Since the war in Syria started, refugees began flocking to different places away from the war. Buffalo is one of those places, sheltering around 300 Syrian refugees according to a statistic. In the new location, refugees, especially teens, are confronted with several challenges. Here are five biggest issues which face several teenage refugees.
Difficulty in learning and speaking the English language. Unlike the youngest refugees, young refugees now living in the city of Buffalo were found out to learn often not or having a hard time to learn the English language. Young refugees were noticed by teachers to have learned the language quickly and can cope up with their classmates easily.
Proper education. High schools in Buffalo can be super challenging for teenage refugees as it's sometimes in a diverse system, in a different language and provides a different method of learning. It was only last year that the efforts of attempting to teach teenage refugees have genuinely improved, according to the teachers of the city's high schools.
Discrimination and bullying. A teenage girl and boy refugees both said they are sometimes ridiculed as "Chinese" and teenage boy refugees said other schoolboys tend to start fights with youngster refugees from Asian countries. Research in the past has shown that student teens of color are sometimes targeted more of bullying and discriminations than white students, and Jewish or Muslim students are sometimes aimed more than other religions. And since most teenage refugees coming to America are non-Christian and with color, they might be more susceptible to discrimination, bullying, harassment, and bias.
Teen pregnancy. Teen girl refugees were thought to be perhaps partly accountable for the high rates of teen pregnancy in the place where they reside as they have come to camps where teenage sexual activities and early marriage are very common. Another reason could be they were greatly not familiar with methods of birth control.
Teen groups or gangs. Teen refugees who don't have access to education eventually became members of various gangs in the city. The Buffalo News noted that teens born of Burmese parents play important roles in at least three refugee gangs: the Tanzanian-Asian Bloods, Karenni 716 and the TANAB, and The Karen Blood Boyz.
Buffalo city has become a refugee center in the past years. A lot of people had fled persecution, war, and hardship in Bhutan, Congo, Somalia, Myanmar, Iraq and Syria. Today, as per the US Census Bureau, 8.4 percent of the population of Buffalo was born abroad, and 15.6 percent speak other languages at home besides English, the Aljazeera has learned.
