Violence against Women Following Natural Disasters Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Though disaster managers minimize conflict and violence after disasters, domestic violence is often reported by disaster researchers and humanitarian relief workers both in the United States and other affluent nations and in the world’s poorest nations, where natural disasters take the highest toll. Indicators include increases in calls to hotlines, requests for protection orders, police reports, and need for urgent shelter where these systems and services are in place and where they are not available, in reports to relief agencies, United Nations’ agencies such as UNIFEM (UN Development Fund for Women), and women’s groups active in disaster response. However, few studies have been conducted to document these patterns or to provide support for increased outreach and protection in disasters. Disaster researchers rarely investigate the link directly or consult community-based service agencies when they do. It is also unusual for documentation procedures to be in place in women’s antiviolence organizations, law enforcement agencies, or relief organizations in order to capture reports, either in the immediate aftermath (when conditions may make communication or travel very difficult) or in the year following when most increases are reported. The invisibility and normality of abuse persists through crisis and into recovery without the explicit attention of antiviolence advocates.

Causes

Why does violence increase? Substance abuse, stress, and overcrowding are often seen as triggering events for intimate partner violence in disaster contexts. Lack of housing is particularly critical as this, like inability to access services or safe space, may once again force women back into violent relationships or increase family pressure to return to abusers. These factors should be investigated further, but in the context of the power and control dynamics at the root of domestic violence. The socioemotional and physical impacts of disasters threaten abusers’ sense of mastery and control. Male-dominated relief systems may also enable the increased control of abusers over critically needed relief and recovery resources as survivors strive to find or repair housing, restore livelihoods and jobs, replace goods, relocate if necessary, and assist family members. Support systems providing some degree of oversight and protection may unravel in a flood, destructive earthquake, oil spill, or gas explosion as people relocate, and connections to family, coworkers, and friends are difficult to maintain. Further, because disasters can also be catalysts for social change, abusers may be threatened by new opportunities for women in relief and recovery initiatives, such as women’s collective organizing around disaster recovery, programs offering women funds for small businesses or skill training, or perhaps even relief funds sufficient for some to relocate to a safer location and situation.

Paradoxically, the very nations most exposed to devastating and deadly impacts of disasters and in which women are most likely to be injured, killed, left without income, widowed, deprived of land, or trapped for months or years in overcrowded and unsafe temporary shelters are also unlikely to provide comprehensive antiviolence services for women who live with intimate partner violence. In every country, however, formal or informal networks exist, and women are organized in some way to prevent and respond to domestic violence. Other countries or communities may have well-established and resourced shelter systems, antiviolence legislation and policy, separate shelters and transition houses, and other program services, but these can be very severely disrupted or destroyed, for example when programs are located in older buildings not seismically resistant or in newer structures built on lower-cost lands in flood plains. The energies of providers, advocates, staff, and volunteers will be diverted to personal needs in a widespread disaster, creating very stressful conditions for those who also feel accountable to women already displaced into battered women’s shelters or already in crisis and sustained by their connection to a counselor or shelter. It is very rare for the equipment, space, funding, or facilities of women’s antiviolence services to be disaster resilient or for effective partnership agreements to be in place between sister agencies in crisis, though these may emerge.

Challenges

Victim-survivors who already struggle with domestic violence face unique hurdles in a natural disaster, especially if they and their children are displaced through violence into a shelter or are already marginalized in their own community by social pressure from the abuser and the abuser’s family. Evacuation is more difficult without the freedom to act or access to transportation. The local shelter, if one exists, may well expose women to the abuser once again. Lack of childcare and employment in the aftermath increases women’s dependence. Housing shortages or need for assistance repairing a residence suitable for children may force a return to the abuser. Simply leaving the home to stand in line for critically needed emergency supplies puts women in some contexts at risk of more abuse. Certainly, lack of access to courts, police, shelters and transition homes, counselors, crisis lines, and other services (where these exist) make abuse more difficult to report and support and protection more difficult to obtain. The trauma of the event and the struggle to survive, lack of information, the loss of home and possessions, evacuation, displacement into temporary accommodations, relocation into new or repaired housing, unemployment, the closure of schools, loss of childcare, and disrupted social networks enormously complicate the lives of women who are already in crisis or under great stress due to violence and the threat of violence.

For the most part, disaster managers fail to include women’s antiviolence shelters in planning, mitigation projects, emergency preparedness drills, training and community awareness, and post disaster funding schemes. Evacuation sites may not be safe spaces for women, especially in rural areas where the abuser may also use this space. Their need for anonymity may limit women’s ability to safely apply for relief assistance or to use family relocation services. Training for mental health counselors in disasters or other disaster relief workers rarely includes domestic violence or related gender issues. In some communities, even information about existing resources such as hotlines is excluded from resource lists available to disaster survivors.

Women’s antiviolence networks and services are a lifeline for women before, during, and after disasters. They must be considered part of the critical infrastructure of a community and protected accordingly. Universally, the informal networks, knowledge, and resources of women’s antiviolence groups or programs are also a much-needed resource wherever people strive to mitigate natural hazards, increase the resilience of residents and systems to impacts, and prepare to respond in a just and effective manner when these events unfold.

Future Disaster Management

Women’s groups and organizations should pressure disaster managers for inclusion as full and equal partners in reducing the risk of harm during and after disasters and planning ahead for responding to increased violence against women when or if it occurs. Where local or national governmental disaster programs are not in place, external relief agencies and non-governmental organizations must be educated about women’s increased risk. For their part, it is imperative that emergency management authorities take responsibility for and be held accountable for devoting resources needed to help women survive both the disaster and domestic violence. Women’s lives and safety are core responsibilities of emergency planners and disaster managers, though too rarely understood and addressed in practice. When the safety of victims of abuse is at increased risk, the challenge of planning ahead to mitigate violence against women in disasters must be taken up across the board as a core responsibility, not an optional “add on” in disaster risk management.

Bibliography:

British Columbia Association of Specialized Victim Assistance and Counseling Programs. (2001). It can happen to your agency! Tools for change: Emergency management for women. Retrieved from http://endingviolence.org/publications/it-can-happen-to-your-agency-tools-for-change-emergency-management-for-womens-services/
Gender and Disaster Network. (2005). Guidelines for gender based violence interventions in humanitarian settings: Focusing on prevention of and response to sexual violence in emergencies. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/453492294.pdf
Gender and Disaster Network. (n.d.). http://www.gdnonline.org/

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