Efthymia Stathopoulou

I work at RLS-Athens , an organisation offering legal advice and representation to asylum seekers and refugees in Athens. I am employed as as Project Coordinator. Reaching out to women spaces and youth groups is central in our mission. We have noticed that it is usually the men of the families that approach legal practitioners and are considered 'the primary applicants' in most cases. Part of our work is to highlight and in fact give prominence to the asylum claim of the mothers/daughters of the families as it is at many instances stronger but more difficult to articulate and confess. Similarly, we are in partnership with day centres who cater for young teenage boys who are most certainly overlooked by the authorities and the civil society just because they are boys and 'can take care of themselves'. This particular group of asylum seekers and refugees are essentially the least served and most marginalised group; for this reason, we have a specific program of information sessions and one-on-one legal advice sessions for teenage or young adult boys who suffer homelessness and destitution due to the social expectation that they can handle immigration more easily than other groups.