As regional wars and climate crises boil away
and the viability for life on the planet diminishes
so third world government gets more anti-democratic
and the numbers for refugees increase many-fold.

Perhaps it is natural for wealthy Western governments
to want to 'pull up the drawbridge' against the weakest
who seek permanent respite in more secure countries
as secure government across the world declines.

The number of women across the world, in Ecuador,
Haiti, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria,
The Netherlands, Peru, Thailand, Ukraine, Uganda
The UK, The USA, South Africa and Zimbabwe
amongst many other countries who seek
consensual relationships with other women
rather than un-consensual relationships
with men who see marriage as a means
of restaging the wars they have survived increases....

The women who define themselves as lesbian
as a means of seeking escape from the the war
find that the war chases them in the form
of that sexual/therapeutic oxymoron,
'Corrective Rape', or 'Curative Rape'.

Thus marriage, war and language
all get cut from the same dystopian cloth,
as 'The first victim of war is truth'*.

When peaceable refuge between women,
refuge from violent men, becomes illegal
and impossible, then fleeing as a refugee
because you are a lesbian is the only choice left....

*in modern times credited to US isolationist senator Hiram W. Johnson but first written by Greek poet Aeschylus (525-456 BC). As for me, I misremembered it as being written by George Orwell, who wrote so well about perpetual war as statecraft in '1984'.